Mannequin Tigers

So much for the Asian century. The Thais are bickering with themselves, and when they8217;re done doing that...

So much for the Asian century. The Thais are bickering with themselves, and when they8217;re done doing that, they8217;ll bicker with the Cambodians8212;again. China may be Japan8217;s biggest trading partner, but they hate each other anyway. Malaysia and Indonesia? Two countries divided by the same language.

I8217;ve spent a lot of time in Asia over the past decade, as an expat and a traveller. From where I stand, the place is a geopolitical mess. Hogtied by nationalism and narrow self-interest, the countries of the East won8217;t be banding together to replace the West as the seat of global power anytime soon.

Earlier this summer, Thailand and Cambodia moved onto war footing because of a dispute over a mountaintop temple8212;not exactly a living example of the Beijing Olympics8217; motto: 8220;One World, One Dream.8221;

Today, the continent battles a kind of split personality. On the one hand, many cultural, economic and political trends suggest that Asian nations are becoming more integrated than ever before. But on the other, a virulent nationalism is spreading in the region, one that feeds on reinterpreted8212;or even imaginary8212;history to gin up hatred and push small-minded agendas.

Elites in Asia clearly understand the benefits of integration. In 2004, China replaced the United States as Japan8217;s biggest trading partner. With the expansion of satellite television, Asian airlines and regional hiring by Asian conglomerates, businesspeople watch the same news, cool their heels together in a slew of space-age international airports and mingle at cocktail parties and pan-Asian business summits. Fads that start in Tokyo or Seoul, such as drinking red wine or dying hair blond, sweep through the region.

Despite all that love, most of the region8217;s multilateral institutions do little more than meet for the sake of meeting. In Cambodia and Laos, local officials and fishermen despair that dams built by China on the upper portion of the Mekong River are blocking water flow8212;and ravaging fishing in the southern stretch of that river that snakes through their countries. 8220;But when we 8230; try to bring this up at ASEAN meetings,8221; Sokhem Pech, a leading Cambodian Mekong expert, told me, 8220;no one even wants to talk about it.8221;

The problem: nationalism and an obsession with sovereignty are drowning out calls for cooperation. Across the continent, populist politicians have scrubbed school textbooks, whether to minimize Japan8217;s atrocities in South Korea and China during World War II or to erase the memory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Travelling to Cambodia, I meet teenagers who know practically nothing about what happened in their country in the 1970s. China, too, has whitewashed the memory of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989. Students at Beijing University shown the iconic 1989 photograph of the man who stopped a tank in its tracks, didn8217;t recognise it.

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The Internet has further empowered Asian nationalists, allowing them to air their vitriol unchecked. On Chinese online bulletin boards such as the 8216;Strong Nation Forum8217;, which is run by the People8217;s Daily, respondents compete for the most aggressive stance and ridicule Chinese leaders for compromising on issues such as relations with neighboring countries or Tibet or Taiwan. In Japan, the blogosphere helped spark sales of the manga comic book Hating the Korean Wave. And in Indonesia, online writers helped fuel anger at neighbouring Malaysia for the use of a supposedly Indonesian jingle in a tourism campaign. Just last week, Vietnam8217;s foreign ministry called in China8217;s ambassador to protest the appearance on Chinese websites of 8220;invasion plans8221; that purported to detail the occupation of Vietnam by the People8217;s Liberation Army.

Even countries that have little history of animosity toward each other can be swept into a rage by the new nationalists. In 2006, after Singaporean state investment fund Temasek Holdings purchased Thai telecommunications giant Shin Corporation, Thai bloggers and online columnists condemned the deal, arguing that a Singaporean company would have control over sensitive Thai communications infrastructure. Thousands of Thais marched to Singapore8217;s embassy in Bangkok8212;a move that left urbane Singaporean diplomats a bit flat-footed.

All these problems don8217;t seem to have resonated in the United States, where an entire industry has developed around predictions that the Asian century will replace the American one. And maybe it will8212;a few centuries from now.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy.