Southeast Asian leaders in their summit late last month declared that the ASEAN Community will be launched on Dec. 31. Compared with the European Union, which involves transfer of some state sovereignty to the union and the use of a common currency for most of its members, the ASEAN Community will be a rather loose supranational grouping. Even so, it should try to develop a sense of unity — the basis for healthy and robust development as a community — among the participating countries and their citizens. Narrowing the huge economic gap among its members and overcoming problems arising from political diversity will be among its key challenges.

Japan, for its part, should take the creation of the new regional community as a chance to consider anew how it should approach the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a whole — which is expected to develop into a single market with a population of more than 600 million in the form of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). While Japan has ostensibly sought deeper ties with the regional group, its interests have so far focused mainly on individual ASEAN members and on investing in them as production bases and markets for its businesses.

The ASEAN Community has its roots in the idea to create an East Asia Economic Caucus, proposed in 1990 by then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who thought that Southeast Asian nations need to form a regional free trade zone to cope with economic challenges from Western powers. While the ASEAN Community aims to achieve integration in three areas — economic, political and security, and social and cultural affairs — it is unclear at this stage how the members will pursue community-building except in the economic arena because of their vast political, ethnic and religious diversity. Some member states have territorial disputes among themselves and with China in the South China Sea, and their attitude toward Beijing, which seeks to expand its influence in the region, differs.