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This article examines the current attempt by the European Union and Japan to negotiate a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA). Sitting alongside negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), this SPA represents an attempt to reignite bilateral relations between these two global powerhouses. Still confined by the origins of their institutionalised partnership in 1991, this article argues that both sides find it hard to break away from earlier functional and normative assumptions about their relative significance and about each other, in order to forge a new meaningful, overarching partnership. It examines the development of Japan–EU relations building up to the preparations for this SPA, against the background of path-dependent processes of engagement. Path dependency in its various forms ‘views institutions as ‘carriers of history,’ which maintain existing behavioural norms and cultural patterns throughout time’. Despite some of the problems such claims elicit, as will be explored below, this article proposes that path dependency – and a particular focus on ‘imprinting’ – offers a useful starting point for explaining the apparent institutional inertia and incremental change that characterise much of this bilateral relationship today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the types of region–to–region dialogue evident in relations among the states of the European Union and East Asia, with a particular focus on ASEM and the EU–ASEAN dialogue. It examines how the EU utilizes interregionalism as one mechanism for managing economic and political relations with a growing yet disparate region. For the states of East Asia, ASEM offers a means of dealing collectively with twenty–five European states, provides a first–hand examination of the practices of regional integration and establishes a framework in which East Asia can present itself as a regional political and economic entity and realize the ‘third side’ in a global triangle of regional blocs. Building upon a particular historical trajectory of relations among the states of the EU and East Asia, ASEM represents an important space for articulating not only the nature of region, but also the role of non–state actors, which have increasingly come to occupy a significant position in transnational affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]