It is abundantly clear who are the strong and who the weak, who the fit and the unfit, in today’s world … In the future, a condition of prosperity without equality, wealth without peace, will probably prevail.
Zhang Junmai, 1923
We are not going to follow the West in competition, in selfishness, in brutality.
Rabindranath Tagore, in Beijing 1924
The growth of historical and internationalist awareness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries now seems truly astonishing. Only a few years after al-Afghani rebutted British claims to have civilized India, Tagore was debating the vices of nationalism with the Japanese, and Liang Qichao was reflecting on the corruptions of American democracy and capitalism. In many ways, the insights Asian thinkers produced into their own and the larger human condition at this time are still transforming the world’s intellectual and political landscape and shaping individual and collective consciousness.
It was a small group of thinkers in every Asian country whom education and experience exposed to a larger view of their societies and the world. Marginal men by virtue of that education and experience, they were particularly sensitive to change; though isolated from the
mass of their ordinary compatriots, they were the first, nevertheless, to articulate their deepest predicaments, needs and aspirations.
It took much private and public tumult, and great physical and intellectual journeys, to bring these thinkers to the point where they could make sense of themselves and their environment, and then the knowledge they achieved after so much toil was often full of pain and did not offer hope. They often seemed to change their minds and contradict themselves. As some of the first to break with tradition, they were faced with the Sisyphean task of finding their bearings in the modern world and reorienting their minds to new problems of personal and collective identity. They were conscious of belonging to civilizations that had not so long ago been great and self-contained but were now growing infirm against a successful and vigorous West. So the manifold adjustments to a new and largely painful historical situation led them into apparent inconsistencies: a figure like Liang Qichao, for instance, upheld Chinese tradition, then rejected it in toto before embracing it again; al-Afghani went through phases of bitterly arraigning Islam and then passionately defending it; Sayyid Qutb was a fervent secular nationalist before he turned into an uncompromising Islamist. Even the most conservative of Asian intellectuals and activists – Gandhi, Kang Youwei, Mohammed Abduh – were forced to radically interpret their own traditions – Hindu, Confucian and Islamic.
Personally powerless, they lurched between hope and despair, vigorous commitment and a sense of futility. Still, there is a striking unity to be observed in their perceptions, and this is because as traditionalists or iconoclastic radicals, these thinkers and activists were struggling to articulate a satisfying answer to the same question: how to reconcile themselves and others to the dwindling of their civilization through internal decay and Westernization while regaining parity and dignity in the eyes of the white rulers of the world.
This was the fundamental challenge for the first generation of modern Asian intellectuals, and many of the ideologies embraced by modern Asian peoples – secular nationalism, revolutionary communism, state socialism, Arab nationalism, pan-Islamism – developed as a response to the same stubborn challenge of the West. It links not only the Muslim Jamal al-Din al-Afghani to the Chinese Liang Qichao, but
also al-Afghani to Osama bin Laden, Liang to Mao Zedong, the Ottoman Empire to present-day Turkey and pre-Communist China to the capitalist China of today.
Many of these thinkers judged Western-style politics and economics to be inherently violent and destructive forces. They knew that borrowing technical skills through a modern system of education from Europe wasn’t enough; these borrowings brought with them a whole new way of life. They demanded an organized mass society whose basic unit was the self-reliant individual who pursues his economic self-interest while progressively liberating himself from guild rules, religious obligations and other communal solidarities – a presupposition that threatened to wreck the old moral order. These thinkers sensed that, though irresistible and often necessary, the modern industrial society and social freedoms pioneered by Europe would destroy many of their cherished cultures and traditions, just as they had in Europe itself, and leave chaos in their place. In the 1920s Zhang Junmai, the disciple of Liang Qichao and Tagore’s host in China, summed up some widely shared fears about the coming confrontation between two opposed modes of life:
The fundamental principles upon which our nation is founded are quietism, as opposed to [Western] activism; spiritual satisfaction, as opposed to the striving for material advantage; a self-sufficient agrarianism, as opposed to profit-seeking mercantilism; and a morally transforming sense of brotherhood rather than racial segregation … A nation founded on agriculture lacks a knowledge of the industrial arts, [but] it is likewise without material demands; thus, though it exists over a long period of time, it can still maintain a standard of poverty but equality, scarcity but peace. But how will it be hereafter?
As people like Zhang feared, the process of modernization was to have a drastic impact at the very least. It was to disrupt old economies of agriculture and handicrafts, barter and trade, and draw young people away to the squalor of new urban centres, sundering or loosening the religious and communal attachments that gave meaning to their lives and exposing their raw nerves to extremist politics. And all this was for a process which did not lead directly, even in the West itself, to a clear destination of happiness and stability, and which
despite producing mass education, cheap consumer goods, the popular press and mass entertainment had only partly relieved a widely and deeply felt rootlessness, confusion and anomie.
Fearing or suspecting this fate for their societies, many Asian intellectuals became some of the most eloquent – and earliest – critics of modernity, using their own traditionalist conceptions of the meaning and purpose of human life to counter the assumption that economic liberalism, individual self-interest and industrialization could be the cure-all for the manifold problems of the human condition. Often drawing upon philosophical and spiritual traditions in Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism they developed a refined suspicion of the ‘brave new world’ of science and reason, insisting on the non-rational, non-utilitarian aspects of human existence. With their anti-modern sensibility, which transcended conventional political categories and divisions, they anticipated Europe’s own thinkers, who were forced to re-examine their nineteenth-century belief in a progressively rational world by the slaughter of the First World War.
The richness of their ideas and imagination continues to be a resource for societies faced with the crisis of modernity. Still, it should be admitted: the course of history has bypassed many of their fondest hopes. In fact, it was European principles of nationalism and civic patriotism that almost all native elites embraced in order to beat (or at least draw level with) the West in what seemed a Darwinian struggle for the future. Even someone as spiritually minded, anti-political and critical of modern state-building as Gandhi could not avoid becoming a nationalist leader; he even flirted with pan-Islamism early in his political career. Impatient to reorient China’s traditionalist masses towards nationalism, Chinese intellectuals felt compelled to vilify over two millennia of Confucian tradition. The Ottoman Turks went so far as to abolish the office of the Islamic caliphate altogether, renounce their leadership of the Muslim umma, and then disestablish Islam itself in order to turn Turkey into a modern nation-state.
Other Western ideas also seemed crucial in stealing some of the wealth and power of the West. Liberal democracy – elected parliaments, an independent judiciary and press – initially appeared as important as science and technology in mobilizing a modern economy
along rational and utilitarian lines. Indeed, as one indigenous modernizer after another in Japan, Turkey, China and India conceded, resistance to the West required urgent adaptation to Western ideas of organizing state and society. At the very least, it called for the expedient overthrow of the apparently moribund empires and dynasties of the East.
There was one Western idea in particular that proved irresistible to Muslim as well as Communist anti-imperialists. Endorsed by the success of Europe, it was embraced by postcolonial elites almost everywhere in Asia. This revolutionary recipe for self-strengthening and pride, generous in its emancipatory promise, consisted of the institutions and practices of the nation-state: clear boundaries, orderly government, a loyal bureaucracy, a code of rights to protect citizens, rapid economic growth through industrial capitalism or socialism, mass literacy programmes, technical knowledge and the development of a sense of common origins within a national community.
Fulfilling either some or the barest minimum of these conditions, an assortment of new nation-states filled the immense vacuum created by the dissolution of European empires. In the period following the end of the Second World War, many Asian countries achieved independence from colonial rule; and more than fifty new states with new names, borders and currencies appeared in just two decades after 1945.
Formal decolonization itself was always unlikely to guarantee true sovereignty and dignity to Asian nations. In the 1950s, Nehru often stressed the urgent task facing postcolonial leaders like himself: ‘What Europe did in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, we must do in ten or fifteen years.’ Catching up with the West’s economic and political power remained as imperative for Egypt’s Abdel Gamal Nasser, who desperately sought foreign assistance for the Aswan Dam project in the 1950s, as for Mao Zedong, who while exhorting the Chinese to match Britain’s industrial capacity in fifteen years during the Great Leap Forward, led his country into a catastrophic famine in the early 1960s.
Ideologies such as communism and socialism were mobilized to enable the formation of new nations. Leaders with resonant names – Nehru, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, Sukarno – not only supervised
these political transformations and identified goals of material progress for their new nations; they also gave them their symbolism of radical nationalism and solidarity against Western imperialism.
But the transition from criticizing foreign rule and instigating mass movements to establishing a stable basis for self-determination proved to be very difficult. The idealist impulses behind revolt and national independence soon faded before the sheer magnitude of such nation-building tasks as sustained economic growth and territorial consolidation. Stumbling out of long decades of colonial exploitation into a world bitterly divided by the Cold War, the new states had to urgently find aid and capital for weak, often pre-industrial economic systems; set fiscal policy; institute land reforms; build such political institutions as parliaments, electoral commissions and parties; make national citizenship more attractive than local loyalties to ethnic, religious, linguistic and regional groupings; codify a legal order; make primary education and health care accessible; attack poverty and crime; and maintain roads and railways. And, as if this wasn’t enough, they also had to equip their countries with a professional army and bureaucracy, check population growth, and establish a foreign policy that regulated relations with the old imperial metropole and also guaranteed the maximum benefits from the main protagonists of the Cold War.
Such manifold and arduous tasks, and (not surprisingly) cruel disappointments, mixed successes, tragic setbacks and vicious conflicts marked the first three decades after 1945 in almost all Asian countries. Ryszard Kapu
ci
ski once summed up the tragic ‘drama’ of the honest and patriotic postcolonial leader by describing the
ciski once summed up the tragic ‘drama’ of the honest and patriotic postcolonial leader by describing the
terrible material resistance that each one encounters on taking his first, second and third steps up the summit of power. Each one wants to do something good and begins to do it and then sees, after a month, after a year, after three years, that is just isn’t happening, that it is slipping away, that it is bogged down in the sand. Everything is in the way: the centuries of backwardness, the primitive economy, the illiteracy, the religious fanaticism, the tribal blindness, the chronic hunger, the colonial past with its practice of debasing and dulling the conquered, the blackmail by the imperialists, the greed of the corrupt, the unemployment, the red ink. Progress comes with great difficulty along such a
road. The politician begins to push too hard. He looks for a way out through dictatorship. The dictatorship then fathers an opposition. The opposition organizes a coup.
And the cycle begins anew.1
The imported ideological passions of the Cold War aggravated political tensions in many countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Separatist movements broke out in Kashmir, Aceh, East Pakistan, Tibet and Sri Lanka. Hard-fisted rulers – Suharto of Indonesia, Ayub Khan in Pakistan, Indira Gandhi in India – came to the fore, often accompanied by much violence and disorder. For a while at least, the Third World, as a large part of the postcolonial world was inaccurately called, seemed doomed from a Western point-of-view, the site of obscure civil wars and the source of needy immigrants.
The picture is a lot clearer and multifarious after more than half a century of change, when many of the ideological blinkers of the Cold War no longer exist. Moral idealism rather than practicality and effectiveness seems to have defined such broad transnational groupings as the Non-Aligned Movement, which almost all postcolonial Asian nations joined in an attempt to build an alternative to the crude polarities of the Cold War. We can see that the seemingly wholesale adoption of Western ideologies (Chinese communism, Japanese imperialism) did not work. Attempts at syntheses (India’s parliamentary democracy, Muslim Turkey’s secular state, China’s state capitalism) were more successful, and violent rejections of the West in the form of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Islamist movements continue to have an afterlife.
Many new nations, such as Pakistan, never recovered from birthing traumas; their liberationist energies dispersed into political-religious movements of an increasingly militant nature. Others, such as the populous nations of China, India and Indonesia, despite some serious setbacks, managed their economic growth and sovereignty to the point where their cumulative heft now seems to pose a formidable challenge to the West itself.
Recent history tells us that there are more such challenges – political, diplomatic and economic – still to arise from large parts of Asia. More than half a century after decolonization began, we continue to live in what the American writer Irving Howe called a ‘revolutionary age’.
The revolutionary impulse has been contaminated, corrupted, debased, demoralized … but the energy behind that revolutionary impulse remains. Now it bursts out in one part of the world, now in another. It cannot be suppressed entirely. Everywhere except in the United States, millions of human beings, certainly the majority of those with any degree of political articulateness, live for some kind of social change … These are the dominant energies of our time and whoever gains control of them, whether in legitimate or distorted forms, will triumph.2
Replacing Europe’s power with its own, America, Howe wrote, was ‘sincerely convinced that only by the imposition of its will can the world be saved. But the world resists this will; it cannot, even if it would, surrender its own mode of response.’ Written in 1954, these words sound no less convincing a year after the Arab Spring and the collapse of several pro-Western dictatorships. Chaos and uncertainty may loom over a wide swathe of the Arab world for some years. But the spell of Western power has finally been broken. If uprooted Muslims defy it contemptuously, others such as the Chinese have adopted its ‘secrets’. The sense of humiliation that burdened several generations of Asians has greatly diminished. The rise of Asia, and the assertiveness of Asian peoples, consummates their revolt against the West that began more than a century ago; it is in many ways the revenge of the East.
Yet this success conceals an immense intellectual failure, one that has profound ramifications for the world today and the near future.
It is simply this: no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world. Gandhi, their most rigorous critic, is a forgotten figure within India today. Marxism-Leninism lies discredited and, though China’s rulers increasingly make gestures towards Confucian notions of harmony, China’s own legacy of ethical politics and socio-economic theory remains largely unexplored. And even if it is exportable to other Muslim countries, Turkey’s Islamic modernity doesn’t point to any alternative socio-economic order.
The ‘Washington Consensus’ may lie in tatters, and Beijing’s Communist regime mocks – simply by persisting as long as it has – Western claims of victory in the Cold War and the inevitability of liberal democracy. But the ‘Beijing Consensus’ has even less universal application
than its Washington counterpart; it sounds suspiciously like merely a cynical economic argument for the lack of political freedom.
The earliest Asian modern intellectuals were beholden to European ideas. Working in a world shaped by European actions, or ‘blinded by the dust-storm of modern history’, as Tagore put it, they naturally embraced the nation-state as the prerequisite for modernity. And though these ‘derivative’ and synthetic varieties of nationalism had some uses in a geopolitical situation fraught with perils for newly sovereign countries, their limitations and problems are now more clearly visible.
It was never going to be easy for internally diverse societies like India and Indonesia to find a social, political and cultural identity without violence and disorder. Europe itself took hundreds of years to develop and implement the concept of a sovereign nation-state, only to then plunge into two world wars that exacted a terrible toll from ethnic and religious minorities. The European model of the ethnically homogenous nation-state was a poor fit in Europe itself. That it was particularly so for multi-ethnic Asian societies has been amply proved by the plight of Kashmiri Muslims, Tibetans, Uighurs, the Chinese in Malaysia, Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Kurds in Turkey and Tamils in Sri Lanka.
The countries with restive minorities may seem to hold together. But they do so at great human cost which future generations will find too steep. Furthermore, the nation-state is fundamentally unable to deal on its own with such problems as climate change, environmental degradation and water scarcity, which spill across national borders. China’s damming and proposed diversion of the rivers that originate in the Tibetan plateau threaten catastrophe in South and South-east Asia.
Much of the ‘emerging’ world now stands to repeat, on an ominously larger scale, the West’s own tortured and often tragic experience of modern ‘development’. In India and China, the pursuit of economic growth at all costs has created a gaudy elite, but it has also widened already alarming social and economic disparities. It has become clear that development, whether undertaken by colonial masters or sovereign nation-states, doesn’t benefit people evenly within a single territory, not to mention across larger regions.
Certainly China’s and India’s new middle classes have done very
well out of two decades of capitalism, and their ruling elites can strut across the world stage like never before. But this apparently wildly successful culmination to the anti-colonial revolution has coincided with a veritable counter-revolution presided over by political and business elites across the world: the privatization and truncation of public services, de-unionization, the fragmentation and lumpenization of urban working classes, and the ruthless suppression of the rural poor. As instructed by the Chinese premier, Mao’s son may well rest in peace in North Korea since his father’s great dream of national regeneration has been fulfilled. But there is no doubt that not just Mao but all the leaders of the Chinese Revolution would have rejected this strange denouement to their great venture, in which some Chinese people stand up while most others are forced to stand down, and the privileged Chinese minority aspire to nothing higher than the conveniences and gadgets of their Western consumer counterparts.
Sixty years after independence, India, with its stable and formally democratic institutions and processes, seems to have come closer to fulfilling the nationalist project of the first postcolonial elites. The Indian nation-state has grown stronger, with a voice in the international arena. It is an increasingly attractive place for Western corporate and speculative capital. Indian elites, like their Asian counterparts in Japan, are still content to make themselves a junior partner to the United States, implicitly affirming that the post-war international order will survive.
These Asian beneficiaries of globalization project an image of a confident and self-aware people moving as one towards material fulfilment and international prominence. But India displays even more garishly than China the odd discontinuities induced by economic globalization: how by fostering rapid growth in some sectors of the economy it raises expectations everywhere, but by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the numbers of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist and ethnocratic politicians. At the same time the biggest beneficiaries of globalization find shelter in such aggressive ideologies as Hindu nationalism.
The feeling of hopelessness and despair, especially among landless peasants, has led to militant communist movements of unprecedented vigour and scale – the Indian prime minister describes them as the
greatest internal security threat faced by India since independence. These Mao-inspired communists, who have their own systems of tax collection and justice, now dominate large parts of central and northern India, particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Their informal secessionism has its counterpart among the Indian rich. Gated communities grow in Indian cities and suburbs. The elite itself seems to have mutinied, its members retreating into exclusive enclaves where they can withdraw from the social and political complications of the country they live in. This is deeply troubling as up to a third of Indians live in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation. More than half the children under the age of five in India are malnourished; failed crops and spiralling debt drove more than a hundred thousand farmers to suicide in the past decade.
The disasters occasionally described in the Western media – the violence in Kashmir that has claimed more than 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half; the destruction of the environment and the uprooting of nearly 200 million people from their rural homes in China – can no longer be explained away with reference to the logic of development as manifested in Europe’s history. The West itself has begun to feel the pain of the emerging world’s transition to modernity, as China’s hunger for energy and resources raises the price of commodities and its cheap exports undermine the once-strong economies of Europe and put workers out of jobs in America.
Of course, as some of Asia’s intellectuals pointed out, Europe’s own transition to its present state of stability and affluence was more than just painful. It involved imperial conquests, ethnic cleansing and many minor and two major wars involving the murder and displacement of countless millions. As India and China rise with their consumerist middle classes in a world of finite energy resources, it is easy to imagine that this century will be ravaged by the kind of economic rivalries and military conflicts that made the last century so violent.
The war on terror has already blighted the first decade. In retrospect, however, it may seem a mere prelude to greater and bloodier conflicts over precious resources and commodities that modernizing as well as already modern economies need. The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in
India and China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans – is as absurd and dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction, and looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage and disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots – the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.