Imagine an international regime with these institutional features:

1. Virtually free trade in goods and services, including a “mutual recognition” system whereby compliance with regulatory requirements in one jurisdiction (eg qualifications to practice law or requirements to offering securities to the public) basically means exemption from compliance with regulations in the other jurisdiction. And for sensitive areas, such as food safety, there is a trans-national regulator.

2. Virtually free movement of capital, underpinned by private sector and governmental initiatives.

3. Permanent residence available to nationals from the other jurisdiction (and strong pressure to maintain flexible rules about multiple nationality).

4. Treaties for regulatory cooperation, simple enforcement of judgments (a court ruling in one jurisdiction is treated virtually identically to a ruling of a local court), and to avoid double taxation (including a system for taxpayer-initiated arbitration among the member states).

5. Government commitment to harmonising business law more widely, eg now for consumer and competition law.

No, the answer is not the obvious one: this is NOT the EU.

Instead I am referring to the Trans-Tasman framework built up between Australia and New Zealand, particularly over the last decade. Sometimes this has been achieved through treaties (binding in international law, and more difficult therefore to change), but sometimes in softer ways (eg parallel legislation in each country and a looser inter-governmental “arrangement”).

And since both countries are so actively pursuing bilateral and now some regional FTAs, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, can’t these Trans-Tasman initiatives become a more palatable template for a broader “Asia Pacific Community”?

I think this is also “an idea whose time is coming”, although (for now) Australasians still tend to bristle at any overt mention of the EU itself as an inspiration for our region. We should be looking at all sorts of specific innovations that have proved successful in Europe, with variants already emerging particularly in the Trans-Tasman context, and ask ourselves how these might be generalisable – sometimes even in the short term.

Since July 2008 (also published in the Australian Financial Review) I have written about many possibilities on this blog, as well as my overlapping “Japanese Law and the Asia Pacific” blog at http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/japaneselaw/. There you can find a paper for an international trade law conference in Wellington this week that tries to bring together many of these (EU / Trans-Tasman) institutional features.

Looking forward, one proposal is for a databas linking the Asia-Pacific with the RAPEX database in the EU, whereby national regulators share information about accidents and serious risks related to general consumer goods. In Europe this is underpinned by a Directive requiring suppliers in the 27 member states to disclose such risks, but already similar legislation has been introduced in the US (1990), Japan (2006), China (2007) and Canada (currently before parliament) – and hopefully soon Australia and NZ (as part of a much bigger consumer law reform package underway). This creates a dynamic “race to the top” anyway, but we could encourage further regulatory cooperation through bilateral and regional FTAs in the Asia-Pacific, And already we should establish an information clearing house for the Asia-Pacific, and link that to the EU’s existing RAPEX system (which is already now connected to China and the US through bilateral cooperation agreements).

For many other possibilities, loosely inspired by the EU’s 50-year experience in slowly bringing together increasingly diverse 27 members states in a variety of ways, please see my blog and paper at http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/japaneselaw/. If it still seems like an “undiplomatic activity” to raise this analogy directly in current negotiations towards an Asia Pacific Community, perhaps it will be more palatable to point to the softer but increasingly compehensive innovations in the Trans-Tasman context.

Luke Nottage