Asia's rise and West's response

Hasan Suroor

Countries that lectured Third World countries on the harmful effect of State subsidies are now themselves fighting to retain massive agricultural subsidies to protect their own farmers from cheap food imports.

The western response to the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European communist states was to declare, triumphantly, that it marked the end of history and that the ideological debate had been settled in favour of Western-style liberal democracy and free market economy.

Francis Fukuyama, a neo-con American academic, wrote a whole book, 'The End of History,' whose central theme was the West had won the battle of ideas and henceforth democratic capitalism was going to be the only show in town.

Fukuyama wrote: "The triumph of the West, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism ...What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Essentially, Mr. Fukuyama predicted two broad global centres of power: America and Europe which between them would dictate the new world order. It was a thesis developed on the hop and inspired more by the post-"cold war" euphoria in the West than based on a serious analysis of hard objective realities.

Fukuyama, who has since abandoned neo-conservatism and recanted some of his theories, was in such a hurry to hail the supremacy of the western system that either he was not able to see or chose to ignore. The early signs of a new battleground taking shape in Asia with India and China finally waking up from their slumber to stake their claim as the new kids on the block.

Vindication

Possibly, the end-of-history campaigners in their eagerness to prove that socialism was dead misread the developments in New Delhi and Beijing as a vindication of Mr. Fukuyama's theory of western triumph. It is now widely acknowledged that Mr. Fukuyama and company over-egged the thesis.

Arguably, a particular phase of history might have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall but history continued with its onward march.

It simply took another turn and moved the battle to Asia-a battle that could prove even more testing for the West than the cold war was.

For, this time the challenge is not from an ideological foe but from its own economic allies as India and China sit on the same side of the free-market fence as the West. But they are also competing with it, demanding greater access to western markets in return for opening up their own economy.

The idea of globalisation as a one-way street is being aggressively challenged by Asia's new converts to free market.

"Restart of history" In a sense, after the "end of history," we are witnessing the "restart of history" in a way that does not suit the entrenched Western interests.

The world is on the threshold of a new historical epoch that will see a profound shift in global power relations. And how it pans out will depend, to a very large extent, on the western response to the rise of new Asian powers, notably India and China.

Will it embrace them as partners in pursuit of real globalisation, or will it regard them as a threat to their domination and seek refuge in protectionism? A debate has already begun over fears of a Western backlash against this "reverse" globalisation in which, for the first time, the momentum lies with Asia.

Kishore Mahbubani, a Singapore-based academic and former diplomat who has followed the debate closely, has warned that any western attempt to resist the rise of Asia will be disastrous.

In his new book, 'The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East,' which Amartya Sen has commended for its "penetrating" analysis, he lays bare the West's hypocritical stance on globalisation, pointing out that leading nations on both sides of the Atlantic are rushing to pull the drawbridge in the face of the Asian challenge.

Globalisation was good so long as it worked for the West but at the first sign of a shift of balance panic has broken out in Western capitals. Countries that lectured Third World countries on the harmful effect of state subsidies are now themselves fighting to retain massive agricultural subsidies to protect their own farmers from cheap food imports.

It is the democracy debate replaying itself: democracy is good when it delivers the West's wish list but bad when the outcome is a victory for a Hamas or a Chavez. Prof. Mahbubani says he is "astonished" at the West's refusal or inability (or perhaps both) to recognise the new global realities.

"As a frequent traveller to western intellectual gatherings, I often come away from them astonished that at a time when Western minds should be opening themselves to completely new realities, they are actually becoming more closed. I often despair when I read the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Financial Times.

Newspapers are filled with an incestuous discourse among minds who believe that the 12 per cent of the world's population who live in the West can continue to dominate the remaining 88 per cent who live outside the West," he writes.

Prof. Mahbubani argues that the West has not even started to grasp the full implications of what is going on in Asia - namely that it marks the "end of the era of Western domination."

And, he warns, the West's "reluctance" to acknowledge that the tectonic plates are shifting presents a "great danger."

It's like the Industrial Revolution. But it is not just (allegedly partisan) south Asian commentators like Prof. Mahbubani who are critical of the Western response.

Prominent independent Western scholars have also cautioned their leaders against the danger of ignoring the enormity of the Asian "drama" that has just started to unfold.

Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard University, for instance, has likened it to the Industrial Revolution and in his opinion the rise of Asia and the events it triggers will be the "dominant story in history books written 300 years from now."

It is important to point out that Prof. Mahbubani is not ideologically anti-West and has chums in high places in America and Europe. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a leading American intellectual, has hailed him as a "friend of America" whose "advice" U.S. policy-makers would do well to heed if the country wants to continue to play a "pre-eminent global role."

Prof. Mahbubani makes clear that the rise of Asia should not be mistaken as the decline of the West which, he says, will remain "the single strongest civilisation for decades more." The new emerging powers while demanding a piece of the global action are seeking not to "dominate" the West but simply to "replicate" its successes and achievements, he says arguing that the West should see them not as rivals but as partners in pursuit of true globalisation.

This means The West would have to share the spoils with their new Asian competitors.

Which, in turn, would entail removing barriers to free trade; creating a level-playing field for all; restructuring the Western-dominated global institutions to reflect the 21st century realities; and acknowledging the stark fact that "the 5.6 billion people who live outside the Western hemisphere will no longer accept decisions made on their behalf in Western capitals."

But what are the realistic chances of this happening? Will the West give up its supremacy without a fight? Or will it have the courage to put its money where its mouth is and accept the logic of true globalisation ?

On present form, it looks that both America and Europe will retreat into protectionism at least in the short term though Prof. Mahbubani (perhaps betraying his pro-U.S. bias) is more critical of Europe where he says a "fortress" mentality is already evident in the way it is trying to retain agricultural subsidies and obstructing reforms of international bodies like the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

"This growing inflexibility of Europe to accommodate change would well be replicated in the United States if Americans begin to share the same degree of insecurity as Europeans. It has not happened so far, but the trends point in this direction.

If this were to happen, the painful scenario of 'Retreat into Fortresses' may well be realised," he warns. There are others who believe that it is America whose response to the rise of Asia has been more protectionist. In the end, though, history tells us that faced with a common "enemy" America and Europe have always hunted in a pack. And there is no reason to presume that they will behave differently.

The Hindu