Africa and overlapping of the regional agreements

The organization of the East Asian region, long dominated by ASEAN, has now become a theater in which the United States and China compete over norms creation and rule setting: the former through the TPP and the latter through the RCEP. The projects supported by the two superpowers differ in their geographical scope as well as in their objectives and in their instruments, but each of them is set to change East Asia's geo-economic landscape. In this moving context, the ASEAN Community was launched on 31 December 2015 with a view to strengthening or optimizing the association's role. The objective of this paper is to assess ASEAN's ability to maintain its centrality and to respond to the power game between its two major partners.