The Pacific Way

Kishore Mahbubani

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995

Article preview: first 500 of 3,626 words total.

Summary:  Western thinkers assume that the rise of East Asian powers will inevitably result in conflict and that these nations will become more like Western societies. Neither is likely. East Asia's nations have emerged from colonial obscurity to center stage. They will not succumb to ruinous wars. The difficulty that Western minds face in grasping the ascent of East Asia comes from the unprecedented nature of this phenomenon: a fusion of Western and East Asian cultures in the Asia-pacific region.

Kishore Mahbubani is Permanent Secretary of Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Dean of the Civil Service College. These are his personal views.

A CULTURAL FUSION

The significant difference between the 21st century and the preceding centuries is that there will be three centers of world power (Europe, North America, and East Asia) as opposed to two in the twentieth (Europe and North America) and one before that (Europe). For centuries Europe set the course of world history: it colonized distant parts of the world, it shook up other empires and societies (including China, India, Japan, and Islam), and its people occupied relatively empty places (North America and Australasia). In the twentieth century the two World Wars and the succeeding Cold War were essentially European struggles. East Asia, by contrast, had little impact on the rest of the world.

The world is greatly indebted to Europe. The huge creative burst there over the past five centuries has carried mankind to where it is today. Conceivably (judging from the progress made between the tenth and fifteenth centuries), we could still be only a few steps away from the Dark Ages. Europe has carried the world on its shoulders.

Now East Asia has arrived on the world stage. Its sheer economic weight will give it a voice and a role. As recently as 1960, Japan and East Asia together accounted for 4 percent of world GNP, while the United States, Canada, and Mexico represented 37 percent. Today both groups have about the same hare of the world's GNP (some 24 percent each), but, with more than half the world's economic growth taking place in Asia in the 1990s, the economies of North America and Europe will progressively become relatively smaller.

Western thinkers are having considerable difficulty finding the right paradigm to describe a world where non?Western powers are emerging. Their natural impulse is to assume that, as they succeed, these powers will become more like Western societies (an assumption implicit in the "end of history" thesis) or that there will be a "clash of civilizations." Neither is likely. The difficulty that Western minds face in grasping the arrival of East Asia arises from the fact that we are witnessing an unprecedented historical phenomenon: a fusion of Western and East Asian cultures in the Asia?Pacific region. It is this fusion, not a renaissance of ancient Asian glories, that explains the explosive growth of the Pacific and provides the possibility of continued peace and prosperity in the region.

ASIA'S TIME IN THE SUN

Most strategic analysts assume that Europe's experience provides the only good basis from which to extrapolate East Asia's future. Consequently, conventional wisdom on East Asia's prospects carries more pessimism than optimism. Richard K. Betts says that "one of the reasons for optimism about peace in Europe is the apparent satisfaction of the great powers with the status quo," while in East Asia there is "an ample pool of festering grievances, with more potential for generating conflict than during the Cold War, when bipolarity helped stifle the escalation of parochial disputes." Aaron L. Friedberg says, "While civil war and ethnic strife will continue for ...

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