The Unintended Consequences of Forum Shopping: Is the EU Drowning in the East Asian 'noodle Bowl'?

If the relative function, legitimacy and efficiency of the EU’s interregional dialogues have been widely discussed it is often under the assumption that EU external engagement is a good thing. Accordingly, their analysis is overwhelmingly framed in terms of ‘positive impact’ or ‘no impact’; and its ‘actor-ness’ described in terms of its capacity to manage the EU’s own idiosyncrasies. This is because mainstream scholarship frames EU external action in terms of success or failure to achieve intended effects, the latter generally defined against the EU’s own stated objectives. However, in a Hobbesian and often contradictory environment such as East Asia, EU external action may often have unintended consequences which in turn imply the need to go beyond mere assessments of effectiveness. In the face of a ‘noodle bowl’ of increasingly complex intra-regional relations, the EU has developed a multi-layered set of bilateral or group-to-group dialogues with a growing number of East Asian partners. These range from bilateral dialogues with a number of strategic partners (China, Japan and Korea) to the trans-regional dialogue within the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), by way of more institutionalised partnerships such as the group-to-group dialogue between the EU and ASEAN. The paper offers to assess whether this multiplication of fora has empowered European Interregionalism in East Asia as it allowed for efficiency gains through strategic forum shopping or whether it has led to the EU losing control of the prevailing narratives due to unintended interferences between the various platforms.