THE period between Christmas and Chinese New Year is a time of grave reflection.
In East Asia, the holiday season coincides with travel and family time, when we
question friends and relative what to expect in the coming year.
You know the year will be good if after Chinese New Year, either the stock market or
the real estate market signals up. If they signal down, look for a weak year for the
economy.
There are signs that this seasonal cross-over signals a time of momentous change,
as the West shows signs of faltering, whereas the East is not only slowing down, but
the sharp drop in oil prices is beginning to hurt not just oil producers, but also global
demand.
Western writers are in an unusually pensive mood.
Influential FT columnist Gideon Rachman argues that the West has lost intellectual
self-confidence, whereas former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor
Larry Summers suggested that China’s growth may revert back to the mean, meaning
slower growth levels.
In the Globalist website, my former colleague Jean-Pierre Lehmann thinks that we
should get rid of the “Myth of Asia” and that those who talk of Asian dynamics are
neo “Orientalists”, whatever that means.
Terms like the West or Asia are of course concepts of geography that encompass
culture, economy and history.
There is nothing wrong with anyone waxing or ranting over the Rise of Asia or
Decline of the West, because just as each has their own perception of God, this does
not mean that God does not exist.
The only problems that exist are whether my God is better than your God and are
they the same, or on what basis do you judge that one is better than the other?
Using the same logic, just because the English invented the English language, this
has not stopped Indians, Chinese or West Indians to speak their own versions of
English.
Of course Asians are different, and they are proud to be different, just as the Scots
are proud to be different from the English and the Basques think differently from the
Parisians.
What is happening in Asia is that just as Western intellectuals are re-defining their
place in the world, different Asians are trying to differentiate their own value systems
in a world that no longer has one hegemonic value system.
Globalization has truly removed the concept of entitlement of rights for even the most
powerful of nations.
U.S. President Obama’s State of the Union speech on January 21 may be crowing
that the U.S. economy is the only one to recover from the crisis, but the reality is that
U.S. inequality is worse than ever.
Growth cannot be sustained when the military and welfare budgets are unsustainable
and the rest of the world is in slowing mode.
The tragedy of the West is that the concept of a united and peaceful Europe is at risk
of fragmentation, with the increasing possibility of a Greek exit.
Turkey has more or less decided under President Erdogan that joining the European
Union is neither welcoming nor beneficial.
Because Europe is hampered by its own cumbersome governance structure that is
founded neither on military nor civil bureaucratic prowess, its raison d’etre has been
weakened by the fact that the center will not pay for the mistakes of the periphery.
Political union is ultimately founded on the self-interest of the member states, and it is
now proven that monetary union is insufficient without fiscal union.
With OECD countries becoming burdened by higher debt, the advanced countries
are reaching the tipping point where their entitlement to prosperity and welfare
guaranteed by the state is under threat.
The 2007-2009 crisis was foundational because it was not a crisis of the poor or the
underdeveloped, but a crisis of the rich and developed.
Furthermore, it was not just financial bankruptcy that was at stake, but the moral
bankruptcy of the free market ideology.
The shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world without the capacity to negotiate more
global public goods (such as climate change and freer trade) is not a good sign for
global peace and security.
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