10-02-08, 12:46 pm
The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East Kishore Mahbubani, New York: Public Affairs, 2008.
Kishore Mahbubani’s new book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, is a sobering text that should be read with three points in mind. First, Mahubani believes that democracy, while a “virtuous idea” that is ultimately necessary for long-term political and economic stability, is nonetheless broadly incompatible with current demands for public order and economic development. Second, through haphazard formulations of what he calls “pragmatism,” he is perhaps Asia’s most admired apologist for human rights’ abuses, including above all, an overwhelming exploitation of workers at levels unseen since Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Third, the author's texts are widely-read and promoted by various political and economic elites celebrating current global capitalist development schemes, including Lawrence Summers, Strobe Talbot, Amartya Sen, and others. Thus readers approaching The New Asian Hemisphere from the left, if not the radical left, might be inclined to a certain, knee-jerk response and the no doubt obvious question: “Why waste my time and money on this?”
Indeed, there is not enough space here to catalog all that is troublesome about this book. First, Mahbubani resorts to an unfortunate 'trifecta' of contemporary Orientalism: 1) he views “Asia” as a largely singular entity, obscuring serious regional and cultural differences (in his view apparently China=India=Indonesia=the Philippines); 2) he counter-poses this imagined Asia with an equally imagined “West,” portraying the two as struggling over global dominion; and 3) he argues that should Asia prevail in this struggle, it would share with the world its competent economic development and political order on the basis of what he calls “Asian pragmatism.”
Nevertheless, the conceptions underpinning Mahbubani’s pragmatist logic are hard to parse. For example, while correct in his belief that American attempts to “export democracy” to Iraq are flawed, inasmuch as America is not a democratic actor in global affairs, especially given its affinities for oppressive regimes like those of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Mahbubani notes that the “the Saudi Arabia-nization or Jordan-ization of Iraq need not be a step backwards, if it leads to stability for the people of Iraq and an end to a bitter civil war.” Then he claims that it is indeed ironic that America works with so many non-democratic countries to create democracy in Iraq, but eschews “Iraq’s only real democratic neighbor…Iran.' As a former diplomat and supposed master of global realpolitik, surely Mahbubani is aware that “Iranian democracy” is merely window dressing for a theocratic dictatorship?
The casual reader of this book might be seduced by a sort of post-colonial fantasy, where the “rise of Asia” marks a much needed rectification of Western imperial abuses. Indeed, such a narrative, if it were true, would be quite compelling. In fact, Asia’s laboring masses have never been more politically oppressed or economically exploited than they are today. Further, however one measures history, whether in tens, hundreds, or thousands of years, the worst atrocities against Asians have largely been committed by other Asians, whether through war, their own heavy-handed regimes, native bourgeois elites, or comprador classes. This history is a simple fact, and given his privileged perch in Singapore, Mahbubani ought to know as well as anyone that this fact is truer today than ever before.
This brings us to an important point. Those familiar with Singapore understand that many different Asian countries would like nothing more than to emulate that city state’s approach to political economy. Indeed, China’s special economic zones were modeled on Singapore, insomuch as the SEZs are relatively small-scale “islands” dotting the Chinese mainland, replicating Singaporean investment and development strategies. But why was China’s government so interested in the Singaporean model in the first place? The answer is depressingly clear: Singapore had long debunked classical bourgeois mythology, namely, that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. In other words, China learned from Singapore that it could vigorously pursue so-called free market reforms while eschewing meaningful political liberalization.
That said, Singapore’s local/global culture itself debunks Mahbubani’s notion of “Asia,” given its daily intermingling of British bankers, Chinese landlords, Indonesian domestics, Tamil day laborers, Thai sex workers, Malaysian 'malcontents” who consider Singapore their rightful property, and American sailors streaming from a large, welcomed US naval presence. In other words, Singapore, and for that matter, the rest of “Asia,” however imagined, is less a hemisphere subordinated to the “West,” than simply suffering like most of us from a bad case of globalization.
The biggest problem about this book is its fundamental misunderstanding of two complicated and interrelated topics: economics and China. For example, Mahbubani states that China’s response to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, i.e., its refusal to devalue its currency despite pressure to do so from the US and EU, is demonstrative of a more enlightened approach to global leadership, insomuch as devaluing the yuan would have been beneficial to China but damaging to the rest of Asia. The crisis, initiated by currency speculators exploiting corrupt financial practices among economic elites in Thailand, Taiwan, and South Korea, is one of the most important events in the history of global political economy and as such, demands careful attention. However, as my own study of the rest of the literature seems to indicate, China appears to have acted in self-interest alone as a matter of survival due to the extreme vulnerabilities the crisis exposed in the Chinese financial system itself. If true, this poses two problems for Mahbubani. First, he is unable to fully appreciate that China’s go-it-alone strategy – in a sense, its refusal to accommodate the “Washington consensus” – was both bold and brilliant and perhaps the biggest reason that China was affected only nominally by a crisis that proved so devastating to workers elsewhere in the region. Second, if China did act in self-interest, then his central thesis, a global future of enlightened despotism turned pan-Asian volunteerism, is farcically construed.
