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Illustration
by Daniel Pudles (by The Economist)
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The
future of Asia: Eastern approaches
The
Economist
08 Feb
08
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10640560
Kishore
Mahbubani makes some sensible recommendations on how Asia's
growing power might be managed. But his other arguments are far
less convincing
When you have spent your long
diplomatic career listening to lectures by arrogant Americans and
Europeans about how others should run their countries and that
the West is best, it must be tempting to try to get your own
back. That is what Kishore Mahbubani, who in the 1980s and 1990s
was Singapore's and probably Asia's best-known diplomat, is doing
in his new book, "The New Asian Hemisphere".
Mr
Mahbubani is now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
at the National University of Singapore, and prefers the title of
professor to ambassador, but this is no dry scholarly tome. It is
an anti-Western polemic, designed to wake up Americans and
Europeans by making them angry. In that goal, it will certainly
be successful.
Interestingly, the author ascribes the
success of Asian economies to their adoption of "seven
pillars of Western wisdom", so he does give some credit to
the West. These are free-market economics; science and
technology; meritocracy; pragmatism; a culture of peace; the rule
of law; and education. Japan led the way in the late 19th century
in realising the need to learn from the West if it was to avoid
being colonised by it. South Korea and Taiwan followed in the
1960s and 1970s, along with Hong Kong and Singapore. Finally
China and India saw the light in, respectively, the 1980s and
1990s. Since Asia has succeeded by emulating the West, why, asks
Mr Mahbubani, is the West not celebrating?
Isn't it? What
about all those business people flocking on aircraft to India and
China? Mr Mahbubani offers no evidence for his assertion that the
West is unhappy about Asian success. His answer to his own
question is that the West—by which he means America and
western Europe, plus Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and, more
controversially, Japan—has become so used to dominating and
controlling the world to serve its own interests that it has
ceased to recognise even that it does so. "If you deny you
are in power, you cannot cede power," he argues.
Mr
Mahbubani also contrasts "Western incompetence" with
"Asian competence": the world would be better run if
Asians had a bigger role, though the West, he says, may try to
stop that from happening. Ultimately, the rise of Asia may force
the West to cede power, but it is not going to do so gracefully.
As a result, there is a serious risk of an anti-Western backlash.
The first problem with this argument is shown by Mr
Mahbubani's inclusion of Japan as a Western economy. That is not
the way things felt during the 1980s, when what was meant by "the
shift of power to Asia" was the rise of Japan. It also
suggests that his definition of Western is really just "rich":
surely, as other Asian countries become rich, they too will
become part of the rich ruling elite of the world, just as Japan
did during the 1970s and 1980s. China and India are already
invited as observers at the main rich-country summit, the G8, and
it can only be a matter of time before they become full
members.
The second problem is a bigger one. To arrive at
his conclusion that the West is incompetent and Asia competent,
Mr Mahbubani has to use a rather distorted view of recent
history. When citing the debacle in Iraq he is, of course,
shooting at a lame and sitting duck. But his other evidence is
much weaker: the West's failure to maintain the global nuclear
non-proliferation regime; the failure to prevent genocide in
Rwanda and war in the Balkans; and the failure of the Doha round
of global trade-liberalisation talks.
It is certainly
lamentable that the nuclear non-proliferation regime has been
crumbling. But whose fault is that? Of the four new
nuclear-weapons states that have emerged in recent decades, three
have been Asian—India, Pakistan and North Korea. Two of
those—Pakistan and North Korea—attained their nuclear
status with a technological helping hand from China, a country Mr
Mahbubani rates as being run by peace-mongering geopolitical
geniuses.
America and western Europe should certainly be
criticised for failing to avert the terrible events in Rwanda and
the Balkans. Mr Mahbubani's argument is also, however, that Asia
has been much better at keeping the peace in its region. This
view can be sustained only if you ignore the recurrent conflicts
between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and the civil war in Sri
Lanka, as well as Asia's closest parallel to the former
Yugoslavia, which is Indonesia. Neither China nor the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which Mr Mahbubani lauds as
far more successful diplomatically than the European Union, did
anything to prevent the bloodshed in the then East Timor as it
sought to separate itself from Indonesia, nor the bloodshed in
Aceh, which failed to do so. In that, Asia's failure was just as
big as that of the EU in the Balkans.
And the Doha round?
A newspaper that was founded 165 years ago to campaign against
farm protectionism cannot but join Mr Mahbubani in condemning the
EU and America for clinging on to their farm subsidies and trade
barriers, which have blocked progress in Doha. But Japan and
South Korea are also big farm protectionists, and India has
helped thwart Doha by its resistance to broader trade
liberalisation. The blame should be as global as trade
itself.
Mr Mahbubani's Asian triumphalism is as futile and
unconvincing as the Western triumphalism he deplores. That is a
shame, as the recommendations he makes for how world governance
should be improved are sensible: Chinese and Indian membership of
the G8; an end to American and European hogging of the top jobs
at the IMF and the World Bank; reform of the UN Security Council
to give permanent, veto-holding status to more Asian countries.
All are regularly made by Western intellectuals too, even though
he claims such minds are determined to maintain the supremacy of
the West.
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