Parag Khanna vs Joseph Nye

One interesting conversation took place between Parag Khanna and Joseph Nye. Joseph Nye seemed to think that “the future is not Asian”.

Both agree, though, that the center of gravity is shifting towards Asia, from the US.

America is good at inventing, but it is not good at maintaining a system.

America has always been very good at inventing. It basically invented the modern world. The middle class took shape in America. The nuclear family, the consumerist society, the chicken in every pot and car in every driveway aspiration came out of America.

But America's unusual strength at inventing systems may blind it to the fact that it's not good at maintaining systems. It's good at inventing systems because it has this notion of progress, whereby things are changing, and therefore things are constantly being renewed, the new replaces the old.

In Asia, you have this thing about the notion of stability. To be sure, Asia at this point in time is a highly dynamic society, and the contact with modernity is relatively recent. But even when you look at Japan, it's a society that values harmony, where the institutions are holding fast. You can see that some kind of social glue is intact. People still trust each other. They think of Japan as the nation, instead of a sizeable group of people having the dissident mentality, which is that the default is that you have a hostile or adversarial relationship with your country.

With Japan, the problem seems to be that there's a lack of progress since the 1980s when the economic progress has been overestimated. By many measures, society seems to be holding up alright.

Americans are growing further apart from each other. In many ways, the astounding economic headstarts that Americans enjoyed over the rest of the world has obscured the problem. A large number of Americans aren't used to the idea that they have to overcome adversity in their lives, and they've not had the social nets that would help them in time of need.

GDP growth and figures have been at the forefront of economic reporting, so other concepts like this soft infrastructure have been overlooked. But Joseph Nye was the one who coined the concept of soft power, so he understands that society is not just about facts and figures. Why does he not understand that there is an analogous soft infrastructure in society? It's about how cohesive society is. In many ways, America has that and in other ways, not at all. It cannot be overemphasised that Trump's extraordinary electoral success is in some way related to how American society has fallen apart, how the ties that bind people together are loosened, about how people who only see the bird's eye view of the situation miss the fact that if you treat people like commodities, and tear them apart to be atomised individuals, society will pay the price in some way or another.

It is true that Americans still lead the way when it comes to technological progress, but there is an extraordinary extent to which Asians and Asian Americans have constituted the knowledge workforce of the leading universities of America. To the extent that many of these people will eventually become naturalized Americans and bring their dynamism to their new country, it is a good sign. But they can cause stresses and fractures in the rest of America. People who have known America as their only country for their whole life can feel left behind, or left out. The relatively weak ties that these new arrivals have to their new country, or the extent to which their kids will form new communities that are weakly connected to the rest of Americans will place more stresses on the structure of society.

Dictatorship vs Democracy.
Joseph Nye also contends that Asia might get left behind because it might not make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. It might be the case that Asia will be fractured because of this divide between authoritarianism and democracy.

There is a lot of philosophical baggage to unpack when you have these westerners judging societies according to conformance to ideas that they are most familiar with. It is not that freedom and democracy are purely western constructs, but I'm just wondering if they even understand these concepts as well as they think they do.

People are still in the old habits of thinking that there is this cosmic, manichean struggle between authoritarianism and freedom, that they were two separate things that are polar opposites, and cannot accommodate each other. There is a broad agreement that these two things have a strong tension against each other, but that's where the similarities end.

I think that in some way, the fact that Asian societies already have some kind of structure before you try to graft these constructs upon it, it actually makes us interrogate these concepts even harder for meaning. Freedom and authoritarianism is some kind of a continuum, and for many of us, it's not so much a matter of one or the other, but trying to achieve some kind of balance. And even freedom and authoritarianism have some kind of yin yang relationship, where things are some kind of pendulum that swings back and forth between the two. Too much authoritarianism, and people will yearn to break free. Too much freedom, and society will lack discipline and cohesiveness.

The question is, why does Joseph Nye think that Asia will divide itself along the fault lines of authoritarianism vs democracy? I think his perspective was coloured by the cold war, where a similar disagreement fractured the West. However the Cold War played out differently in Asia. It was more like fascism vs communism, rather than free world vs communism. The Asians in the “free world” did not live in democratic societies, and were more obsessed with economic progress at any cost, during the early days of nation building, rather than the freedoms enjoyed by the West.

Asians have different priorities. We prize material security and a sense of belonging a little more, and maybe not so much freedom. Perhaps freedom is not associated with a lot of things it's associated with in the West. America has a particular history in that it was founded as a collective of colonies, and many of the pilgrims were in some way refugees and persecuted citizens. Perhaps they would value freedom a little more. They would value freedom from tyrants. In Asia we have despots, but somehow we expect better behaviour from our leaders, in exchange for co-operations from the citizens.

After Taiwan and South Korea transitioned to democracy, it didn't stop them from having more trade links to China. Asians are too pragmatic to sanction each other based on ideological differences. It's not that there's no such thing as principles to Asians, but these things don't get in the way of a relationship. Of course, when we look at Hong Kong and China, we can see plainly that democracy and authoritarianism can seem like existential threats to each other. But Asia did not go through the enlightenment that the West did. In seeking to emulate the West, the Asians went after the material well-being, the technological know-how, but not necessarily the individual liberties. Only when the latter filtered through, would they start questioning their values. A lot of the quasi-feudal aspects of Asian society remained intact.

Asians would not have valued freedom so much that they'd have looked at the “evil empire” of a Soviet Union, and then decided that they were going to pursue “containment” on that adversary. In fact, it would probably be useful to try and figure out why the Russian revolution was perceived by the Americans as being such a threat, and try and figure out why they had such adverse reactions to people they hardly come into contact with.

Asians cannot be as united as the West is.
That is most certainly false. False as in, Asians may not pull together, but the West is actually pretty terrible at it as well. When the Europeans were the most powerful people in the world through the colonial era, they were always going at each other. Then there were the two devastating wars in the 20th century. You had to wait until the formation of the European Union, as well as NATO to envision them acting together in concert. And even today, there are great fractures in Europe and the West, especially when it comes to views on neoliberalism and immigration.

To be sure, Asia is much more vast than Europe. The people of Asia are barely aware of each other, and inasmuch as the countries have some kind of history, it's the terrible legacy of the Japanese military expansion in the 1940s. But at the same time, this is a good sign, because it's a history that's relatively free of the historical baggage. The economic links that these countries have with each other show that some recognition of a common cultural heritage goes a long way in building ties with each other. Many Asian countries aren't particularly direct about what they dislike about each other, but that makes it possible to have some kind of economic relation without the awkward politics getting into each other's way.

There are conflict zones, of course. But we don't have conflicts that are as deep and entrenched as Muslims vs West, Slaves vs slavers in the New World, colonisers vs colonised. Of course, there are examples everywhere of genocide, and there are pogroms everywhere, but these sources of hatreds are relatively shallow. That said, away from East Asia, there are ancient hatreds, like Muslim vs Hindu and Sunni vs Shi-ite.

Furthermore, the fact that there is one label to put on everyone – Asian – is an acknowledgement of some commonality. It is less about some shared history, as is the case with the west, but the fact is that histories have been intertwined in some distant past, and they have followed many parallel trajectories, and shared experiences.

The quasi-confucius values of the “chopstick” countries.
Similar experiences in World War 2.
Participation in the tradewinds trading system – people are called “Asians” not because it's the European way of saying “rest of the world”, but because the has been some kind of contact in the distant past owing to the ancient trade land and sea routes.

Furthermore, much of Asian culture is communalist, and geared towards social harmony. So yes, there is comparatively little interaction between Asian countries, but there is less of a tendency to go to war. At least in East Asia. And even in the subcontinent and the Middle East, the warring factions are often not government soldiers, but guerilla factions.

Law and the military
Perhaps Americans have been a little too willing to count projection of military strength as a measure of power. To be sure, it matters a lot that the US is providing a security umbrella, and is the sheriff around town. The US has also been heavily involved with wars in the Middle East.

I think that maybe Joseph Nye reflects the current imperialistic reality, where there is a hegemon and he's in charge of maintaining the military peace. In a way, nobody will be fulfilling this role. During the time as a hegemon, the US projects military power all over the world, and makes all the rules. International law was created by the West, the financial system was centered around the West. The world of the future will probably be one with overlapping centers of influence. Maybe centered around China, around India, around Europe, around Southeast Asia. The security arrangement still overlap and are subject to some kind of negotiation.

Now, instead, things work either bilaterally, or through regional arrangements. The reach of the Americans is somewhat curtailed. Perhaps this is a departure from a system that was centered around the Bretton Woods institutions, and maybe a departure from the notion that it was a system that could prevail indefinitely.

The post 1945 world order was based on the notion that nation states are the biggest stakeholders in the system, that each nation state is in some way equal, or at least they are on the same tier in a hierarchy, that conflicts would be resolved in the UN rather than on the battleground. That was the idea. These days, nation building is not uniformly successful, states are not uniformly powerful. There are failing states which have a seat in the UN. Taiwan does not have a state in the UN but in many respects is doing fine. Some corporations are more powerful than countries. The whole ecosystem is something that's vastly complicated, much more than the US view of the world would allow.

When the US was a hegemon that ruled the world, it was because it held the cards in so many aspects that it couldn't conceive of a world that used a different operating system. Now, the underbrush has grown to be great and mighty. IT's still conceivable that the US will be the number 1 nation, but it's not a number 1 nation that will dominate the world, like it did before, and it might become the first amongst equals, if it still is number one.

Perhaps America will be seen as the last colonial power for a while. IT is not ostensibly a colonial power, but it has features that are similar to a colonial power, in that it has the fiat currency, that it keeps the peace, and it has a massive cultural influence on the rest of the world. But as the rest of the world develops and the branches grow apart from each other, its ability to dictate the operating system of the world, and furthermore dictate it from a vast remove – after all the US is one of the most geographically isolated countries in the world – is under a great amount of strain.