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1. The Ministers welcomed the convening of the East
Asia Summit as a forum for dialogue on broad
strategic, political and economic issues of common
interest with the aim of promoting peace, stability
and economic prosperity in East Asia. In this
respect, they recognized that the East Asia Summit
could make a significant contribution to the
achievement of the long-term goal of establishing an
East Asian community.It appeared that over time
following the first EAS the focus was less on
whether the EAS has a role in community building
than on what the role was and whether it was
secondary to ASEAN Plus Three. By mid-2006 the
Chinese news site Xinhua Net suggested the
community would arise through a two-phase process
with ASEAN Plus. Three as the first phase and the
EAS as the second phaseThe China-India joint
declaration of 21 November 2006 linked, at
paragraph 43, the EAS with the East Asian
Community processThe concentric circle model of
the community process with ASEAN at the centre,
ASEAN Plus Three at the next band and the East
Asia Summit at the outer band is supported by the
Second Joint Statement on East Asia Cooperation
Building on the Foundations of ASEAN Plus Three
Cooperation

2. The Chairman's Statement of the 3rd East Asia
Summit Singapore, 21 November 2007 also states:
We stressed our conviction that the EAS should
continue to help build a united and prosperous East
Asia, with ASEAN as the driving force working in
close partnership with other participants of the East
Asia Summit. We reaffirmed that the East Asia
Summit is an important component of the emerging
regional architecture and would help build an East
Asian community. It should play a complementary
and mutually reinforcing role with other regional
mechanisms, including the ASEAN dialogue process,
the ASEAN Plus Three process, the ARF, and APEC in
community building efforts.
A first stage of a future community may be seen in
the Comprehensive Economic Partnership for East
Asia (CEPEA) proposed by Japan for the members of
the East Asia Summit. The reality appears, however,
that movement towards such a relationship is a long
way off. Lee Kuan Yew has compared the
relationship between South-East Asia and India with
that of the European Community and Turkey, and has
suggested that a free-trade area involving South-East
Asia and India is 30 to 50 years away.