Intergovernmental Yet Dynamically Expansive: Concordance Legalization as an Alternative Regional Trading Arrangement in ASEAN and Beyond

The conventional regional trading arrangement landscape holds two primary models. One is the ‘dynamically expansive supranational model’ of the European Union (EU) that progressively enlarges its community beyond the constituent treaty through its evolving laws and institutions. The other is the ‘static intergovernmental model’ of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) where members strictly uphold obligations in the original agreement – no more and no less. A certain genre of Asia-Pacific regional trading arrangements (and beyond in the global South) sits uncomfortably within this bifurcated landscape. Sovereignty-centric, they seek a dynamic and ever-expanding community like the EU but, firmly rejecting supranationalism, insist on intergovernmental modalities as seen in the USMCA. Unsurprisingly, they have not been effective. Using post-2007 integration data from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, this article presents concordance legalization as a new explanatory framework in this landscape, demonstrating how one can regionalize successfully despite being simultaneously agenda expansive and intergovernmentally operational. Concordance legalization’s four-pronged strategy – the constituent treaty explicitly entrenching intergovernmentalism to facilitate dynamic agenda expansion; the dual-step system of primary and secondary laws (with a carefully calibrated use of hard and soft instruments); the organizational hierarchy that expands, implements and exerts intra-regional accountability pressures through numerous meetings and monitoring mechanisms (rather than adjudication) that enforce compliance – has enabled this curious success.