The peoples of Europe have learned from past conflicts. Besides the economic merging, European integration is designed to help forestall tensions between countries and reconcile diverging interests. Incidentally, regional integration is celebrating anniversaries this year, both here in South-East Asia and in Europe. ASEAN will be thirty years old this year, and the European Union forty.
The other level of integration is globalisation, which is galloping ahead. Here, several factors are combining and mutually reinforcing one another: -  the internal decisions many countries have taken to open up their markets, the easing of restrictions on multilateral trade and, in particular, the huge technological advances in telecommunications and data processing.