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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]

Japanese government interests in Southeast Asia continue to expand. Official speeches refer to the growth of a 'community that acts together', while institutional linkages have been strengthened with the creation of the ASEAN Plus Three process and by a proliferation of bilateral arrangements. These developing networks raise questions about Japan's future orientation towards its wider region. This article assesses recent developments, by challenging some of the fundamental assumptions about Japan's regional behaviour. First, it examines how a tendency to render mutually exclusive bilateral and multilateral forms of behaviour serves to obfuscate a focus on the fundamental processes of regional engagement. Second, this article delineates Japan's changing orientation towards the region as part of a process of 'complex regional multilateralism', in which a range of often ad hoc engagements have resulted in a loose framework for interaction. In so doing, it suggests that Japan's current policy-making approach towards Southeast Asia may be regarded as a continuation of policy that is, nevertheless, being buffeted by a range of - primarily regional - external influences. The resulting set of perceived strategies demonstrates not an either/or approach to regional engagement but, rather, shows how the Japanese government manages changing circumstances to carve out a new role for itself in Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]