Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM)

The Asia-Europe Meeting, known as ASEM, is an Asian-European political dialogue forum founded March 1, 1996 at its inaugural summit in Bangkok, Thailand, whose original 24 partners comprised the fifteen European Union member states and European Commission alongside seven ASEAN members plus China, Japan and South Korea. It has since grown to 53 partners, including 51 countries and the European Union and ASEAN Secretariat as regional-organization members, and pursues deeper Asia-Europe relations across political dialogue, economic and financial cooperation, and social, cultural and educational exchange through biennial summits that alternate between the two continents; the Asia-Europe Foundation is the only permanently established institution under the ASEM framework.