亚洲为何需要“亚盟”？_时事_双语阅读-查字典英语网

亚洲为何需要“亚盟”？

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.

诺贝尔委员会将诺贝尔和平奖(Nobel Peace Prize)授予欧盟(EU)的决定引发一片揶揄之声，这是可以理解的。不只一个喜剧演员说过，至少他们没有将经济学奖授予欧洲人。

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.

然而，我们有必要问的是，在亚洲这样一个因旧日战争引发的紧张局势仍时时被激化的地区，哪家机构扮演了与欧盟类似的角色？答案是一个也没有。亚洲有着太多职能重叠的机构，但没有一家机构具备必要的广度和深度，来发挥欧盟——更别提北约(Nato)了——那样的作用。亚洲地区的复杂性、多样性和人口数量都远远超过欧洲。

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.