Do you think that India’s ‘Look East policy would help a common Asian market, unlike European common market? (2009, 20 Marks)
In Bela Balassa’s sequence of integration (The Theory of Economic Integration, 1961), a common market comes after a free trade area and a customs union. It frees the movement of goods, services, capital and labour behind a common external tariff, as the European Economic Community did after the Treaty of Rome (1957). India’s Look East policy has helped knit Asia together, but it cannot produce that outcome, because the obstacles lie in Asia’s political structure rather than in India’s policy.
What Look East contributed
- Agreements. India signed the Singapore CECA (2005), AITIGA with ASEAN (in force 2010), and CEPAs with South Korea (2010) and Japan (2011).
- Ideas. Manmohan Singh proposed an Asian Economic Community in 2004, joining ASEAN to China, Japan, Korea and India. Nagesh Kumar and other Indian economists built the policy case for it. India’s entry into the East Asia Summit (2005) supported the broader ASEAN+6 conception that Japan pressed in 2006 against a China-centred ASEAN+3.
- Projects. The Trilateral Highway and Mekong–Ganga Cooperation (2000) were meant to link South and Southeast Asia physically.
Why not a European-style common market
- Sovereignty. Ernst B. Haas’s neofunctionalism (The Uniting of Europe, 1958) explains European integration through spillover driven by supranational institutions. ASEAN’s founding norm is non-interference and consensus, which Kishore Mahbubani defends as pragmatic rather than deficient. Even the ASEAN Economic Community (2015) has no common external tariff and no supranational authority.
- Asymmetry. Europe integrated among states of broadly comparable income. Asia puts Singapore beside Laos, and China beside Bhutan.
- Security. Karl W. Deutsch’s “security community” preceded Europe’s market. Asia’s largest economies (China, Japan, India) are rivals with live territorial disputes, and Asia has no counterpart to the Franco-German reconciliation.
- No hegemonic sponsor. The United States underwrote the European project. In Asia, Sino-Japanese rivalry and India’s caution pull integration apart.
- India’s own protectionism. India left RCEP in November 2019, fearing Chinese imports. Its deficit with ASEAN reached US$45.2 billion in 2024–25, and the AITIGA review was still unresolved at the Manila economic ministers’ meeting of 22 September 2026.
What Asia has instead
Peter J. Katzenstein (A World of Regions, 2005) calls Asia’s regions porous: integrated by markets and production networks, not by treaties. The result is regionalisation without regionalism. Jagdish Bhagwati’s “spaghetti bowl” of overlapping FTAs became, in Richard Baldwin’s Asian version, the “noodle bowl”. RCEP (in force 2022), the CPTPP and the ACFTA 3.0 upgrade of October 2025 add layers. This web frees trade without pooling sovereignty, and India stays outside its deepest layer, RCEP.
India’s preferred path runs through bilateral and sectoral deals: the Australia ECTA (2022), the EFTA TEPA (in force October 2025), the UK CETA (in force July 2026) and the EU FTA concluded in January 2026. Its offensive interest lies in services and the movement of professionals, which a goods-centred customs union would not serve.
| Feature | European common market | Asian pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Driver | Treaty and institutions | Markets and supply chains |
| External tariff | Common | None |
| Authority | Supranational | Intergovernmental |
| India’s role | Not applicable | Bilateral FTAs, outside RCEP |
Conclusion
Look East will not produce an Asian common market, and no single policy could. What it can do is secure India a place in open, market-led regionalism. That depends less on new institutions than on competitiveness, logistics and rules-of-origin discipline at home. The European path assumes pooled sovereignty, and no Asian state, India included, is willing to pool it.