As the Asians seek to manage their rapidly developing economic integration and evolving security landscape and try to develop sustainable strategies of cooperation for the future, Europe's experience of regional integration might provide useful lessons. This session will focus on the future of Asian integration and security in the 21st century, with a special emphasis on the value of the European experience and its current and potential role in the region and will bring a group of 50 to 60 current and future leaders, policy-makers and analysts from Asia, Europe, North America and elsewhere with the aim of improving the mutual understanding of each other.

Consideration will be given to the following questions, among others: What are the drivers of Asian regionalism? How to build strong institutions for effective regional cooperation? What can be learnt from what worked and what did not work in Europe? What are the main challenges and threats which Asia is going to face in the next decade? How are these comparable to those that Europe has had to tackle since the Second World War, and especially since the end of the Cold War? How can regional institutions best co-ordinate responses to the security challenges in the region? Might Europe be able to contribute directly to Asian security by potentially expanding its role in the future and perhaps sharing the burden with the US?

The session program, using appropriate case studies, will focus particularly on issues such as:

• The contribution to regional security and stability made by different institutional models of cooperation and integration - both "deepening" and "widening" - including in the field of border controls and visa regimes, as well as the management of exchange rates and the bold experiment of monetary union.

• The role of regional organizations in stabilizing the periphery of a region through peacemaking and peace-building activities, including notably cooperation between military and civilian agencies and aligning development and security strategies. (The EU's experience in eastern and south-eastern Europe can perhaps be compared with stabilization efforts in East and South Asian "trouble spots".)

• How to overcome the legacy of past conflicts and atrocities whose memory still divides neighbouring peoples. For instance, does reconciliation between France and Germany hold lessons for China and India, or Korea and Japan?

• How to deal with non-traditional security concerns such as climate change, environmental degradation, energy shortages and supply routes, migration and human trafficking, natural disasters, and epidemic or pandemic disease.

• Europe's actual and potential contribution to Asian security, with an analysis of European involvement in Afghanistan as a case study.