Can Asians think? Judging from the record of Asian societies over the past few centuries, the answer should be “no” — or, at best, not very well. Societies that take centuries to wake up cannot be said to think very well. It would be foolish for any Asian to deny this painful historical fact.
Its key message to Asians is simple: do not think that you have arrived. The rapid economic advances enjoyed by several East Asian societies may, in retrospect, have been the easy part. Retooling the social, political and philosophical dimensions of their societies will be a tougher challenge. This challenge has arrived.
The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the “happiness of mankind” as its promise.
Clearly, in the past few centuries Europe and, more recently, North America have carried the larger share of the global burden in advancing human civilization. By 2050, when Europeans and North Americans make up 1/10th instead of 1/6th of the world’s population, would it be fair for the remaining 90 percent of mankind to expect this 10 percent to continue to bear this burden? Realistically, can the rest of the world continue to rest on the shoulders of the West?
Western Europe in the 6th century was a chaos of conquest, disintegration, and rebarbarization. Much of the classic culture survived, for the most part silent and hidden in a few monasteries and families. But the physical and psychological foundations of social order had been so disturbed that centuries would be needed to restore them. Love of letters, devotion to art, the unity and continuity of culture, the cross-fertilization of communicating minds, fell before the convulsions of war, the perils of transport, the economies of poverty, the rise of vernaculars, the disappearance of Latin from the East and of Greek from the West.
Against this backdrop, it would have been sheer folly to predict at the time that in the second millennium Chinese, Indian and Islamic civilizations would slip into the backwaters of history while Europe would rise to be the first civilization ever to dominate the entire globe.
At that time, Europe’s relative weaknesses were more apparent than its strengths. It was not the most fertile area of the world, nor was it particularly populous — important criteria by the measure of the day, when the soil was the source of most wealth, and human and animal muscle of most power. Europe exhibited no pronounced advantages in the fields of culture, mathematics, or engineering, navigation or other technologies. It was also a deeply fragmented continent, consisting of a hodgepodge of petty kingdoms, principalities and city-states. Further, at the end of the 15th century, Europe was in the throes of a bloody conflict with the mighty Ottoman Empire, which was pushing its way, inexorably it seemed, towards the gates of Vienna.
The most painful thing that happened to Asia was not the physical but the mental colonization. Many Asians (including, I fear, many of my ancestors from South Asia) began to believe that Asians were inferior beings to the Europeans. Only this could explain how a few thousand British could control a few hundred million people in South Asia. If I am allowed to make a controversial point here, I would add that this mental colonization has not been completely eradicated in Asia, and many Asian societies are still struggling to break free.
Educational excellence is an essential prerequisite for cultural confidence. To put it baldly, many Asians are pleased to wake up to the new realization that their minds are not inferior. Most Westerners cannot appreciate the change because they can never directly feel the sense of inferiority many Asians experienced until recently.
Indeed, for the past few centuries, it was Western scholarship and endeavor that preserved the fruits of Asian civilization, just as the Arabs preserved and passed on the Greek and Roman civilizations in the darkest days of Europe.
The 20th century was born in hope. It dawned in a relatively benign setting. The principal powers of the world had enjoyed, broadly speaking, a relatively prolonged spell of peace. The dominant mood in the major capitals as of January 1, 1900, was generally one of optimism. The structure of global power seemed stable. Existing empires appeared to be increasingly enlightened as well as secure.
Despite this great hope, the 20th century became mankind’s most bloody and hateful century, a century of hallucinating politics and of monstrous killings. Cruelty was institutionalized to an unprecedented degree, lethality was organized on a mass production basis. The contrast between the scientific potential for good and the political evil that was actually unleashed is shocking. Never before in history was killing so globally pervasive, never before did it consume so many lives, never before was human annihilation pursued with such concentration of sustained effort on behalf of such arrogantly irrational goals.
Until the middle of 1997, most East Asian societies believed that the had mastered the basic rules of modern economics. They liberalized their economies, encouraged foreign investment flows and practised thrifty fiscal policies. The high level of domestic savings gave them a comfortable economic buffer. After enjoying continuous economic growth rates of 7 percent or more per annum for decades, it was natural for societies like South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia to assume that they had discovered the magical elixir of economic development.
Integration had brought both benefits (in terms of significant increases in standard of living) and costs (such as loss of autonomy in economic management). But there was a clear reluctance to acknowledge and accept the loss of autonomy. This was demonstrated by the state of denial that characterized the initial East Asian response to this crisis. The denial clearly showed the psychological time lag in East Asian minds in facing up to new realities.
Clearly, East Asian societies have experienced many dangerous moments. But if they emerge from the 1997-98 financial crisis with restructured and reinvigorated economic and administrative systems of management, they may yet be among the first societies in the world to develop strong immune systems to handle present and future challenges springing from globalization.
These political forms are not perfect. They contain many features that inhibit social progress, from vested interest lobby groups to pork-barrel politics. Indeed, it would be fair to say that political development in most Western societies has atrophied. But it has atrophied at comfortable levels. Most of their citizens live in domestic security, fear no oppression, and are content with their political frameworks. How many Asian societies can claim to share this benign state of affairs?
Good governance is not associated with any single political system or ideology. It is associated with the willingness and ability of the government to develop economic, social and administrative systems that are resilient enough to handle the challenges brought about int he new economic era we are moving into. China provides a good living example of this. Its leaders are not looking for the perfect political system in theory. They are searching daily for pragmatic solutions to keep their society moving forward. The population support this pragmatism, for they too feel that it is time for China to catch up. Traditionally, the Chinese have looked for good government, not minimal government. They can recognize good governance when they experience it. The fact that Japan — which is in Western eyes the most liberal and democratic East Asian society — has had great difficulties adapting to the new economic environment demonstrates that political openness is not the key variable to look at.
Here again, it is far too early to tell whether Asian societies can successfully both integrate themselves into the modern world and reconnect with their past. Both are mammoth challenges. Western minds have a clear advantage over Asian minds, as they are convinced that their successful leap into modernity was to a large extent a result of the compatibility of their value systems with the modern universe. Indeed, many Western minds believe (either consciously or subconsciously) that without Western value systems no society can truly enter the modern universe.
But it will not be easy to walk out of a thousand year of stupor. Asians need to ask themselves hard questions. One of the key purposes of this essay is to look at some questions that Asians should ask themselves at this turn of the millennium. How did they come to lose a millennium? Will they lose the next one too? What challenges do they have to overcome to succeed in this new millennium?
To avoid losing the next century, Asians must resume the learning process they had aborted for centuries. They have to ruthlessly analyze their past. They have to understand, for example, why so many Asians allowed themselves to be colonized by so few Europeans. What went wrong? They must further determine what went right in the West. Many would want to credit Europe’s success to purely material factors: its domination of science and technology in the past five centuries. Superior European weapons subdued large Asian masses. But to look at the “hardware” alone, while ignoring the “software” advantages of European societies, would be a mistake. Distilling the wrong lessons may be even worse than distilling no lesson at all. The velocity of change is accelerating. Societies with the right competitive advantages will leap ahead even faster. Those without will fall further behind.
Capitalism, with its essential ingredient of “creative destruction,” generated new elites. Democracy provided another institutional process for flushing out old elites and churning out new ones. Both capitalism and democracy were therefore not purely ends in themselves (even though they are ideologically worshipped in many Western minds). They were also functional instruments that enabled — most times — new talent to emerge while simultaneously preventing the encrustation of old elites (which has been one key reason for Asia’s failure). If each Asian society allows its best minds to emerge, flourish and provide leadership, Asia could well take off. But conservative social and political forces resist change. And a great deal of Asian talent is wasted.
Ostensibly this is a loss for Asia. Most will not return immediately. But many eventually do. Taiwan’s economic miracle was helped by returning students. India’s explosive growth in the computer software industry has also been helped by its returning “brain drain.”
The third principle is “honesty.” This sounds trite, but it is a polite way of drawing attention to one of Asia’s most shameful aspects: corruption. Successful societies have functional elites. They add more value to their societies than they take from it. Unsuccessful societies have corrupt elites. As a result of feudal attitudes, they become easily entrenched, even though they survive as parasites.
We believed that London was the centre of the universe; one friend used to tell me that the streets there were paved with gold. Both India and China seemed doomed to eternal poverty.
One of the least appreciated contributions to the rise of Asia has been the magic provided by ASEAN in delivering political stability and harmony to Southeast Asia. Despite having greater ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity than Southeast Europe, the region remained an oasis of peace in the 1990s while the Balkans erupted into a frenzy of ethnic and religious killings.
Those as yet unborn will not understand how deeply the myth of European cultural superiority had been embedded into the Indian psyche. Nehru once said that the defeat of Russia in 1905 by Japan first triggered the idea of independence for India in his mind. That was a remarkable admission; it implied that intelligent Indians could not conceive of governing themselves before Japan, an Asian power, defeated a European one.
The Asian states, especially China, resisted copying the West. This is how the famous “Asian values debate” was sparked. In refusing Western prescriptions, Asians were perceived to be promoting the superiority of their own values. In fact, they were merely arguing that they should be free to choose their own political paths. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Asian intellectuals — including those from China — agree that the ultimate political destination of all societies is democracy. The destination is not in question, only the route and the timing are.
September 11, 2001, removed all traces of political smugness in Western minds and all claims to Western ideological superiority. It made the West aware that the new ideological challenge from Islam was far bigger than the communist one, which future historians will see as a passing shower.
The Western mind believes that it understands all worlds, since its is open to all ideas and closed to none. The paradoxical result of this deep-seated assumption is that the Western mind is actually unaware of the limits of its understanding and comprehension.
Superior Western military technology will be useless against these invading armies because they will arrive as poor and defenseless individuals and families, moving without commanders or orders, and seeping slowly through porous borders.
Increasingly, once-remote villages in China, Central Asia and the heart of Africa now have clear pictures of the comfortable and affluent lives of ordinary citizens in the West. Clausewitz observed that “once barriers — which in a sense consist only in man’s ignorance of the possible — are torn down, they are not easily set up again.”
Economic development came first, creating both working and middle classes that had a vested interest in stability and would therefore not be pulled apart by demagogic democratic politicians trying to capitalize on ethnic and other sectional differences. That has also been the path taken by who have made the successful transition to democracy in East Asia.
Today, the West is encouraging, and sometimes demanding, the opposite approach in the Third World. It is promoting democracy before economic development.
In many Asian and African cases, without such middle classes the national polity breaks down into ethnic and tribal loyalties.
In the eyes of many Third World observers this pragmatic application of moral values leads to a cynical belief that the West will only advance democracy when it suits its own interests. The same cynicism can develop — is almost certain to develop — over human rights campaigns. Would the West be as tough on the Chinese regime in Beijing if China were located where either Turkey or Mexico is today? Would the West then be as sanguine about the prospect of millions of boat people emerging from China if the regime broke down and chaos prevailed?
Peru was punished with sanctions, while Algeria was not. The Europeans wisely calculated that sanctions on Algeria would further destabilize the volatile socio-economic situation and exacerbate the flow of Algerian refugees. Hence, nothing was done.
No Western government has publicly confessed that in determining its particular human rights and democracy policies, it weighs them against other vital national interests. Yet every government does so: the Germans take a strong stand on Kurdish rights, the US does not; the US and the UK come down hard on Qaddafi, Italy does not. This pattern of inconsistencies in turn undervalues the merit of these human rights policies in the eyes of the ostensible beneficiaries, the Third World societies, because instead of being impressed by the moral courage of Western governments, they notice the pragmatic and calculated application of moral principles.
The absolute power of the Western journalist in the Third World remains unchecked. Indeed, given the overwhelming power of the US at the end of the century, the might of the American media has increased, not diminished. Within the US, there are informal checks and balances on this media power. Outside the US, nothing restraints the American journalist.
They are like hungry and diseased passengers on a leaky, overcrowded boat that is about to drift into treacherous waters, in which many of them will perish. The captain of the boat is often harsh, sometimes fairly and sometimes not. On the river banks stand a group of affluent, well-fed and well-intentioned onlookers. As soon as those onlookers witness a passenger being flogged or imprisoned or even deprived of his right to speak, they board the ship to intervene, protecting the passengers from the captain. But those passengers remain hungry and diseased. As soon as they try to swim to the banks into the arms of their benefactors, they are firmly returned to the boat, their primary suffering unabated. This is no abstract analogy. It is exactly how the Haitians feel.
Yet, when I tried in seminars at Harvard University to challenge the universal applicability of democracy, human rights or freedom of the press, I discovered that these values have become virtual “sacred cows.” No one could challenge their intrinsic worth. Worse still, when I persisted, I was greeted with sniggers, smug looks and general derision. The general assumption there was that any Asian, especially a Singaporean, who challenged these concepts was doing so only in an attempt to cover up the sins of his government.
It is never a pleasant experience to be lowered from a pedestal.
Power corrupts. The absolute power of the Western journalist in the Third World corrupts absolutely.
The greatest myth that a journalist cherishes is that he is an underdog: the lone ranger who works against monstrous bureaucracies to uncover the real truth, often at great personal risk. I never understood this myth when I was in Washington. Cabinet secretaries, senators and congressmen, ambassadors and generals promptly returned the phone calls of, and assiduously cultivated, the journalists. None would dare to tell an American journalist of a major paper to go to hell. It was as inconceivable as trying to exercise dissent in the court of Attila the Hun.
The cruelest results of this myth are experienced in the developing world. On arriving in a Third World capital, no American journalist would shake out from his unconsciousness the deeply embedded myth that he was once again arriving as a lone ranger battling an evil and corrupt Third World government. Never would he admit that he had arrived in a Third World capital with as much power as a colonial proconsul in the 19th century. In both cases the host government ignored these emissaries at its own peril. The average correspondent from an influential Western journal who arrived in a Third World capital would, of course, ask to see the president, PM, and perhaps foreign minister.
Never would he admit to himself that the PM, even of India, would hesitate to turn down an NYT request knowing that the NYT controlled the gateways to key minds in Washington. What is sweet about this exercise of power by an NYT correspondent is that he would never have to admit that he was savouring the delicious fruits of power, since they come with no obvious trappings of office.
A free press can serve as the opium of society.
After all, the US press has been second to none in exposing the follies of the US government. But have all their exposures served as opiates, creating the illusion that something is being done when really nothing is being done?
That perhaps 30 years of discussion of African-Americans’ problems have served as a substitute for 30 years of action, creating an illusion of movement when there has been little or none.
The hardest thing to get most academic experts on Islam to admit is that what they say and do as scholars is set in a profoundly and in some ways an offensively political context. Everything about the study of Islam in the contemporary West is saturated with political importance, but hardly any writers on Islam, whether expert or general, admit the fact in what they say.
The Orientalist has traditionally been affiliated directly with colonial offices: what we have just begun to learn about the extent of close cooperation between scholarship and direct military colonial conquest is both edifying and depressing. Yet books and articles continue to pour forth extolling the nonpolitical nature of Western scholarship, the fruits of Orientalist learning, and the value of “objective” expertise. At the same time there is scarcely an expert on “Islam” who has not been a consultant or even an employee of the government, the various corporations, the media. My point is that the cooperation must be admitted and taken into account, not just for moral reasons, but for intellectual reasons as well.
Yet for all its massive coverage of Tiananmen, the Western media failed to explain how this event was seen through Chinese eyes. Few Chinese intellectuals believe that China is ready for democracy. Most are as afraid of chaos and anarchy (a persistent Chinese disease) as they are of a return to Maoist totalitarianism. It was a battle between soft authoritarians and hard authoritarians.
When Nixon landed in China in 1972, the US media had a virtual love-fest with a regime that had just killed millions in the cultural revolution. Yet, in the 1990s a much more benign regime that has liberated millions from poverty and indignity and promises to launch them on the road to development is treated as a pariah regime.
Talk and wine flowed freely, and in a moment of rare intimacy, Stalin admitted that even the stress of war did not compare to the terrible struggle to force the collective farm policy on the peasantry. Millions of Kulaks had been, well, eliminated. The historian Churchill thought of Burke’s dictum “If I cannot have reform without justice, I will not have reform,” but the politician Churchill concluded that with the war requiring unity, it was best not to moralize aloud.
Think about it. Think hard, for in so doing you will discover to your surprise that it is possible for thoughtful and well-informed people to have double standards. If the rule that prevents any possible meeting between Thatcher and Pol Pot is “thou shalt not have any discourse with a genocidal ruler,” then the same rule also forbids any meeting between Stalin and Churchill.
We have already established what you are. We are only negotiating the price.
In Stalin’s case, as England’s survival was at stake, all was excused. In Pol Pot’s case, as no conceivable vital Western interest could be served in any meeting with him, no mitigating excuse could possibly exist.
Western governments will happily sacrifice the human rights of Third World societies when it suits Western interests to do so.
It is remarkable how much satisfaction the Western governments, media and public have taken over their ability finally to pursue “moral” policies after the end of the Cold War. Yet, this has not come with any admission that the West was (logically speaking) pursuing “immoral” policies during the Cold War. Nor has anyone addressed the question of whether it is “honorable” to use and abandon allies.
As Max Weber said in his famous essay “Politics As a Vocation”, “… it is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who says this is, indeed, a political infant.”
No ethics in the world can dodge the fact tha in numerous instances the attainment of “good” ends is bound to the fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones. Unfortunately, there is no living Western statesman who has the courage to make such a statement, for in the era of “political correctness” that we live in, the Wester media would excoriate any such brave soul. Out of moral correctness, we have produced moral cowardice.
There is no unified Asian view on human rights and freedom of the press. These are Western concepts. Asians are obliged to react to them. Predictably, there is a whole range of reactions, ranging from those who subscribe to these concepts in too to those who reject them completely. An understanding of the Asian reactions is clouded by the fact that many Asians feel obliged to pay at least lip service to their values.
In any of the four offices, if you ventured out at night and strayed a few hundred yards off course, you would be putting your life in jeopardy. Yet, despite this, none of the editorial desks or writers would argue in favour of the reduction of the civil liberties of habitual criminals. Danger from habitual crime is considered an acceptable price to pay for no reduction in liberty. This is one social choice.
In Singapore, you can wander out at night in any direction and not put your life in jeopardy. One reason for this is that habitual criminals and drug addicts are locked up, often for long spells, until they have clearly reformed.
This is another kind of social choice. Let me suggest that none is intrinsically superior. Let those who make the choice live with the consequences of their choice.
There is only one force that has the power to “liberate” the Third World. Economic development is probably the most subversive force created in history. It shakes up old social arrangements and paves the way for the participation of a greater percentage of social in social and political decisions. The CCP can no longer regain the tight totalitarian control it enjoyed in Mao’s time. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms have killed that possibility. Hence, if the West wants to bury forever Mao’s totalitarian arrangements, it should support Deng’s reforms to the hilt, even if he has to occasionally crack down to retain political control.
Unfortunately (and paradoxically), the very nature of Western democratic societies (which inhibits politicians from speaking about sacrifices) may well be one of the biggest barriers to the effective spread of democracy and human rights in the Third World, including Asia.
If the people in that room had had the power to depose the Indonesian government, they would have done it instantly, without paying a thought to the horrendous consequences that might follow. This is the attitude of many human rights activists: get rid of the imperfect governments we know — do not worry about the consequences that may follow. On their own, such activists will probably cause little trouble. But when they get into positions of influence, their ability to cause real damage increases by leaps and bounds.
In dealing with Asia, I am calling on the US to take the long view. These are societies that have been around hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They cannot be changed overnight, even if, for example, Fang Lizhi is elected president of China. The experience of President Aquino should provide a vivid lessons to those who believe that one change at the top can reform everything.
In psychological attitudes, such an activist is no different from a religious crusader of a previous era. He demands total conversion and nothing else. Such activists can do a lot of damage with their zealotry. Unfortunately, since they occupy the high moral ground in Western societies, no government or media representative dares to challenge them openly.
There need be no fear that they will remain ignorant of the virtues of the US media. The globe is shrinking.
In short, live and let live. If the US is convinced that its systems of human rights and freedom of the press are the best possible systems for any society around the globe, let the virtues of these systems speak for themselves. As in the world of ideas, if a social system has merits, it will fly on its own wings. If it does not, it will not. Most Asians now know enough of these systems to make their own choices. Let them do so in peace.
One dreads to think what the world would have looked like if either Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia had triumphed in what have been called the “Western civil wars” of the 20th century. Paradoxically, the benign nature of Western domination may be the source of many problems. Today most Western policymakers, who are children of this era, cannot conceive of the possibility that their own words and deeds could lead to evil, not good. Most Western journalists travel overseas with Western assumptions. They cannot understand how the West could be seen as anything but benevolent.
Only hubris can explain why so many Western societies are trying to defy the economic laws of gravity. Budgetary discipline is disappearing. Expensive social programmes and pork-barrel projects multiply with little heed to costs. The West’s low savings and investment rates lead to declining competitiveness vis-a-vis East Asia. The work ethic is eroding, while politicians delude workers into believing that they can return high wages despite becoming internationally uncompetitive. Leadership is lacking. Any politician who states hard truths is immediately voted out. Americans freely admit that many of their economic problems arise from the inherent gridlock of American democracy. While the rest of the world is puzzled by these fiscal follies, American journalists and politicians travel around the world preaching the virtues of democracy. It makes for a curious sight.
This is massive social decay. Many a society shudders at the prospect of this happening on its shores. But instead of traveling overseas with humility, Americans confidently preach the virtues of unfettered individual freedom, blithely ignoring the visible social consequences.
The West is still the repository of the greatest assets and achievements of human civilization. But Western values do not form a seamless web. Some are good. Some are bad. But one has to stand outside the West to see this clearly and to see how the West is bringing about its relative decline by its own hand.
Most living in the West do not appreciate or understand the feelings among many in the Third World that they are essentially second-class citizens of our globe. They need to believe that they too can become first-class citizens.
With the advent of the UN Charter, all nation-states can claim to enjoy sovereign equality. This is the theory. In reality, nation-states — like human beings in any society — do not enjoy equal power. What is remarkable today, in may significant ways, is that the architecture of power relationships in the beginning of the 21st century still resembles those of the 19th century.
No non-Western citizen, not even a Japanese, has a realistic prospect of heading the IMF or World Bank.
This nominal equality should not be dismissed. It has enhanced the sense of self-worth and dignity of many people around the world. But when it comes to making hard decisions on how and when the world’s resources will be deployed, we should be under no illusion that all capitals are equal. Just as in the 19th century, a handful of capitals make the big decisions.
Equally important, in discussions of philosophy and human values, the greatest outpouring of writing and books is generated in the West. Hence, while we are not surprised that the US should be passing moral judgment on the implementation of human rights instruments by China, a visitor from Mars might be surprised that a young 200-year-old society of the world is passing judgment on a 5000-year-old society.
Hitherto, the common historical and cultural roots of the US and Europe have kept them close together despite the vast Atlantic Ocean that separates them. But over time, their geographic, economic and political needs could pull them in different directions.
However the most successful continent in the world has also become one of the most pessimistic continent in the world. Few young Europeans believe that their future will be better than that of their parents’ generation. This pessimism about the future needs to be addressed.
The Chinese leaders are aware that their country’s rise in power could provoke discomfort both in Washington and among its own neighbors. Hence, in a pre-emptive strike against any potential American policy to contain it, China has decided to share its growing prosperity with all of its neighbors.
The entire relationship has been distorted by this one issue because EU politicians wanted to look good in front of their domestic audience by taking a strong stance on Myanmar.
The EU picks on Myanmar because it is an easy target, with no political costs to itself. But in contrast to its willingness to condemn the regime in Myanmar, the EU bends over backwards to accommodate other more repressive countries with worse human rights records, such as North Korea.
Life is sweet in Europe. But the rising tide of insecurity in European hearts and minds also means that Europe cannot continue to be a giant Switzerland. The Swiss can feel secure because they are surrounded by Europe. The Europeans can only feel insecure because they are surrounded by an arc of instability. To make matter worse, the age-old Christian obsession with the threat of Islam has become far more acute.
One simple unpalatable truth that many Europeans refuse to confront is that, in the short run, free-riding on US power can significantly diminish European security.
However, when the Asian financial crisis came along, the EU abandoned Asia in its hour of need, leaving behind a bitter residue of distrust, and demonstrated that it was a fair-weather friend. Given Asia’s quick rebound and the abundant evidence that this will be Asia’s century, this European decision will go down as one of its stupidest strategic decisions.
In short, whenever the EU gets a chance, it slaps Asia in the face.
The real irony here is that Asia is doing much more to enhance long-term European security than America is. The Asian march to modernity, which began in Japan and is now sweeping through China and India, is poised to enter the Islamic world in West Asia. When this march enters the Islamic world, Europe will be surrounded by modern, middle-class Muslim states.
Yet Japan may also be one of the loneliest countries in the world. Japan has still not found any natural resting place for itself.
Except on trade and economic issues, Japan has almost never said “no” to any significant US demand since WW2, especially in the area of international security.
That hesitation cost the Japanese dearly. Their reputation suffered badly in the US. As a consequence, even Japan’s payment of $13B, the largest contribution from any non-Arab coalition member, did not alleviate the feeling that Japan had once again tried to be free rider on the US.
The admiration that the Japanese have genuinely felt for the US, in part because it was unusually generous as an occupying power, is steadily diminishing.
Given the traditional Japanese-Korean antipathies, several Japanese officials have confidentially said that while Japan can live with a nuclear-armed Russia and China, a nuclear-armed Korea would be unacceptable. Almost certainly, Japan would build its own nuclear weapons in response.
China knows it cannot stop Japan from going nuclear on its own, and, more crucially, it knows that only the US can. Hence, even though China in principle opposes the US military presence in the region, there is nothing it dreads more than a US military withdrawal that could induce Japan to acquire its own nuclear weapons.
The power imbalance can be demonstrated with an analogy. Washington sees the US-Japanese relationship as a friendly game of chess. But where Washington sees it as one-to-one game, Tokyo sees three other players on the same chessboard: China, Korea and Russia. Any Japanese move against the US affects its ties with the other three. In Japanese eyes, there is no “level playing field” in the game.
In order to review and reform its relations with its three neighbors, Japan will have to confront ghosts from the past that it has consciously ignored since WW2.
Many Japanese also feel that what Japan did in Korea and China was no different from what Western colonizers did elsewhere, that the rape of Nanking was no different from the British massacre of Indian protesters at Amritsar. Why, they ask, should Japan atone for its colonial sins when the West never did so?
The inability (or unwillingness) of the Japanese to absorb the several hundred thousand Koreans who have lived in Japan for generations is a powerful statement of the exclusivity of Japanese society. Ethnic exclusivity, as demonstrated by South Africa, does not foster good neighbourliness.
Those cultural obstacles are compounded by Japan’s weak, divided and scandal-ridden political leadership. The frequent changes of PMs, the appointment of weak individuals to senior political positions, and the absence of visionary leaders for the new times have all compounded the country’s inertia. Japanese policy is often deadlocked, and the signals it sends are often mixed and confusing.
Japan’s position as an “economic giant” but a “political dwarf” is no longer viable. Japan’s economy is already larger than all other East Asian economies combined, and the Japanese GNP makes up 70 percent of the total for all of Asia, not counting the former Soviet republics. No European country enjoys such a position in its neighborhood. Yet, Japan has relatively little political influence in East Asia — much less than the US has in Latin America.
Fundamentally, Japan has to ask itself whether allowing the US-Japanese relationship to drift on its present course will naturally lead to stronger and closer bonds between the two countries or whether the continuation of the present pattern — in which the Japanese public feels constantly bullied by the US and the American public sees Japan as a “free rider” growing wealthy at the US’s expense — will bring a progressive deterioration.
Yet the Japanese need to be aware of the profoundly democratic nature of American society. The commitment of the US government to defend Japan is real only if it has the support of the American people. Japan cannot afford to make the same mistake the South Vietnamese generals did in 1975, when they accepted at face value Washington’s commitment to defend Saigon without paying attention to American public opinion.
If Japan goes nuclear, the US will have to plan a defense against a nuclear power that, unlike the USSR, could be technologically more advanced than the US. Japan could also pose new competition for American arms exporters, an area Japan has not ventured into so far.
The economic tensions between the two countries must also be addressed squarely. The US has to publicly admit that Japan is being made the scapegoat for the former’s inability to get its own economic house in order. For its part, Japan needs to make a major pronouncement that a strong US is in the interest of Japan and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole and that it will work with its neighbors in formulating economic policies to enhance both US competitiveness and US economic interests in the region.
The fifth pillar requires Japan to become a good global citizen. Japan’s effort to gain a permanent set on the UNSC reflect that desire. However, its method of trying to gain that seat is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Without an established track record of managing international conflicts, what would Japan do on the Security Council?
Such a move could drastically alter public perceptions of the Japanese as mere calculating beings with no moral purpose. That is the sort of bold leap that Japan needs to make.
Bold steps, of course, have not been the hallmark of Japanese foreign policy since WW2. Caution has been the keyword.
Like all other parts of the world that have experienced greatness, Europe too is becoming exhausted. The time has come for other regions to contribute as much as Europe has in moving the world forward.
They have wasted centuries trying to make it into the modern world. After centuries, their moment has come. Why waste it over relatively petty disputes or historical squabbles?
Many European thinkers celebrate the firm implantation of democracies in their societies as an unmitigated good, especially since it prevents wars. But democratic systems can also be deeply resistant to change. The heavy welfare burdens accumulated by Europe cannot be shed easily, especially since the burden is often passed to future generations.
It will be an immense struggle to work out social, political and philosophical norms that best capture their people’s aspirations, but it will also be an all-engrossing struggle. The most foolish thing that any East Asian society could do is to turn away from this overwhelming challenge and engage in traditional military rivalries: to snatch failure once more from the jaws of victory.
A third flawed element in European strategy is its effort to “lock in” the relatively high living standards of Europe by raising new barriers to free trade and sustaining high subsidies. Here, the contrast between the strategies of the US and Europe is striking. The US has taken the relatively bold leap of crossing a cultural as well as a socio-economic divide by entering into a free-trade agreement with Mexico. Effectively it had no choice because if it did not export some low-paying jobs to Mexico and gain high-paying jobs in return, Mexico could not and would not stop exporting its populace into the US.
Real learning requires humility. Fortunately, the Americans are fundamentally an open and compassionate people. They carry no hubris from history, as the European do. Only this can explain why the US has been the most benevolent great power in history. European nations with such power would have used it to advance only their own national interests. Americans pushed an idea. And they have contributed to uplifting East Asian society.
“Face” is important, and conflict can break out when it is lost, such as when Vietnam humiliated China by invading Cambodia in defiance of explicit Chinese warnings. Vietnamese diplomats have confessed in private that it had gone against 2,000 years of collected wisdom in snubbing China so openly.
The fundamental mistake that Pol Pot and his colleagues made was to interpret Marx and Lenin literally. When these founders of the communist movement called for the extermination of the bourgeoisie, Pol Pot assumed that this meant physical elimination, not just their elimination asa a political force.
The typical time horizon in Washington hovers somewhere between the daily spin for the evening talk shows and the next election cycle. In Beijing the clear focus is on where China wants to be in 50 years in order to avoid a repetition of the two centuries of humiliation China experienced. The desire to permanently erase all traces of that humiliation is a profound motivating factor in the psyche of the Chinese leadership. In ensures national unity on foreign policy issues.
The American Foreign Service has never been so demoralized. Over the decades, as ever more American ambassadorial posts have gone to the political appointees, the Foreign Service has progressively become less attractive and every day draws in ever less of the talent of the calibre of a Lawrence Eagleburger — men who could rise to the very top of the State Department ladder. Today, the top rungs of the Foreign Service ladder have been sawn off. With such a short ladder to climb, there is little incentive for the best and brightest to leave Goldman Sachs to join the State Department.
In all my encounters with individual American thinkers, I have found them as sophisticated and aware of global realities as any Chinese. The many politically correct constraints on American strategic discourse, however, seem to prevent them from expressing publicly what they readily admit to me privately.
No appeal to universal ideals or principles will convince the American body politic to support multilateralism. Only an appeal to national self-interest will do so.
In reality, the UN is actually a family of institutions. Some are completely independent, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Some are related to and dependent on it, like the UNDP and UNICEF. But at the core, three principal organs play critically different roles: the UNSC, the UN General Assembly and the UN Secretariat.
The UNSC represents the aristocracy. Decisions of the Council, taken by 15 members, are binding on all 189 UN member states.
The General Assembly represents the masses. Decisions of the Assembly are not binding, even though most are adopted by consensus. At best, they are recommendations.
Technically the Secretariat is only the implementing arm of the UN. It is accountable to the Assembly in theory, but in practice it pays greater heed to the views of the Council (which has a decisive say in the appointment of the Secretary-General). The Secretary-General does have a capacity to launch independent initiatives and act as a moral force. The personal prestige and stature of the individual Secretary-General does matter.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the US no longer needed a friendly UN for some anti-Soviet causes. Attacking the UN carried no costs for the US.
Since the activist days of Dag Hammarskjol, the last Secretary-General in 40 years to attempt to forge a new role for the UN as an international conscience and an independent global actor, the major powers have tacitly agreed that, whatever their differences, they were all better off with a less independent and more compliant UN. Hence, for the past few decades, the UN has been relegated to a peripheral rather than a central role in international affairs. The UN was told clearly to steer clear of many important and vital international issues, such as the Vietnam War and the Middle East peace process, even though the Charter clearly mandates the Security Council with the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” For most of its existence, the UN has been crippled not by accident, but by design.
As the US is a complex society that prides itself as being based on the rule of law, domestic debates about the acceptability of such constraints on US power are conducted in sophisticated language: “unilateralism” vs “multilateralism”; “a la carte” multilateralism vs “constructive” multilateralism. But these sophisticated terms disguise realities as much as they explain them. The only way to understand the policies of any country is to look squarely at the deeds. And American deeds on the UN have spoken loudly and clearly.
Altruism is a guise that has been worn by many in history but has been rarely implemented in practice. In real life, governments, business corporations and NGOs have one fundamental thing in common: each seeks to defend its own interests (even if they believe that their interests best represent mankind’s interests).
In theory, all 15 members of the Council enjoy equal status, even though the permanent members occasionally use the veto. In practice, there is no level playing field between the permanent and elected members.
Expectations of the Council have shifted over the decades. In the early years its main function appeared to be the institutionalization of a concert of powers, legitimizing the great power status of the P5 and ensuring that the UN did not engage in a collision course with any of them. In the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, the Council gradually transformed itself into a problem-solving institution, living up partially to the founding fathers’ vision of providing collective security. Much of the transformation took place without careful reflection of its impact on the role and responsibilities of UNSC members.
The most celebrated of the special privileges granted to the Big Five, the right to veto in the Security Council, was not so much an instrument of great power dictatorship over small states as a factor injected into the relationships of the great powers among themselves. At San Francisco the small states accepted the superiority of the mighty as a fact of life. The first objective was to ensure that all of the great powers would accept their place in the leadership corps of new organization; in this they were successful, and this fact was perhaps the major basis for the hope that the UN would prove more effective than the League. Their second objective was to constitutionalize the power of the international oligarchy; toward this end they achieved the incorporation in the Charter of a surprising array of limitations upon arbitrary behavior, including the procedural brake upon collective decisions by the great powers which was implicit in the rule of unanimity. Their third objective was to gain assurance that the most powerful members would initiate and support positive collective action within and on behalf of the organization in times of crisis; in this respect there were serious apprehensions of failure, based largely upon the fact that the veto rule foreshadowed the possible paralysis of such undertakings.
But the instrument of the veto and the privileges it conferred on the five victors of WW2 were designed to remedy the main weakness of the first half of the 20th century: the failure to anchor the major powers in a collective security system and to ensure that no decisions were taken against their interests. Hence it had a negative, and not positive, function. The veto is “the safety-valve that prevents the UN from undertaking commitments in the political field which it presently lacks the power to fulfill.”
There was no P5-E10 divide then because the P5 were divided.
Firstly, and most obviously, the national power of each of the P5 countries is stronger than that of most elected members. The pecking order of states in any international organization reflects the relative national power of the states, especially their power in the area that the organization specializes in. In the field of peace and security, the P5 remain the only five legitimate nuclear power. Of course, within the P5 there is also a pecking order.
It is noteworthy, however, that even when the E10 representatives come from states with larger economies than some of the P5 (for example, Japan and Germany), there is no change in the pattern of P5 domination.
Paradoxically, however, the two most active members of the Council among the P5 have been the UK and France. This situation could be a reflection of their traditional activist foreign policies, where both have provided leadership on issues far from their national borders. However, many also believe that their activism in the Council is an attempt to justify their continuing permanent membership, at a time when there is increased questioning of whether permanent membership should still be conferred only to the victors of WW2 58 years after the end of the war.. Thomas Franck has noticed the tendency of these countries to refrain from using their formal veto power and notes that this “self-restraining practice, which, in effect, reduces privileges which have come to be unjustified illustrated their consciousness of the role of coherence in legitimizing the system of rules which is the UN Charter: a legitimacy in which all members have a stake.”
We expected a positive response. Instead we ran into a lot of resistance, especially from some of the P5. We were initially puzzled until we heard the private comments of a P5 permanent representative who expressed surprise that the “tourists” were trying to change the arrangement of the Council. This was a revealing comment. It showed that the P5 believe that they “own” the Council. In their eyes, the E10 should make no claim of co-ownership, even if they happen to be elected by 191 member states of the UN.
The E10 are further hobbled by the fact that much of the agenda, procedures and policies of the Council have been settled by the time each new elected member joins the Council. There is a delicate web of understandings reached among the previous members of the Council, especially among the P5, on which issues should receive real attention and which should receive pro forma attention.
This is an obvious weakness of the Council that needs to be addressed. With the current arrangements, only the P5 members have a continuous record and memory of the Council’s work over the years. As the Council often works by referring to precedents, the elected members are at an obvious disadvantage when they have either no knowledge of or background on these precedents.
It is remarkable in some ways that the obvious failures of the UNSC in Bosnia, Srebrenica and Rwanda did not make a bigger dent in the Council’s standing and prestige in the international community. Even though the Council never explicitly acknowledged its failures, it may have implicitly done so when it authorized the setting up of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. However, were the Council to remain passive again in a similar Rwanda type episode, it is more than likely that its credibility and effectiveness will diminish, perhaps like that of the IMF which was in the past perceived to be arrogant and insensitive to the concerns of the apparent beneficiaries of its actions.
Most of the time the UNSC is dealing with decisions of policy, and not responding to an obligation under international law. Having a primary responsibility for international peace and security is not an obligation under international law; it is description of a function.
Hidden behind this economic story, however, is another story that is surprisingly little known. Societies should be judged ultimately on their ability to deliver to their citizens most of their human needs: food, shelter, health, education, a clean environment, a sense of community and a sense of purpose in life. It is on these dimensions that Singapore could perhaps provide recipes for a crowded planet.
I have always believed that a blighted urban landscape, a concrete jungle, destroys the human spirit. We need the greenery of nature to lift our spirits.