Just short of five years later, on 28 June 1914, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in the streets of Sarajevo. Within weeks virtually the entire planet was at war.
What happened in Harbin had purely local consequences. What happened in Sarajevo went global. The period from the end of the Napoleonic wars until the end of the Cold War (1815–1991) encompasses the ‘European centuries’ in the sense that the global narrative of that epoch was written in Europe. Although Europe declined after World War II and the United States emerged as the dominant global power, it was what happened in Europe that mattered: in America, perhaps only the 1962 Cuban missile crisis came close to being a globally significant event on the same scale as the World Wars.
The narrative of this century will be written in Asia. It is in that sense that this is the Asian century, not in the sense that Asia has inherited the mantle of global power from the United States. Though the Ukrainian situation appears to resurrect European ghosts, it will not significantly alter the march of history to Asia. The 21st century is the Asian century.
Differences between the two parts of the Eurasian continent are considerable. Europe has fairly precise borders, it is geographically compact, and is the location of one civilisation. Asia, in contrast, is a term coined by the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) to refer to everything lying east of Anatolia. ‘Asia’ was originally a Western concept articulated to differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In reality, Asia is composed of several civilisations, including the Arabic, Persian, Indian and Chinese civilisations.
This is not to say that there have been no exchanges between Europe and Asia. On the contrary, throughout history there has been a great deal of trans-Asian interaction, whether through empires — for example, the expansion eastwards of Arab power, influence and trade from the 7th to the 15th centuries, or the Mongol empire in the 13th and 14th centuries — or through trade along the Silk Road and the Spice Route. Indeed recent research indicates that the Silk Road may have been an even better conduit of ideas than of goods.
The rise of European imperialism in the 19th century which extended, with the single exception of Japan, to the entire continent of Asia, brought these intra-Asian exchanges to an end. Though Siam (renamed Thailand in 1948) escaped actually being colonised, squeezed as it was between British Burma and French Indochina, it had little room for sovereign manoeuvre. Similarly, though China was not colonised, it was subjected to Western (and later Japanese) imperialist indirect rule.
Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, Japan’s imperialism in East Asia did not create any form of pan-Asian space. The expansion of American power in Asia during the latter half of the 20th century retarded the resurgence of intra-Asian exchanges.
In the past two decades that things have changed quite considerably. While Asia at the dawn of the 19th century had a share of over 60 per cent of global GDP, by 1950 this had fallen to less than 20 per cent, with a third accounted for by Japan. But by the late 20th century it was clear that Asia was back. East Asian economies in particular have witnessed the world’s highest and most sustained growth rates. Cross-border intra-Asian trade and investment has soared and constitutes a key driver of the global economy.
While much of Central and Western Asia remains in a state of economic, political, geopolitical, social and ideological turmoil, greater ties are developing with East and South Asia, especially due to the fact that large Asian economies are now major importers of Middle Eastern oil. Whereas the two big Eurasian nations, Turkey and Russia, have throughout the two previous centuries focused their visions primarily on Europe, this is changing as both Moscow and Ankara seek to develop closer ties with Beijing, Delhi and other Asian capitals. The membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in 2001, includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan have observer status, while Belarus, Sri Lanka and Turkey are listed as dialogue partners.
The rise of Asian power can also be seen by the fact that when the G8 (now G7 again) expanded to the G20, the majority of the new members were Asian—China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Saudi Arabia, along with the Eurasian power Turkey, and Australia, which economically is now in the East Asian orbit.
Yet this does not translate into Asian unity. The continent is defined by numerous fault-lines and powder kegs. There are territorial and other disputes of various degrees of seriousness between numerous Asian states, extending from west to east: Pakistan versus India; India and China; Bangladesh and Burma; China and the Philippines and Vietnam; Japan and China and Korea; and, of course, the two Koreas, just to name a few. A number of these are either current or potential future nuclear powers.
Another potential source of conflict is water security. Half of the world’s population depends on water flowing from the Tibetan plateau. Indeed the entire ‘WEEF’ range of issues — water, energy, environment and food — will punctuate the Asian century narrative.
In the face of all these challenges, what is likely to be a critical problem is that Asians do not know each other. Commercial and geopolitical relations may have been revived, but cultural and intellectual ties remain weak. Western soft power still tends to dominate in numerous important respects. For example, while Asian young elites flock in great numbers to American (and Australian, Canadian and European) universities, intra-Asian university exchanges are comparatively few. The same applies to the media. Often Asians depend on Western media for news about other Asian societies, as they have very few correspondents of their own in other Asian countries. Al Jazeera is a rare exception.
The same applies to scholarship. Whereas Asian studies institutes proliferate throughout the West, they are relatively few in most Asian universities (with the notable exception of institutes in Hong Kong and Singapore). Internationally published books and articles on Asian societies will in all probability have been written either by locals (that is to say, Indonesian authors writing on Indonesia) or by Westerners, rarely by other Asians.
The mythological Tower of Babel is believed to have been situated in Asia — according to recent research most likely in North Syria. The two European centuries were extremely brutal and bloody. It remains to be seen what the narrative of the Asian century will be. Its initial stages are, like the Tower of Babel, cacophonous. The world urgently needs a greater Asian cultural and intellectual space in which Asians can create knowledge, confidence and trust by sharing perspectives on the world and each other.
Jean-Pierre Lehmann is Emeritus Professor of International Political Economy at IMD, Lausanne, founder of The Evian Group@IMD; Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong and at NIIT University in India, where he is engaged in The Asian Lenses Forum, an initiative launched in February 2014.
This article appeared in the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly,‘The G20 summit at five’.
In the Cuban missile crisis, the world came close to being obliterated in a nuclear holocaust. By contrast, during the two world wars, the world did not come close to being destroyed, although sixty or so million human beings perished. These facts alone hint at the uselessness of attributing to one continent alone the destiny of the planet for any length of time, such as a century. The worst potential crisis of the twentieth century in fact occurred in the Americas, not in Europe.
This author suggests that European imperialism emerged in the nineteenth century. But the Europeans were established in Asia long before that. The British had acquired much of India in the eighteenth century, and the Dutch much of Indonesia. These facts hint at the uselessness of the time-frame of a century for defining historical epochs.
There is no reason to assume that any Asian era will last a hundred years. It could be less, it could be more.
Granted we are living in an Asian era, why should it be of a century’s duration?
thanks, Ken, but I think you have misread the article. Best. JP
Jean-Pierre,
Having misread your post the first time, I have now read it again. But my re-reading hasn’t resolved the key problem which is that I lack your ability to divine the future, particularly over such a long period of time as a century. Thus I can’t join you in saying that ‘the narrative of this century will be written in Asia’. Otherwise, I agree with most of what you have written.
thanks, Ken, I am honoured that you should be not only reading, but re-reading me! I think we can agree, because I can emphatically assure you that I do not claim at all any ability to divine the future, let alone a whole century. What I am proposing is drawing analogies between Europe turn of the 19th/20th centuries and Asia turn of the 20th/21st. As I write in the article, war in the Balkans then leads to Europe-wide war, which in turn plunges the planet into a cataclysmic century (give or take a couple of decades). Conversely war between Japan and China at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries has no major global effect. War between Japan and China now would be one of the worst scenarios one could imagine, while a war in the Balkans (as we had during a good deal of the 1990s) is tragic for the people concerned, but had no broader global geopolitical repercussions. So I am not divining the future at all, but suggest that it is events in Asia, especially East Asia, for reasons that are fairly obvious – economic, geopolitical, social, demographic, security, etc – that will most likely shape the narrative of coming decades. I make no claim to know the future but am fond of Susan Strange’s remark: “the future is impossible to foretell, but to important to ignore”. As I told my students and others we need to have a VOW – a view of the world – which should be based on analysis, not on dogma, and therefore subject to change. So there is no dogma in what I am saying, no prophesy, I am suggesting how I see forces most likely to shape our futures.
I propose for any further correspondence we take this offline. You can reach me at [email protected]