The idea of an Asian Community — a continent united economically and politically, with its own institutions and even its own currency — sounds at first like a natural and even an inevitable idea. If Europeans can do it in their own historically turbulent continent, why not elsewhere — especially in a region with so many common values and practices, from Buddhism and Confucianism to wet rice cultivation? Over the decades since Europe’s experiment has become reality, various eminent Asians have had the thought, the latest of them Yukio Hatoyama, the Japanese Prime Minister.

At last weekend’s gathering of Asian leaders in Thailand he set out his vision of the “East Asian community” inspired by the mid-20th century Europeans who shaped the European Union. To Europeans, used to taking the lead in such matters, it is an awe-inspiring, and mildly alarming, possibility. But how likely and practical is a future United States of Asia?

There is no doubt about the theoretical potential of such a body which could one day make the EU look like a minor global player. The countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), together with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India, include more than half the world’s population and have a combined GDP of $14.1 trillion.

This brings up the first problem when building an Asian community: who counts as Asian?

Chinese leaders speak in terms of an integrated Asia including the ten Asean countries plus China, Japan and South Korea. Mr Hatoyama, however, wants to include Australia, New Zealand and India, and insists that the US, though not eligible for membership, has a “vital role” to play in the region.

The reasons are obvious: Japan, facing political, economic and military eclipse with the rise of China, wants to dilute Beijing’s power by bringing on board friendly nations with priorities close to its own. And this is only the beginning of the political complications that ensure that any close Asian union will remain a distant and Utopian dream for a generation at least.

Asian diversity makes Europe look dully homogenous by comparison. Politically, its nations range from a pariah narco-dictatorship (Burma); through the free-market communism of China and Vietnam; an Islamic absolute monarchy (Brunei); to the integrated globalised democracies of Japan and Australia. At their annual summits, South-East Asian leaders are fond of speaking of the “Asean way” – an approach based on consensus and moderation, and a reluctance on the part of member countries to pass judgment on the regimes of their partners. But often this looks like a way of papering over otherwise intractable differences

In tone and method, the defining characteristics of Asian diplomatic get togethers are almost diametrically opposed to those of the EU which, despite the frequent appearance of dividedness, has created solid working institutions through decades of hard negotiation. In place of squabbling, there is in Asia a desperately yearning for harmony and for vague and conciliatory consensus over binding rules.

The biggest obstacle of all to Asian integration is demographic. In Europe the power of the biggest state, Germany, is balanced by three partners – Britain, France and Italy – sufficiently large that no one power is ever likely to dominate the continent. But East Asia, increasingly, is a region of small and medium-size states orbiting the superpower-in-waiting, China. So vast is China becoming, both in its population and the size of its economy, that it is hard to see how an integrated Asia could ever serve the interests of both Beijing and its smaller neighbours.

The truth is that the displays of harmony and good cheer are a mask, an attempt to cover up the region's deep and potentially explosive divisions. Serious and long running territorial disputes divide Japan from China and South Korea, and several of the South-East nations from China and from one another. The potential for war remains real in Taiwan and Korea. The EU had its origins in the desperate collaborative wish to avoid a repeat of the century’s worst war; in Asia, that war has not and may never be fought, but a sense of rivalry and divergent interests remains.

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