After a decade of start-stop negotiations, the European Union and the Philippines have found their way to a “substantial agreement” on free trade – one that analysts say could pave the way for Brussels to lock in an Asean-wide pact.

The breakthrough, announced on Tuesday, capped talks that began in 2016 and stalled a year later, only to resume again in 2024.

“I am proud to say we have delivered a substantial agreement that reflects the ambition both sides brought to the table,” EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic said following virtual talks with his Philippine counterpart Cristina Roque.

Their call set the trade deal “on a clearer path towards its formal conclusion in the coming months”, the two said in a joint statement issued afterwards, in which they welcomed the promise of new opportunities for “businesses … farmers, manufacturers and consumers on both sides”. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is expected to travel to Manila next year for the deal’sg once it has been finalised.

“This is a major win for both European and Philippine businesses,” EU-Asean Business Council executive director Chris Humphrey said in a statement welcoming the agreement, adding that it paved the way for the Philippines to “strengthen its competitiveness … both as a destination for European investment and as a more important part of regional value chains”.

“The challenge now,” Humphrey added, “is to translate the country’s strong fundamentals into a competitive operating environment, making it easier for companies to invest, produce and integrate the Philippines into regional supply chains”.

The EU was the Philippines’ fourth-largest trading partner last year accounting for 8.3 per cent of the country’s total goods trade, with bilateral trade in goods reaching €17.6 billion (US$20.7 billion), according to European Commission figures.

In addition to Manila, Brussels has also been in prolonged trade talks with Bangkok and Putrajaya, the latter of which dates as far back as 2010.

Negotiators are aiming for both EU trade deals with Thailand and Malaysia to be wrapped up by the end of 2027, the 50th anniversary of the European bloc establishing formal diplomatic relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

“However, bilateral agreements should not be the end point,” Humphrey said, noting that European businesses had “consistently called” for a region-to-region free-trade deal.

“We hope the EU and Asean will begin laying the groundwork for a broader economic architecture that reflects the scale and strategic importance of the relationship,” he added.

Nearly four in five of the 150 European business leaders surveyed by the EU-Asean Business Council earlier this year said they expected to trade more with, and invest more in, Southeast Asia over the next five years.

A little more than three in five also said Asean offered the best economic opportunities globally over the same time period.

Humphrey said he was confident that the Southeast Asian bloc was “ready to embrace the idea” of a region-to-region deal, following consultations with Asean economic ministers, officials and others at a business summit held in Manila on Tuesday. “The question is the level of ambition on the EU side,” he added.

Matthijs van den Broek, a geoeconomic analyst and business consultant based in Southeast Asia, said Asean could become a “central player and a stable economic force” as demand rose for diversified partnerships and supply chains amid growing global unpredictability.

“This new reality has made individual Asean member states recognise the urgency not only to further increase intraregional trade and investment but also to complement and align country-specific priority and focus business sectors, consumer segments and products,” he said.

Even the region’s “noodle bowl” of overlapping trade agreements need not be fatal to the project, he said, provided “access to the entire Asean region is guaranteed and facilitated by an aligned intraregional infrastructure and supply chain”.

With such an alignment, “Asean will be in a better position to present itself as one region,” van den Broek said, adding that Thailand and Vietnam, for example, were already moving in that direction.

Asean’s ongoing free-trade talks with Canada are evidence that the bloc can negotiate as a single entity, according to Humphrey.

“There is no reason why they [Asean members] shouldn’t follow the same pattern with the EU,” he said, also pointing to 10 Asean members’ entry into the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2020 – though, crucially, these ascensions were signed and ratified individually, rather than en bloc. Other observers were less optimistic that a wider EU-Asean agreement would materialise any time soon.

“Asean as a regional group works by consensus, but as individual sovereign countries, while the EU has a sophisticated majority voting system between its member states and its own EU parliament,” said Carsten Bermig, a policy adviser and director for governance and sustainable development at the Asia-Europe Foundation in Singapore.

“Asean as a regional group works by consensus, but as individual sovereign countries, while the EU has a sophisticated majority voting system between its member states and its own EU parliament,” said Carsten Bermig, a policy adviser and director for governance and sustainable development at the Asia-Europe Foundation in Singapore.

“That has an impact on the length of negotiations as well as the level of integration both regions can commit to.” Bermig said there was still a “long way to go” until a region-to-region deal was reached, noting that European free-trade agreements “tend to be deeper and more comprehensive than the ones Asean has entered into so far”, with question marks still hanging over the Southeast Asian bloc’s “level of regulatory integration and cooperation”.

Then there is past precedent. Van den Broek recalled that initial EU-Asean free-trade talks, launched in 2007, were derailed that same year by a violent crackdown on protesters in Myanmar, where human rights concerns persist to this day.

Rather than hold out hope for a fully fledged pact that might be a long time coming, Bermig said the two blocs should instead consider a lighter-touch arrangement, bridging the gap between existing bilateral deals and baseline World Trade Organization rules.