抄録
Community is defined as "a group of people living together in one place", or "a place considered together with its inhabitants" (Concise Oxford Dictionary), which has various meanings and sizes from small "local community", to "national/state community", more widely to "supra-state/regional community", or even to "global community" in widest sense, as far as people feel "living together". This paper, however, focuses on the evolutional process of supra-state/regional communities and its implication in the legal system of contemporary world, contrasting with the parallel trends of the recent revaluation of the role of local communities in social life. Because both communities have become more and more important, while state community has started losing its supremacy shown in "the Retreat of State" by Suzan Strange, as a result of the Globalization accelerated since the 1980s.
For this purpose, first, I will examine the process of development of these three communities both in Western and Asian societies since the evolution of modern state. Second, I will pick up the case of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Countries) in order to illustrate the development of a supra-state regional community in Asia, and examine the direction of its expansion to more wider "East Asian Community", together with East Asian countries like China, Korea and Japan, after facing serious economic and political crisis at the closing of the 20th Century. Last, as a conclusional part, I will propose the idea of multi-dimensional legal structures, which consist of supra-state, state and local community laws, in order to understand the legal phenomena of these supra-state/regional communities as a whole.
