" 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. "

― Henry Kissinger , World Order