SINGAPORE — The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has just been celebrated. For many, that momentous event marked the so-called end of history and the final victory of the West.
This week, Barack Obama, the first black president of the once-triumphant superpower in that Cold War contest, heads to Beijing to meet America’s bankers — the Chinese Communist government — a prospect undreamt of 20 years ago. Surely, this twist of the times is a good point of departure for taking stock of just where history has gone during these past two decades.
Let me begin with an extreme and provocative point to get the argument going: Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay “The End of History” may have done some serious brain damage to Western minds in the 1990s and beyond.
Mr. Fukuyama should not be blamed for this brain damage. He wrote a subtle, sophisticated and nuanced essay. However, few Western intellectuals read the essay in its entirety. Instead, the only message they took away were two phrases: namely “the end of history” equals “the triumph of the West.”
Western hubris was thick in the air then. I experienced it. For example, in 1991 I heard a senior Belgian official, speaking on behalf of Europe, tell a group of Asians, “The Cold War has ended. There are only two superpowers left: the United States and Europe.”
This hubris also explains how Western minds failed to foresee that instead of the triumph of the West, the 1990s would see the end of Western domination of world history (but not the end of the West) and the return of Asia.
There is no doubt that the West has contributed to the return of Asia. Several Asian societies have succeeded because they finally understood, absorbed and implemented the seven pillars of Western wisdom, namely free-market economics, science and technology, meritocracy, pragmatism, culture of peace, rule of law and education.
Notice what is missing from the list: Western political liberalism, despite Mr. Fukuyama’s claim that “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.”
The general assumption in Western minds after reading Mr. Fukuyama’s essay was that the world would in one way or another become more Westernized. Instead, the exact opposite has happened. Modernization has spread across the world, but it has been accompanied by de-Westernization.
Mr. Fukuyama acknowledges this today. “The old version of the idea modernization was Euro-centric, reflecting Europe’s own development,” he said in a recently published interview. “That did contain attributes which sought to define modernization in a quite narrow way.”
In the same interview, he was right in emphasizing that the three components of political modernization were the creation of an effective state that could enforce rules, the rule of law that binds the sovereign, and accountability. Indeed, these are the very traits of political modernization that many Asian states are aspiring to achieve.
Asians surely agree that no state can function or develop without an effective government. We feel particularly vindicated in this after the recent financial crisis. One reason the United States came to grief was the deeply held ideological assumption in the mind of key American policymakers, like Alan Greenspan, that Ronald Reagan was correct in saying that “government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Fortunately, Asians did not fall prey to this ideology.
Consequently, in the 21st century, history will unfold in the exact opposite direction of what Western intellectuals anticipated in 1991. We will now see that the “return of history” equals “the retreat of the West.” One prediction I can make confidently is that the Western footprint on the world, which was hugely oversized in the 19th and 20th centuries, will retreat significantly.
Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.”
Global Viewpoint / Tribune Media Services
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