The EU's Southeast Asia Trade Deals Are Bilateral. A Bloc-to-Bloc Deal Isn't Close

After years of arduous negotiations, the EU is closing on a string of bilateral trade deals with countries in Southeast Asia, DW reports. The same reporting notes what that run of agreements is not: a bloc-to-bloc agreement between the EU and ASEAN remains a distant prospect. The distinction is the substance here. Country-by-country deals can widen trade coverage piece by piece without delivering the single region-to-region framework that the distant-prospect framing implies is still the larger goal.