The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership: new paradigm or old wine in a new bottle?

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is currently negotiating with its six trading partners to form a new trade agreement called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The RCEP intends to harmonise rules and regulations across multiple overlapping free trade agreements in the region, and thereby attract new members. However, it faces several challenges. The mention of a flexibility principle and the ‘ASEAN Way’ of decision-making has led many to believe that the RCEP will be yet another low-quality regional trade agreement. However, the RCEP presents all ASEAN members with the opportunity to take a role in setting the agenda for a region-wide agreement. Hence, despite its challenges, ASEAN must make the effort to reach an attractive RCEP vis-à-vis other competing regional agreements. Accordingly, this paper describes what the RCEP is intended to be, how it emerged, and the issues that might affect the agreement's final quality, in order to evaluate if it will establish a new paradigm or a repackaged version of ASEAN's existing trade agreements.