The Economist on Asia’s bestknown diplomat Kishore Mahbubani‘s new book “The Asian Hemisphere“:
“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….
“To arrive at his conclusion that the West is incompetent and Asia competent, 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 Mahbubani rates as being run by peace-mongering geopolitical geniuses.”
Read the full review: The future of Asia
I would broadly agree with Kishore, though will not attribute “seven pillars of Western wisdom”.
I am a firm believer of David Washbrook and Frank (ReOrient), that West’s road to modernity existed previously in Asia- India, China, Middle East. Formal Rationality, which gave birth to modern science, was a part of Sanskrit universe long before it came to Anglo-Saxons. Commerce and the money economy which led to rise of modern capitalism, existed in Asian societies before medieval europe. Property and class relations similarly were prevalent in them. Pre-colonial Indian societies demonstrated a fair amount of individualism in the brahminic ethic and the Bhakti movement. There is also evidence of equality in the kinship systems and temple sects.
Modernity is an ideology of Western dominance, not a scientific phenomenon.
West did NOT rise. East fell due to long global economic cycle. West, had it not plundered Americas, did NOT have money, Gold, Silver to do trade with Asia. Even in mid 19th century, CHina and India had 30 & 25% of world GDP. The cycle is again turning back to its previous position.
The whole concept of defining Asia as one single competent and coherent entity is absurd. Prof. Mahbubani has appointed himself as Ambassador-at-large of Asia to the West. It’s high time to step down from that pedestal.
And the same competence is running our Indian infrastructure and other systems? Maybe we should round up some of these competent Asians and let them run our systems for a while – assuming they dont turn everything into one large labour camp. But we cant – since they exist only in his imagination.
“Pre-colonial Indian societies demonstrated a fair amount of individualism in the brahminic ethic and the Bhakti movement. There is also evidence of equality in the kinship systems and temple sects.”
only applies to brahmins or the ruling caste you mean?
From the article
>>Two of those—Pakistan and North Korea—attained their nuclear status with a technological helping hand from China, a country Mahbubani rates as being run by peace-mongering geopolitical geniuses.”
>>
Anybody who considers China a country run by peace mongering geopolitical geniuses is crypto-commie and need not be taken seriously.
KM is a shit stirrer! He has a cold eye for everybody and a glad eye for the government he comes under:) Talk about some one punching above his weight!
Aruna>>only applies to brahmins or the ruling caste you mean?
Amartya Sen wrote in “Development as freedom”, concern for freedom shown by the Upanishads, Kautilya, Ashoka to be sure, confined to the upper groups of society, but that is not radically different from the Greek Concern with free men as opposed to slaves or women.
Greek achievement is not abused by Western Historians as it was limited to less than half of its population, as done by some of us. It was narrower than what was offered by Kautilya.
Time to think out of caste, and appreciate the achievement of the past, expand that to all sections of the society. And feel proud as an Indian.
Instead of discussing a review of Mahbubani by some barely literate dunces at that colored weekly tabloid “The Economist” how about discussing a really learned critique by an Asian Indian scholar – Sunanda K. Datta-Ray?
To save your time, the link, as well as the article in full, are posted.
Datta-Ray correctly determines the source of Mahbubani’s ideas – not Asian, but simply Western Civ. Ver.2 from the US. So instead of Western Civ. Ver.1 from the Old Country, Mahbubani plumps for Ver.2 from over the Atlantic. But SN Balagangadhara would tell you that what we in India believe is Western Civ. is only Anglo-Civ. and now maybe Anglo-American Civ. To be truly Western Civ. it would have to include the rich elements from the Continent over the last 1,000 years. And we colonials of the Anglosphere neither have the languages, nor the interest in deep study. Unfortunately we know even less of our own intellectual history. So there we are like children in a sandbox.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/33zxkv
Courtesy: The Telegraph, Friday , February 8 , 2008
ONE FACE, ANOTHER COLOUR
– Can history’s wheel really turn back for India and China?
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
Kishore Mahbubani
It’s part of the conspiracy of colour never to mention society’s deepest faultline. Thus, Kishore Mahbubani, whose perceptive essay, “The West and the Rest”, sparked off the Asian values debate before Samuel Huntington hit the headlines, goes to extraordinary lengths in his latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, to avoid the one word that says it all. He fumbles instead with definitions of territory and religion that obfuscate (deliberately?) the brown man’s warning that the white man’s day is done.
Singaporean Mahbubani rather than Sindhi Mahbubani is a more circumspect creature than Sukarno for whom Bandung ushered in the “century of the awakening of the coloured peoples”. Or Jawaharlal Nehru who lamented a pecking order that placed Anglo-Saxons at the top and Negroids at the bottom, with Latin Americans and Asians occupying the middle rungs. Shying away from explicit ethnicity, Kishore implies it by mentioning “an implicit compact between America and Europe as well as with the Anglo-Saxon states of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand on global policies”. Though commonplace in India, such prognostications, couched in trenchant prose and formidably backed by facts and figures, are novel enough in Singapore to prompt The Economist to call Kishore “an Asian Toynbee preoccupied with the rise and fall of civilisations”.
His argument here and elsewhere, that Barack Obama’s election or Asian chiefs for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund would send a powerful message, is more in keeping with the twinkling enfant terrible of our first encounter in the early Nineties in the Shangri-la hotel during a session of the World Economic Forum. I was advising a colleague not to light a cigarette when a locally-accented voice interjected, “Don’t worry. You won’t be caned!” It was daring of a Singaporean in the wake of the Michael Fay affair publicly to poke even gentle fun at the justice system. Then came the disappointment. Kishore said he read me in the International Herald Tribune. An innocuous remark meant as a compliment, except that my byline appeared far more frequently in the local Straits Times where I worked. To ignore that and note the American IHT from Paris was very Singaporean.
What I should like to know is whether the shift in global power he predicts will ever produce an Indian, Chinese or Japanese equivalent of the IHT that Americans, Europeans and, yes! Asians will want to write for, read and talk about. Will Delhi, Beijing or Tokyo replace the judgment of Paris? South Africa’s chic high commissioner, Zanele Makine, obliquely questioned the emergence of a civilizational equivalent of wealth at the book’s grand launch, an event that, incidentally, was part of a sales blitzkrieg that nicely meshed Kishore’s Sindhi and Singaporean identities. The distinguished ethnic Chinese scholar, Wang Gungwu, who presided, set the tone for Makine’s question by gently invoking Macaulay and Mill, presumably with Prospero-Caliban implications in mind.
Sindhis and Singaporeans alike view life through an economic telescope. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Kishore, than are dreamt of in your pragmatism. An Asian country’s will to reach out for global hegemony in the footsteps of the Western colonial powers is one. Translating economic growth into military might is another. Also, does history really repeat itself? Standing recently in the church at Tra Kieu that crowns the citadel of Simhapura, centre of the forgotten Hindu kingdom of Champa in Vietnam, I could understand Nani Palkhivala’s despairing wondering if a nation can ever regain its lost greatness. The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome and the wonder that was India … all the pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
A bustling pragmatist like Kishore optimistically expects history’s wheel to turn back for India and China. He is a master of realpolitik and Asian nationalists will love his book (which Public Affairs has published in the US) despite a clumsy title that does scant justice to the incisive substance. But the thesis invites at least two caveats. First, a seasoned diplomat, who has represented Singapore all over the world and twice at the United Nations, must know that despite currently fashionable platitudes, too much lies between India and China for them to constitute a power bloc in the foreseeable future. Past disputes are less important in this context than present and future trajectories. It’s only third parties that lump them together in contradistinction to America and Europe because neither is white and both are in the amorphous eastern half of the Eurasian landmass conveniently dubbed Asia. Second, recalling Japan’s “honorary white” status, one wonders whether Asia will remain Asian as it prospers in a world where the relentless march of Western infotainment sets the trend. Singapore is the best example of a synthesis that might rudely be called deculturization.
Kishore strengthens fears on this count by arguing that Japan, Southeast Asia’s tiger economies, China and now India have done (or are doing) well because they have assimilated what he calls the seven pillars of Western wisdom — free market, science and technology, meritocracy, the ability to change and adapt, the culture of peace and education. Substitute American for English in Macaulay’s famous argument that the value system laced into instruction in the English language would “create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” and you have the future many Asians yearn for.
Far from regarding this as a threat, Kishore, who deplores the British colonization of Indian minds, welcomes being American in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect as being bang up to date. Americanization is modernization. What happens then to the much-vaunted Asian values, to Confucius who, truth to tell, often reads like Samuel Smiles and sounds like Queen Victoria in drag, or to India’s quintessential culture of compassion that prompted Kipling’s comment that as long as there is a crust of bread in the land neither prince nor pauper will starve?
To be fair to the author, he does acknowledge differences between India and China as well as the importance of soft power. On the former point, he quotes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, whom Telegraph readers know, saying that China is a closed society with an open mind while India is an open society with a closed mind. He could have added that China holds the “foreign-returned” student in greater esteem than India where, especially in Bengal, the genre used to be a figure of fun. But from Soong Ching Ling (Sun Yat Sen’s wife), who wrote “The Influence of Foreign Educated students in China” in 1911, to Deng Xiaoping who expected a national transformation when thousands of students returned home, the Chinese have taken a more positive view of foreign-trained talent. On culture, Kishore says only a sub-structure of economic power can legitimize other manifestations of national aspiration. “The economic power is shifting to the East. The soft power has not yet shifted. But it is going to.” I shall still suspend judgment until there really is an Asian equivalent of the IHT, not an Asian edition that some canny Western entrepreneur publishes in Hong Kong or Singapore.
As for colour, Asians are far more sensitive than Lady Mountbatten who “simply could not remember” once whether the “most amusing dinner guest” sitting next to her “had been black or white”. A report from Beijing says that ambitious Chinese “hire” Westerners to grace social and business occasions. “White people are an expensive commodity….It is a glorious thing to show off that you have foreign friends,” says a sociology professor at Renmin University. Perhaps the fad will spread to India. Some might argue that lending face to enriched Asia is the impoverished West’s ultimate destiny. The question is, who gives and who gains? It could be the theme of Kishore’s next intellectual exercise.
you people are racist and full of shit