LONDON, PARIS and ROME-- European leaders have been holding a special meeting at the invitation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss what he calls "the strategic issues facing Europe in the years ahead."

Blair wanted this to be a really informal gathering. The setting was the delightful Hampton Court Palace just outside London, a sprawling Tudor Palace built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey -- in effect the English shogun of his day -- during the reign of quarrelsome King Henry the Eighth (1509-1547). Unfortunately the cardinal got the wrong side of his increasingly impatient and somewhat brutal master -- over the matter of the king's divorce (before Henry went on to marry five more wives) -- and was ousted. His palace was grabbed by the king and remains a royal possession to this day.

"Oh put not your trust in princes" murmured Wolsey ruefully on his deathbed, quoting from the Bible (Psalm 146). The question now is whether we should feel the same about the political princes who have been gathering there this time -- around 480 years after the cardinal's downfall.

Blair clearly hoped that a pleasant day at Hampton Court, with its historic background and beautiful parks and gardens will generate all the trust and friendship needed to get the limping European Union back on the way forward. He wanted no officials to be present -- although some were bound to slip in -- and he wanted no one to wear a tie. Conviviality was to be the keynote -- out of which harmony on the road ahead would emerge.

But what road is that to be? All the heads of state and governments may talk about working more closely together and more European integration. But the words seem to mean quite different things to different leaders.

Some want to revive the draft constitution for the EU, which both the French and the Dutch rejected heavily last summer, and push ahead with political union in Europe to make it, in effect, one political bloc under one Europe-wide legal authority, heavily harmonized and centralized on many fronts, although with frequent lip-service to diversity and national cultural distinctions.

Others, including the British, but by no means just the British, want less vision and more practical detail. For example, Blair talks about more cooperation on research and development, on universities, on illegal immigration, on personal security for Europe's citizens.

Others again want the smaller and newer member states to have more say, and are still smarting under the whiplash of French President Jacques Chirac's tongue when, speaking from the presidential palace in Paris, he grandly ordered the smaller states to keep quiet over the Iraq issue and support for America. "They have missed" he said ominously "a great chance to stay silent." Then there are the Italians, whose feelings toward the EU seem to vary with their domestic moods. Many Italians now blame their problems on the euro currency, which is widely disliked. A week ago in Rome a taxi driver cursed the euro as he handed me my change. The sooner Italy escaped from it, he opined, the better.

These numerous different approaches may appear to have been seamlessly interwoven in the chatty, tie-less conversations over lunch in the Tudor Palace. In fact they conceal a fundamental divergence of view about the nature of regional cooperation in Europe -- a divergence that should be studied closely by those in East Asia who are contemplating more "integration" in an East Asian community.

This divergence is not between those who are pro- or anti- the European Union. It is between those who want light, practical and neighborly cooperation, some of it very close, within the European region, and those who want to build a new political power in Europe, and to do so if necessary by stealth and without waiting for democratic validation.

The latter -- the power-builders -- have on their side the heady vision of a United States of Europe acting as a significant policy player on the world stage, mounting an integrated army, using its bloc trade power to call the shots internationally and above all, to be a counterweight to American hegemony.

The former want European togetherness to be part of a wider global network. They want close integration in specific areas where it really works, such as regional crime-busting collaboration. But they just do not want the full political union that the dreamers demand, and they do not really want an EU with its own foreign policy that might override the very varied and sometimes conflicting foreign-policy objectives of the individual member states.

The lesson for those wanting to build more regional cooperation in East Asia is that they should be careful about copying the European model. Practical cooperation on issues such as energy supply and the environment, and migrant movements, make a lot of sense. Turning an East Asian community into a political union of some kind with its own personality and foreign-policy drive is quite another proposition -- and a dangerous one.

Besides which, such attempts at forced political intimacy never work for long, as the EU example shows. Real feelings of unity have to come from below, not from government schemes imposed over the heads of the citizens.

The message from below is that people like international cooperation, but not too much and not in too politicized a form. Would-be builders of East Asian community would do well to note that.