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senior envoy of the European Union and Indonesian expert has urged the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) not to copy the EU common market concept, saying that the single market to be implemented by ASEAN should be based on the economic levels of the association's members.

 EU Ambassador to Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam and ASEAN Julian Wilson said on Thursday that the EU had proved that a single market could bring economic advantages to its members but ASEAN should also learn from the mistakes the EU had made.

'I don't like the idea of saying that ASEAN can learn from what we have done because in fact we made some mistakes. ASEAN can learn from our mistakes as well as learn from our success,' he told reporters on the sideline of EU-ASEAN Economic and Policy Forum.

The Vice President's deputy secretary for political affairs, Dewi Fortuna Anwar, said that ASEAN should establish a single market concept based on their own economic condition.

'ASEAN regionalism is different from that of the EU. ASEAN is much more politically driven while the EU is much more economically driven,' she said. In addition, Dewi argued that with the wide gap in the economic condition among the ASEAN members, it would be quite difficult for the association to use the European single market as a copy of the region's proposed ASEAN Economic Community.

Dewi also emphasized that the EU became a strong single market as it was a supranational body in which each member gave part of its sovereignty to the union, such as imposing the single currency policy. In terms of ASEAN, the member countries are still reluctant to compromise their views but the market sometimes requires them to have a common policy.

Meanwhile the ASEAN Secretary-General Le Luong Minh stressed that ASEAN ministries in the last meeting had agreed and endorsed the deliverable and the post 2015 agenda. He believed that ASEAN could make the single market timely and made their own countries proud.

The ASEAN single market is expected to facilitate the free flow of goods and services in which the tariff among member countries could be reduced 0 to 5 percent.

The single market will be fully implemented in 2015 in ASEAN-6 (Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines) and in 2018 for CLMV (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam) making it a bloc with 600 million population and US$2.2 trillion in GDP. (koi)