ASIA AND EUROPE: DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF BALANCE OF POWER The term “Asia” ascribes a deceptive coherence to a disparate region. Until the arrival of modern Western powers, no Asian language had a word for “Asia”; none of the peoples of what are now Asia’s nearly fifty sovereign states conceived of themselves as inhabiting a single “continent” or region requiring solidarity with all the others. As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia. There is no memory of a common empire comparable to that of Rome. Across Northeast, East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, prevailing major ethnic, linguistic, religious, social, and cultural differences have been deepened, often bitterly, by the wars of modern history. The political and economic map of Asia illustrates the region’s com