It might be stretching the point to claim that people across Southeast Asia will wake up one morning in 2015 to find themselves part of one giant country with 10 ‘‘provinces’’, as one Thai executive enthusiastically put it.

However, there’s no doubt that the arrival of the Asean Economic Community three years from now will force a lot of people to adopt a less insular outlook.

The vision of a region with 600 million people and a gross domestic product of nearly $2 trillion as a single market and production base is indeed a compelling one. Getting the vision to work is another matter.

Asean’s top policymakers and bureaucrats have spent years working out ways to streamline and harmonise regulations to ensure that goods, services, capital and people will be able to move freely from one country to another.

Indeed, the AEC has no shortage of cheerleaders among politicians and executives of large corporations that are already confident about their ability to hold their own in the wider world. For many small business owners and the public at large, however, reactions range from suspicion and fear to outright cluelessness.

Clearly, a lot of work remains to be done on the public relations side to ensure that all of the region’s citizens will be comfortable in their new, bigger home.