How the West can adapt to a rising Asia Kishore Mahbubani
About 200 years ago,
Napoleon famously warned …
He said, “Let China sleep,
for when she wakes,
she will shake the world.”
Despite this early warning,
the West chose to go to sleep
at precisely the moment
when China and India
and the rest of Asia woke up.
Why did this happen?
I’m here to address this great mystery.
Now what do I mean when I say
the West chose to go to sleep?
Here I’m referring
to the failure of the West
to react intelligently and thoughtfully
to a new world environment
that’s obviously been created
by the return of Asia.
As a friend of the West
I feel anguished by this,
so my goal to today
is to try to help the West.
But I have to begin the story first
by talking about how the West
actually woke up the rest of the world.
Look at chart one.
From the year one through the year 1820,
the two largest economies of the world
were always those of China and India.
So it’s only in the last 200 years
that Europe took off,
followed by North America.
So the past 200 years of world history
have therefore been
a major historical aberration.
All aberrations come to a natural end
and this is what we are seeing.
And if you look at chart two,
you’ll see how quickly and how forcefully
China and India are coming back.
The big question is:
Who woke up China and India?
The only honest answer to this question
is that it was Western civilization
that did so.
We all know that the West was the first
to successfully modernize,
transform itself;
initially it used its power
to colonize and dominate the world.
But over time, it shared the gifts
of Western wisdom
with the rest of the world.
Let me add here that I have
personally benefited
from the sharing of Western wisdom.
When I was born in Singapore,
which was then a poor British colony,
in 1948,
I experienced, like three-quarters
of humanity then,
extreme poverty.
Indeed, on the first day
when I went to school
at the age of six,
I was put in a special feeding program
because I was technically undernourished.
Now as you can see I’m overnourished.
(Laughter)
But the greatest gift I got
was that of Western education.
Now since I’ve personally
traveled this journey
from third world poverty
to a comfortable middle-class existence,
I can speak with great conviction
about the impact of Western wisdom
and the sharing of Western
wisdom with the world.
And one particular gift
that the West shared
was the art of reasoning.
Now reasoning was not
invented by the West.
It’s inherent in all cultures
and civilizations.
Amartya Sen has described how deeply
embedded it is in Indian civilization.
Yet there’s also no doubt
that it was the West
that carried the art of reasoning
to a much higher level.
And through the Scientific Revolution,
the Enlightenment,
the Industrial Revolution,
the West really raised it forcefully,
and equally importantly used this,
applied it to solve
many major practical problems.
And the West then shared
this art of applied reasoning
with the rest of the world,
and I can tell you that it led
to what I call three silent revolutions.
And as an Asian,
I can describe how these silent
revolutions transformed Asia.
The first revolution was in economics.
The main reason
why so many Asian economies,
including the communist societies
of China and Vietnam,
have performed so spectacularly well
in economic development,
is because they finally understood,
absorbed and are implementing
free market economics –
a gift from the West.
Adam Smith was right.
If you let markets decide,
productivity goes up.
The second gift was psychological.
Here too I can speak
from personal experience.
When I was young,
my mother and her generation believed
that life was determined by fate.
You couldn’t do anything about it.
My generation
and the generation of Asians after me,
believe that we can take charge
and we can improve our lives.
And this may explain, for example,
the spike of entrepreneurship
you see all throughout Asia today.
And if you travel through Asia today,
you will also see the results
of the third revolution:
the revolution of good governance.
Now as a result of good governance –
travel in Asia,
you see better health care,
better education,
better infrastructure,
better public policies.
It’s a different world.
Now having transformed the world
through the sharing of Western wisdom
with the rest of the world,
the logical and rational response
of the West should have been
to say, “Hey, we have to adjust
and adapt to this new world.”
Instead, the West chose to go to sleep.
Why did it happen?
I believe it happened
because the West became distracted
with two major events.
The first event
was the end of the Cold War.
Yes, the end of the Cold War
was a great victory.
The West defeated the mighty Soviet Union
without firing a shot.
Amazing.
But you know, when you have
a great victory like this,
it also leads to arrogance and hubris.
And this hubris was best captured
in a very famous essay
by Francis Fukuyama
called “The End of History?”
Now, Fukuyama was putting across
a very sophisticated message,
but all that the West
heard from this essay
was that we, the liberal democracies,
we have succeeded,
we don’t have to change,
we don’t have to adapt,
it’s only the rest of the world
that has to change and adapt.
Unfortunately, like a dangerous opiate,
this essay did a lot
of brain damage to the West
because it put them to sleep
just at precisely the moment
when China and India were waking up
and the West didn’t adjust and adapt.
The second major event was 9/11,
which happened in 2001.
And as we know, 9/11 caused
a lot of shock and grief.
I personally experienced
the shock and grief
because I was in Manhattan
when 9/11 happened.
9/11 also generated a lot of anger,
and in this anger, the United States
decided to invade Afghanistan
and later, Iraq.
And unfortunately,
partly as a result of this anger,
the West didn’t notice
the significance of another event
that happened also in 2001.
China joined the World Trade Organization.
Now, when you suddenly inject
900 million new workers
into the global capitalist system,
it would naturally lead
to what the economist Joseph Schumpeter
called creative destruction.
Western workers lost their jobs,
they saw their incomes stagnate,
clearly people had to think
about new competitive policies,
workers needed retraining,
workers needed new skills.
None of this was done.
So partly as a result of this,
the United States of America became
the only major developed society
where the average income
of the bottom 50 percent –
yes, 50 percent –
average income went down
over a 30-year period,
from 1980 to 2010.
So partly, as a result of this,
it led eventually to the election
of Donald Trump in 2016,
who exploited the anger
of the working classes,
who are predominantly white.
It also contributed
to the rise of populism in Europe.
And one wonders,
could this populism have been avoided
if the West had not been distracted
by the end of the Cold War and by 9/11?
But the big question
we face today is this:
Is it too late?
Has the West lost everything?
And my answer is that it’s not too late.
It is possible for the West to recover
and come back in strength.
And using the Western art of reasoning,
I would recommend that the West
adopt a new “three-m” strategy:
minimalist, multilateral
and Machiavellian.
(Laughter)
Why minimalist?
Now even though
Western domination has ended,
the West continues to intervene
and interfere in the affairs
of many other societies.
This is unwise.
This is generating anger and resentment,
especially in Islamic societies.
It’s also draining the resources
and spirits of Western societies.
Now I know that the Islamic world
is having difficulties modernizing.
It will have to find its way,
but it’s more likely to do so
if it is left alone to do so.
Now I can say this with some conviction
because I come from a region,
Southeast Asia,
which has almost as many Muslims
as the Arab world.
266 million Muslims.
Southeast Asia is also one of the most
diverse continents on planet earth,
because you also have
146 million Christians,
149 million Buddhists –
Mahayana Buddhists
and Hinayana Buddhists –
and you also have millions of Taoists
and Confucianists and Hindus
and even communists.
And once known as “the Balkans of Asia,”
southeast Asia today should
be experiencing a clash of civilizations.
Instead, what you see in southeast Asia
is one of the most peaceful
and prosperous corners of planet earth
with the second-most successful
regional multilateral organization,
ASEAN.
So clearly, minimalism can work.
The West should try it out.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But I’m also aware that minimalism
cannot solve all the problems.
There are some hard problems
that have to be dealt with:
Al-Qaeda, ISIS –
they remain dangerous threats.
They must be found,
they must be destroyed.
The question is, is it wise for the West,
which represents 12 percent
of the world’s population –
yes, 12 percent –
to fight these threats on its own
or to fight with the remaining
88 percent of the world’s population?
And the logical and rational answer is
that you should work
with the remaining 88 percent.
Now where does one go
if you want to get
the support of humanity?
There’s only one place:
the United Nations.
Now I’ve been ambassador to the UN twice.
Maybe that makes me a bit biased,
but I can tell you that working
with the UN can lead to success.
Why is it that the first Iraq war,
fought by President George H. W. Bush,
succeeded?
While the second Iraq war,
fought by his son,
President George W. Bush,
failed?
One key reason is that
the senior Bush went to the UN
to get the support of the global community
before fighting the war in Iraq.
So multilateralism works.
There’s another reason
why we have to work with the UN.
The world is shrinking.
We are becoming a small,
interdependent, global village.
All villages need village councils.
And the only global
village counsel we have,
as the late UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan said,
is the UN.
Now as a geopolitical analyst,
I do know that it’s often considered naive
to work with the UN.
So now let me inject
my Machiavellian point.
Now Machiavelli is a figure
who’s often derided in the West,
but the liberal philosopher
Isaiah Berlin reminded us
that the goal of Machiavelli
was to promote virtue, not evil.
So what is the Machiavellian point?
It’s this: what is
the best way for the West
to constrain the new rising powers
that are emerging?
And the answer is
that the best way to constrain them
is through multilateral rules
and multilateral norms,
multilateral institutions
and multilateral processes.
Now let me conclude
with one final, big message.
As a longtime friend of the West,
I’m acutely aware of how pessimistic
Western societies have become.
Many in the West don’t believe
that a great future lies ahead for them,
that their children
will not have better lives.
So please do not fear the future
or the rest of the world.
Now I can say this with some conviction,
because as a Hindu Sindhi,
I actually feel
a direct cultural connection
with society’s diverse cultures
and societies all the way
from Tehran to Tokyo.
And more than half of humanity
lives in this space,
so with this direct cultural connection,
I can say with great conviction
that if the West chooses
to adopt a wiser strategy
of being minimalist,
multilateral and Machiavellian,
the rest of the world
will be happy to work with the West.
So a great future lies ahead for humanity.
Let’s embrace it together.
Thank you.
(Applause)