BANGKOK: Debt-laden Euro-pean nations will lobby Asia’s economic dynamos for help to calm the crisis raging in the eurozone at a major summit next week in communist Laos, one of the world’s poorest countries.
A heavyweight contingent including French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is due at the two-day meeting that opens tomorrow, underscoring Europe’s growing engagement with Asia’s rising stars.
The Europeans “are aware of Asia’s growing importance as an engine of global economic growth”, said a Southeast Asian diplomat. “They will take this chance at the summit level to assure Asia that although there’s no immediate solution to the debt crisis, the monetary union is not going to break up,” he said.
The Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem), held every two years since 1996, will provide a platform for Europe’s leaders to strengthen trade and investment links at a crucial juncture for their crisis-hit region. “When Europe is in trouble, global concern sets in,” French Labour Minister Michel Sapin said ahead of the summit.
“We have to show the world that Europe is not going backwards but is moving forward,” he said on a recent trip to Vietnam.
About 50 leaders or their representatives are expected to stream into the normally sleepy Laos capital Vientiane to attend the gathering, which comes against a backdrop of improving ties between Europe and Southeast Asia thanks to a series of dramatic political reforms by former pariah Myanmar. European Union president Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso are among those set to jet into Laos.
Asia’s economies have not been immune to the fallout from the debt crisis lashing Europe, with China and other exporters suffering from weaker demand for their products in key Western markets.
Beijing has repeatedly expressed concern about the EU slowdown and offered help in resolving the debt crisis, but at the same time has been increasingly forced to take costly stimulus steps of its own to sustain growth. AFP
