The idea that countries as different as Japan and Laos, or Singapore and Myanmar, might share the same money has always been a vision for future generations, not the here and now. But policymakers have at least been heading in the direction of closer cooperation by formalising the network of emergency central bank loans they set up in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2000 to try to prevent a repeat of the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis.

Any notion, though, that the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) could form a springboard to more ambitious monetary coordination looks doomed since the bailouts of Greece, and now Ireland, have exposed the frailties of a common currency area with infinitely deeper economic and institutional roots than Asia can offer.

"The key message from Europe for Asia is that it undermines any argument that currency union is a sensible way forward towards closer integration," said Peter Drysdale, emeritus professor of economics at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

"That was never a persuasive argument, but it has close to zero credibility now," Drysdale added.

POSTPONED TILL LATER

The nations of Europe painstakingly knitted together their economies, and then their exchange rates, over the course of nearly half a century before they were ready to create the euro.

Even then, as the current crisis has exposed, the fathers of the single currency left gaping institutional holes that they are now scrambling to fill by creating mechanisms to enforce fiscal discipline and, as a last resort, enable sovereign debt restructuring.

Governments in Asia, by contrast, pride themselves in not poking their nose into their neighbours' business.

It took the 10 members of the Association of South East Asian Nations along with China, Japan and South Korea -- ASEAN Plus Three -- a decade to turn the CMI's complex web of bilateral currency swap agreements into a single, uniform facility.

The $120 billion, ungainly named Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation agreement finally took effect in March.

But don't expect leaders to conclude that the moral from Europe's debt mess is to get a move on. The opposite is more likely.

"There is a bit of concern about what has been going on in Europe and what it means for Asia," said Jay Menon, an economist in the Office of Regional Economic Integration at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila.