The decision to award the EU the Nobel Peace Prize elicited understandable merriment. More than one comedian said that at least the Nobel committee had refrained from awarding the Europeans the prize for economics.
Still, it is worth asking which institution in Asia, where tension from previous wars still festers, has performed a similar role? The answer is none. Asia has a plethora of overlapping organisations. But not one of them has the breadth or depth to have played anything like the same role as the EU – let alone Nato – in a region far more complex, diverse and populous than Europe.
There are good reasons for the institutional gap. First, Asia is not so much a region as a European invention. Since Herodotus, the term has been used to refer vaguely to the world east of Europe. Second, for much of the period after 1945, Asia was frozen into ideological camps. Defeated Japan became a client state of the US. It sat on one side of the cold war divide. Communist China was on the other. That put Asia’s equivalent of Germany and France in different blocs, making anything like a European project a non-starter.