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Values and identities in Asia through the lense of connected history

Hoa Sen University, the 3/9/2015

Tran Thi Lien Associated professor

University Paris Diderot – Research Unit Cessma

The subject “Values and identities” is an important issue as for the Asian as the Western people.

For Asian peoples, this topic is not a question of old traditions but an issue which has dominated

the last century and which is still a current topic: how to face Western domination, taking in

account the inputs of the Western civilization, bases of its political economic power, but keeping

their values and identities. This question remains a major issue for most of the Asian States at

the beginning of the 21th century in a context of globalization.

For South East Asian States and for Vietnamese in particular, this issue was very important in a

context of colonization and then the context of nation building: after centuries of meetings and

confrontations with the West, many Asian countries had proclaimed to gain knowledge from the

West, but keeping their own traditions. They moved on from the assertion of national identities

face to Western domination to a modernization policy, but often still, according to Western

models (socialism, capitalism). Today at the beginning of the 21th century, South East Asian

countries have to think how to set with regards to the other Asian states and to the Western

world, in a context of globalization. This issue is also significant for Westerners whose supremacy

had been contested by Japan and more recently by other Asian States: More recently, in a context

of a great economic development of the region, some East Asian countries have been able to

compete with Western countries and claim their own model of development based on their, they

say, own specific “Asian Values”. As professor Kishore Mahbubani 1, author of the book, Can Asian

think? says, it is impossible for Western countries to understand the present world and to foresee

the future today without taking in account the perspective of “the Rest”, and Asia in particular.

The aims of this presentation are to to give an understanding of the actual debates about the

significance of Asian values in particular , and a critical approach of what is meant by “Asian

values” particularly led by scholars from Indian origins who are very represented in the debates

about Asian values. It is also to insist on the contemporary relevance of « Asian traditional values

and identities » in the process of nation building and modernization in Asia. My paper first insists

on the context in which the discourse on Asian values has emerged in the nineties. Second, it

develops the arguments of the advocates of « Asian values » and their permanence within the

modernization process of Asian States and societies , insisting on the role of Confucianist,

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Buddhist and Muslim traditions in the conception of power as well as in the emergence of a

specific economic model, which have made the economic miracle in East Asia possible. Third, it

deals with all the debates it had provoked, and the critics of the discourses on Asian values. I

show the necessity for Asians and Westerners, to overcome a simplistic dual vision East versus

West and reconsider the vision of the past, present and future as a connected world with an

ancient and permanent circulation of peoples, ideas and goods.

But just before to begin my presentation, let us define the two terms: value and identity. The

term value (from latin valor), generally used on its plural form, means merits and qualities. It has

important connection with the idea of Ethic and Moral on an individual, and what is commonly

called Tradition on a social level. It designated a group of moral values shared by a significant

group of persons (of the same culture, of the same nationality). The term Identity (from latin

idem (« the same») on the singular or on the plural form, is used in the social sciences to describe

a person's conception and expression of his individuality or of his group affiliations (such as

national identity and cultural identity). On its singular form, the term has been used during the

modern period, period of fight for independence of many of South East Asian countries, face to

the West, but also face to Japanese imperialism. It has been also used on his plural form, with the

recognition of the plurality of identities within a same country as most of the South East Asian countries

have to manage with important ethnical minorities.

East Asian miracle and « Asian values »: context and significance

What is interesting is that the fathers of the “Asian values” discourse, former prime minister of

Singapore Lee Kuan Yew and the former prime minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohammad were

coming from South East Asia. All along the 60s-80s decades, the East and Southeast Asian

countries were the only regions that knew a strong economic growth. Some advocated Asian

Values, crediting this success to a distinctive "third-way" Asian political model presented as an

alternative to the liberal Western democratic model. The Malaysian version of Asian values or

“The Mahathir Model” basically was supposed to be influenced by Malay-Islamic values, and the

Singaporean School that stresses on Confucianism and China Model emphasized the combination

of Chinese-Nationalist-Communist values were dominating the discourse on Asian values.

These discourses on Asia values, which emerged in South East Asia, were made in the aim to

support their own political agenda: Stability and enforced social cohesion has become

internalized as the fundamental core of the Asian values: Lee Kuan Yew and Mohammad

Mahathir introduced the concept of Asian values in response to the global democratization,

booming economy and political stability of the 1990s, before that the currency crisis of July 1997

shocked Asian countries.

Then, the idea of Asian values spread all over Asia. Cultural and value differences between Asia

and the West were stressed by several official delegations at the 1993 World conference on

Human rights in Vienna. And today, the concept of "Asian values" is popular in China as in

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Vietnam, the Communist leaders talking about the role of the party to guarantee “social

harmony.” In Japan, these ideas of Asian values were popular among some nationalist circles

because it challenged the West and also offered the possibility of Japanese leadership in a new

Asia. Even Han Sung Joo, Former Minister of Foreign affairs of the Republic of Korea defended

the Asian values: “I think Asian values have much to do with Asian governance. When we talk

about “values in Asia,” we probably mean social or cultural values that are shared by a substantial

number of people in that society named Asia. (…) He considered that that Asian values which

were helpful during the early industrialization and preglobalization stage actually acted as

impediments for these Asian countries in adjusting to a new age of interdependence and

globalization. The earlier stages of industrialization and economic growth seemed to have been

helped by a paternalistic state, government guidance and protection of private enterprises,

communitarian outlook and practices and emphasis on social order, harmony and discipline. » 2

Two popular examples of that concept of Asian values are a song and a film. The Song of Dick

Lee, a Singaporean rock-pop-rap star singing in Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Cantonese.

His 1998 song “Home “, commissioned by the Singapore National Arts Council and conferring a

major national award in 2005, marked his consecration as an official national cultural figure in

the city-state. This was confirmed in 2007 when he was chosen to compose “Rise”, the Official

Theme Song for the 40th Anniversary celebrations of ASEAN. He also composed a song for the

APEC Singapore 2009 summit which was sung in front of world leaders such as Obama. In his

song Orientalism (1991) which promotes a pan Asian pop music, he said: You have to perceive

How you want yourself to be. I think it’s time to show that all of us are no caricatures or

stereotypes, No token yellows! We simply have to be assertive, make them see this is the new

Asian ready for the twenty-first century!” Moreover, the film of Zhang Yimou Hero in 2002 also

deals with the theme of Asian values in choosing the period of the fighting kingdoms, the time of

, the first emperor of China , the king Qin who dreamed to unify China. The film was criticized

and perceived as pro strong power of Communist China with the triumph of security and stability

ideas on those of liberty and human rights.

This discourse on Asian values spread all over East Asia at the same time as the political scientist

Samuel P Huntington developed his idea of "The Clash of Civilizations?" in the American Review

Foreign Affairs 3, and then in a book untitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World

Order. 4, the political scientist Samuel Huntington develop the theory that people's cultural and

religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.

2 Han Sung-Joo (ed), "Forward & Asian Values: An Asset or a Liability," Changing Values in Asia: Their Impact on Governance and Development, Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange,

2003, pp. vii-9 3 Huntington, Samuel P, The Clash of Civil izations?, in Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, Summer 1993, pp. 22–49 4 Huntington, Samuel P, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996

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During the post-Cold War period, the idea that Human Rights, liberal democracy and capitalist

free market economy will become the only remaining ideological alternative dominated. For

example, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached the 'end of history' in a Hegelian

sense. Huntington expressed his disagreement with that analysis and didn’t believe in his theory

of progress. He thought that the world will come back to a normal state of affairs characterized

by cultural conflict. To him the primary axis of conflict in the future would to happen according

cultural and religious lines. Cultural identity would become the principal cause of conflict: “It is

my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily

ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating

source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world

affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of

different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines

between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Huntington divided the world into the "major" civilizations within which religion, was, he said,

the main criterion of classification. The Western civilization, centered on Australasia, Northern

America, and Europe (excluding Orthodox Eastern and South-Eastern Europe); the Latin America

civilization which could be considered as a part of the Western civilization, though it has slightly

distinct social and political structures from Europe and Northern America; The Orthodox world

of the former Soviet Union, The Eastern world which was, he said, a mix of Buddhist, Sinic, Hindu,

and Japonic civilizations; the Muslim world and the Sub-Saharan African civilization. According to

him, the two main threats for the Western world were the Muslim and Chinese civilization. The

Huntington argument that Confucianism was becoming one of the major threats to Western

Christian civilization, aroused intense debates in China in the 90s and stimulated nationalist

sentiments among intellectuals. To the argument that Western civilization was synonym of

democracy and Human Rights, free economy, some Chinese intellectuals answered that

international conflicts was the result of the Western expansion. To them (as well as some Russian

intellectuals), the Western form of nationalism, based on religion, had led to the conflicts. The

Confucian civilization could bring peace and harmony among nations because it was precisely not

based on religion. They were speaking about the civilizational superiority of China, which had

learned from the West capitalism (market system and free trade) in a very short period of time.

The discourses on Asian values

The Mahathir and Lee Kwan Yee models definitely defended in terms of “Asian values” with the

strong influences of Malay-Islamic and Confucian values, which set them far apart from “Western

liberal universalist values”, in terms of the role they play in society and how the State has

responded to them.

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Lee Kwan Yee and the successful Singaporean model

The great economic success which move Singapore from poverty to plenty within one generation

is the result of the Lee Kwan Yee policy. Singapore’s per capita GNP is now higher than that of its

erstwhile colonizer, Great Britain. It has the world’s busiest port and is the third-largest oil refiner

and a major center of global manufacturing and service industries. Lee managed this miraculous

transformation of Singapore’s economy while maintaining tight political control over the country:

Until a high age, he travelled all over Asia dispensing advice on how to achieve economic growth

while retaining political stability and control. It is a formula that the governing elites of these

countries were anxious to learn.

Lee Kwan Yew had developed his arguments in an interview the political scientist Fareed Zakaria

in Foreign Affairs in 1994,5 promoting an Asian perspective over the Western model. With the

end of the Cold War, criticism of the Western political and economic and social system from elites

in East Asia increased. Whereas some positive features of Western societies were acknowledged

as the free, easy and open relations between people regardless of social status, ethnicity or

religion, a certain openness in argument about what is good or bad for society; the accountability

of public officials, negative features were also underlined: The erosion of the moral

underpinnings of a society, the breakdown of civil society (guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy,

unbecoming behavior in public), the expansion of the right of the individual to behave or

misbehave as he pleases came at the expense of an orderly society as well as the diminution of

personal responsibility : “ Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that

all problems are solvable by a good government, which we in the East never believed possible.”

Lee Kwan Yew established differences between Asian and Western societies. He didn’t believe in

an Asian model as such but argued that Asian societies were unlike Western ones. The

fundamental difference between Western concepts of society and as government and East Asian

concepts, (Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam), distinct from Southeast Asia, which is a mix between

the Sinic and the Indian, though Indian culture also emphasizes similar values : the Eastern

societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. "We use the family to push

economic growth, we were fortunate we had this cultural backdrop: the belief in thrift (saving),

hard work, filial piety and loyalty and the extended family, and, most of all, the respect for

scholarship and learning."

To him, the bases of the Singaporean success lied first in the preexistence of the Western and

Japanese models and the lessons of their positive and negative results. Second, on the family

bases, defined as the extended family, and then friends and the wider society. “The tested norm

5 Fareed Zakaria, A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew, in Foreign Affairs March/April 1994 Issue

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is the family unit. It is the building brick of society”, he said. In the East the main goal is to have a

well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This

freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of anarchy. According to Lee

Kwan Yew, History of China is of dynasties which have risen and fallen: “through all that

turbulence, the family, the extended family, the clan, has provided a kind of survival raft for the

individual. (…) The family and the way human relationships are structured, do increase the

survival chances of its members. That has been tested over thousands of years”. Chinese aphorism

“Xiushen qijia zhiguo pingtianxia”6 resumed this idea shared by the whole Confucian societies

and the basic concept of Confucian civilization.

“We have focused on basics in Singapore. We used the family to push economic growth, factoring

the ambitions of a person and his family into our planning. We have tried, for example, to improve

the lot of children through education. The government can create a setting in which people can

live happily and succeed and express themselves, but finally it is what people do with their lives

that determines economic success or failure. Again, we were fortunate we had this cultural

backdrop, the belief in thrift, hard work, filial piety and loyalty in the extended family, and, most

of all, the respect for scholarship and learning.”

To the Singaporean leader, the cultural factors (values systems) were divergent between

Confucianism and Western values: as tradition of strict discipline, respect for the teacher, rote

learning and scholarship and hard work, providing high-quality education: “We are all in the

midst of very rapid change and at the same time we are all groping towards a destination which

we hope will be identifiable with our past. (…) The Japanese have solved this problem to some

extent. Japan has become an industrial society, while remaining essentially Japanese in its human

relations. They have industrialized and shed some of their feudal values. The Taiwanese and the

Koreans are trying to do the same. But whether these societies can preserve their core values and

make this transition is a problem which they alone can solve. (…) Therefore, you will find people

unreceptive to the idea that they be Westernized. Modernized, yes, in the sense that they have

accepted the inevitability of science and technology and the change in the life -styles they bring.

(…) What are we all seeking? A form of government that will be comfortable, because it meets

our needs, is not oppressive, and maximizes our opportunities.”

“The Mahathir Model”: anti-Western imperialism, strong government and

protecting community

Mahathir Mohammad former Prime Minister who ruled Malaysia from 1981 till 2003, and was

credited with engineering Malaysia's rapid modernization was the other main advocate of the

6 Xiushen means look after yourself, cultivate yourself, do everything to make yourself useful; Qijia, look after

the family; Zhiguo, look after your country; Pingtianxia, all is peaceful under heaven.

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“Asian values.” Based on Malay-Islamic culture, he intended to propose a Malaysian perspective

of “Asian values”, anxious to protect Malaysians against Western values. According to him, the

concept of Asian values was supposed to reconcile the religion of the Malays, Islam, with the

Confucianism of the ethnic Chinese and Hinduism and contributed to create a sense of common values

between different ethnic and religious groups and to form a common ideology, different from the West.

In his book, The Malay Dilemma (1970), he describes the three bases of “Malayness” – feudalism,

Islam, and adat (traditional customs) which have to be adapted to modern needs but he rejected

Western universalism which could, he said, corrupt Malaysian culture and religious beliefs.

Concerned about the influence of Western individualism, and the future of Asian values and

traditions, he defended to Universalism (fact that the human condition is unique, and that all

human beings possess certain inalienable rights (fact that the human condition is unique, and

that all human beings possess certain inalienable rights), the idea of cultural relativism (human

values, far from being universal, vary a great deal according to different cultural perspectives.)

Because of the pervasiveness of the notion of “group” or “community” rather than that of the

“individual” in many cultures, he concluded that the Western models were not significant for

other countries. He launched the “Look East” policy in 1982 as a broader campaign against

“Western values” with the aim “to rid ourselves of the Western values that we have absorbed.”

The main elements of “The Mahathir Model” were strong authority, priority of the community

over the individual and strong family based society.

His policy was based on three ideas: anti-western imperialism, strong government and protecting

community. First, the Anti-western imperialism. In Asia, there was a widespread suspicion that

the West had a hidden agenda to maintain its hegemony by slowing down Asian prosperity and

competitiveness by “changing the rules” to invoke a new kind of protectionism, with human

rights and democracy as the standard-bearers, succeeding the colonialism and Christianity.

Mahathir claimed that Western pressure on developing countries, over human rights and

democratization would cause instability, economic decline and poverty: “They still consider their

values and political and economic systems better than any others. It would not be so bad if it

stopped at that; it seems, however, that they will not be satisfied until they have forced other

countries to adopt their ways as well.(…) . Westerners cannot seem to understand diversity, or

that even in their own civilization values differed over time. » 7

Mahathir further argued that the West had a long history of human rights violations and could

hardly be considered as a paragon of democracy and justice. To him, the groundless sense of

superiority was impeaching the West from seeing the significance of Eastern values .

The second base of his model was a strong government. Mahathir, however, argued that peoples

in Asian countries believe in the idea of strong government, not limited government, as in

7 Mahathir M. and S. Ishihara (1995) The Voice of Asia: Two Leaders Discuss the Coming Century, Tokyo: Kodansha International, p. 75

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Western culture, where the government interventions in personal liberties and the economy

were limited by law, usually in a constitution, which has roots in Hebraic Law and Magna Carta

and the US Constitution. Without authority and stability there could be no civility, and the society

would become fragmented and disordered. He mentioned that Malaysians (Asians) should

respect authority because authority guarantees social stability. However, Mahathir argued that

strong authority does not means despotic rulers, but noticed that even within the most

democratic system, citizens must pay due respect to government and understand the need for

healthy balance between individual rights and obligations towards society. In fact, Mahathir had

taken a step further by encouraging feudalistic loyalty among people to his leadership in using

the Malay culture and Asian values in order to justify his leadership.

His last aim was to protect the community. The importance of the community in Asian culture

and society explained the belief of the Asians, he said, that the community should take priority

over individuals at the opposite with the primacy of the individual in Western society. Modern

Asian societies were based on the idea that “Asian” culture, with its priority on the group rather

than the individual, is ideally suited to modern, industrial society. To him, emphasis on the rights

and freedoms of the individual was producing crime-ridden societies in moral decay, with little

social discipline or concern for the broader interests of community. Mahathir urged the need to

limit personal freedom for the sake of political stability and economic prosperity: The individual

and minority must have their rights but not at the unreasonable expense of the majority. To him,

the priority of the community over the rights of the individual was widely embraced in Confucian

East Asia, in Islamic Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia and Buddhist Thailand. The Asian concept

of the individual, different from that of the West through the importance of relationships in the

extended family setting, was giving East Asians a much more sophisticated ability to relate to

others.

East versus West

Despite the fact that this concept was proclaimed by very different persons with very different

cultural backgrounds, the concept of “Asian values" gathered Asian countries which were

supposed to have sharp with values and traditions of the Western model: single-party rule rather

than political pluralism, social harmony and consensus rather than confrontation and dissent,

welfare and collective well-being of the community rather than individual rights, loyalty and

respect towards authority including parents, teachers and government rather than individualism.

The supporters of the “Asian values” argue that Asians appreciate more order and harmony,

whereas Westerners appreciate more personal freedom. Likewise, Mahathir and Lee argue that

the supposedly universal human rights documents and treaties were privileging Western values

to the detriment of Asian values. To countries as Pakistan and China, it was necessary to sacrifice

some political and civil freedoms in order to protect the economic security of their people and

the stability of their societies. In 2000, Dr Mahathir was telling that too much democracy could

lead to violence and instability.

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To sum up, the Asian values thesis suggest that it is only through an orderly society which curtails

the excesses of individualism that all members of the community could live safe and fulfilled lives.

The Asian States should provide such an environment by curtailing individual freedoms and

striking a balance between civil liberties and social stability. In fact, these concepts developed in

the 1990s were more appropriate for Asian societies than the liberal values and institutions of

the West, were used to justify authoritarian regimes in Asia.

The debates about Asian values

There is an impressive literature about the question of Asian values . I select here the arguments

of three Asian intellectuals, who all are Indian or from Indian backgrounds, where the post

colonial studies had been very influential.

The critics of Asian values by Amartya Kumar Sen

Graduated in Economy and philosophy from the University of Calcutta and Trinity College

(Cambridge), he first had been Professor and Head of the Economics Department of the newly

created Jasavpur University in Calcutta in the fifties. Then, he had taught in England and the US

since the beginning of the seventies. He is well known for his contributions to welfare economics,

social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines and indexes of

the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Prize

in Economic Sciences in 1998.

One of his important book was published in 1982: Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement

and Deprivation. 8 In this book, he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but

from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. His interest in famine can be

explained by his personal experience, as a nine-year-old boy during the Bengal famine of 1943 in

which 3 million people perished. Moreover, Sen provided a great contribution in the field of

development economics (social choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and

inequality) in the Human Development Report by the UN Development program, an annual issue that

ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators. 9 Sen's revolutionary idea in his book

The Idea of Justice 10 was the concept of "capability", stressing the importance of public

discussion and arguing that governments should be measured by the concrete capabilities of

their citizens in evaluating various states with regard to justice.

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8 Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press Oxford University Press , 1982 9 Sen, Amartya , On Economic Inequality (expanded ed.). Oxford New York, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1997 [1976] and Inequality Reexamined, New York Oxford New York, Russell Sage Foundation Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1992

10 Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice, London, Penguin, 2009

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Amartya Kumar Sen doesn’t believe in the important cultural dichotomy between Western and

non-Western civilizations on the subject of liberty and rights , contesting the idea of unity of

Asia, characterized, at the opposite, by a great diversity even among the Confucean countries.

To him, the temptation to see Asia as one unit in fact a legacy of the Eurocentric point of view

(Asia/Orient). The rhetoric of cultures, with each "culture" seen in homogenized terms is

criticable: to him, political and religious leaders do not have a monopoly in interpreting local

culture and values: “ There are no quintessential values that apply to this immensely large et

heterogenous population, that differentiate Asians as a group from people in the rest of the

world” . He is against any generalizations about "Western civilization, Asian values," "African

cultures," and insists on the necessity to recognize heterogeneity, diversity within each country

and culture.

He also contest the uniqueness of "Western values", looking backward the History of the West.

He considers the idea of individual freedom as quite recent and not as the result of a long run

western heritage. The value of tolerance or the importance of individual freedom, have been

advocated by few Western philosophers as Aristotle but many others as Plato, St. Augustine

expressed their preference for order and discipline over freedom, as Confucius' thinking.

Moreover these philosophers, excluded women and slaves from these rights, so it is impossible

to speak about the universality of the rights. It also exist in non- Western traditions, particularly

in a great variety of Asian intellectual traditions, ideas of individual freedom and tolerance.

Sen underlines the presence of diversity and variety within each tradition, both Western and non-

Western. Both in Asia and in the West, some have emphasized order and discipline, even as

others have focused on freedom and tolerance. The language of freedom is very important, he

said, in Buddhism: the Indian emperor Ashoka in the third century BC presented many political

inscriptions in favor of tolerance and individual freedom, both as a part of state policy and in the

relation of different people to each other. Sen gives the example of Confucius who was not so

authoritarian: he did believe in order, but he did not recommend blind allegiance to the State

and insisted on the importance of opposition. At least, he gives the example of the Islamic

civilization, often seen as being fundamentally intolerant and hostile to individual freedom. The

Mughal emperors in India were not only extremely tolerant, but some even theorized about the

need for tolerating diversity, as for example the great Mughal emperor Akbar during the

sixteenth century, whereas at the same time the Inquisitions in Europe chased the Jewish away

from Europe to the tolerant Cairo under the patronage of Sultan Saladin. Sen notices: “In seeing

Western civilization as the natural habitat of individual freedom and political democracy, there is

a tendency to extrapolate backwards from the present. Values that the European Enlightenment

and other recent developments since the eighteenth century have made common and widespread

are often seen, quite arbitrarily, as part of the long- run Western heritage, experienced in the

West over millennia. The concept of universal human rights in the broad general sense of

entitlements of every human being is really a relatively new idea, not to be much found either in

the ancient West or in ancient civilizations elsewhere.”

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At least, he contests the supposed link between Asian values and economic development. To

him, some countries had an economic development without being politically controled

(Botswana) and there are cases of famines in authoritarian countries (North Korea). it is the

economic policy and the context of this policy (as the use of international markets, a hight rate

of literacy, successful land reforms, incitation for investments, exportations) which only can

explain the economic success but not values.

The critics of Asian values of Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria is an Indian American journalist graduated from Harvard (Doctor of Philosophy)

who had studied under Samuel P. Huntington. He had been managing editor of Foreign Affairs

and is columnist in many American newspapers (The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, New

York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker…). He is at the moment professor at Columbia

university in International relations; He is the author of many books as The Post-American World

(2008), where he argued that the most important trend of modern times is the "rise of the rest"

with the economic emergence of China, India, Brazil, and other countries. Another book, written

with James F. Hoge, The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern

World Essays from 75 Years of Foreign Affairs, (Basic Books; 1997) was translated into over 25

languages. He is considered by The New Republic as one of the most influential thinker.

To Fareed Zakaria, the Asian "model" is a transitional phenomenon. Western countries also went

through a period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they were capitalist and had

limited participatory democracy. Western elites then worried, as Asian do today, that "too much"

democracy and "too many" individual rights would destabilize social order. But as these societies

modernized and as economic growth spread to all sections of society, things changed. He

underlines the increasing role of a growing middle class in South East Asia that demands a say in

its own future. Fareed Zakaria also insists on the variability of the role of culture: what explains

a culture’s failure in one era and success in another? If Confucianism explains the economic

boom in East Asia today, does it not also explain that region’s stagnation for four centuries?

When East Asia seemed immutably poor, many scholars as Max Weber, arguing that Confucian-

based cultures discouraged all the attributes necessary for success in capitalism. Today scholars

explain how Confucianism emphasizes the essential traits for economic dynamism. To him, when

people cannot find one simple answer to why certain societies succeed at certain times, they

examine successful societies and search within their cultures for the seeds of success. We can

sum up his argument: Cultures being complex, one finds in them what one wants.

Fareed Zakaria analyzes Lee Kuan Yew’s fascination with culture: to him, he is not a man

untouched by the West. Part of his interest in cultural differences is surely that they provide a

coherent defense against what he sees as Western democratic imperialism. A deeper reason to

him lays in his sentence: "We have left the past behind, and there is an underlying unease that

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there will be nothing left of us which is part of the old." Cultures change. Zacharia demonstrates

that most of the attributes that Lee sees in Eastern cultures were once part of the West. Under

the impact of economic growth, technological change and social transformation, no culture

remained the same. Four hundred years of economic growth had also changed the Western

societies: From the very beginning of England’s economic boom, many Englishmen worried that

as their country became rich it was losing its moral and ethical base. 11 It is this "decay" that Lee

is trying to avoid. Speaking about the anxious search for religion in East Asia today, it is in fact,

Zacharia says, a quest for a Confucian alternative to the West because of the fear to lose identity

with progress.

At least, he asserts that it is difficult to be modern without becoming more Western. The West

has left a mark on "the rest" (the non Western world) and it is not simply a legacy of technology

and material products. A great part of the literature about tradition and transformation in Asia,

has been written by Western scholars, that shows that West is not so alien to the Confucian

culture. He also underlines a misunderstanding about the relationship between rights and duties.

It is said that “Asian” morality is based on duties, while “Western” morality is based on rights .

John Locke (17th century) held that everyone has the duty to respect the life and dignity of others.

Rational individuals consent to live under government on condition that it also implements the

same duties. Individualism of the West is often overstated: Western societies constrain

individualism by such collectivities as the family, economic enterprise and nation.

The critics of Asian values of Yash Pal Ghai

Yash Pal Ghai is a Kenyan from Indian origins12, academic in constitutional law, graduated from

Oxford and Harvard University. He was professor in Hong Kong University and has been a Special

Representative of the UN Secretary General in Cambodia. He is the author of numerous books of

Law. 13 Yash Pal Ghai points out that there are also strong communitarian traditions in the West,

including conservatism, democratic socialism and some forms of liberalism. And that Asi an

development strategies, based on strong states and participation in global markets, have also

been destroyed traditional communities. To him, invoking the value of community, therefore,

does not clarify the difference between “Asian” and “Western” values. However, he notices

differences between Malaysians and Westerners, the first being much more strongly rooted in

11 "Wealth accumulates and men decay," wrote Oliver Goldsmith in 1770. 12 His grandparents came from North India, and belong to the ancient waves of migration sp onsored by the British Empire.

13 Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, A Study of the Legal Framework of Government from Colonial

Times to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1971; Hong Kong's New Constitutional Order The Resumption

of Chinese Sovereignty and the Basic Law, Hong Kong Univ Press, 1998; Public Administration and Management in Small States, South Pacific Books, 1990 ; Autonomy and Ethnicity Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-Ethnic States, Cambridge University Press, 2000

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their culture and religion than the second. This is unlike Western communities which believe

strongly in secularism and individualism and religion is relatively secondary in their life.

In conclusion, I would say that there is at the moment a rivalry between value systems and

resurgent norms. Increasing interrelated world needs new paradigms and redesigned norms. In

his book untitled Civilization on Trial published in 1948, the British historian Arnold Joseph

Toynbee already noticed that the Asia’s impact on Western life might be more profound than

that of Communist Russia.

And the division between the “West” and “East” isn’t misleading because these are neve been

two big permanent static blocks? In fact, the dynamic relationships between cultures in the age

of global interactions keep them in a constant state of flux. In his book Can Asians Think? 14

Kishore Mahbubani, a famous Singaporian academic and former diplomat and currently

Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (NUS) considers that after the past two

centuries of Western domination of world history, Asia will return to centre stage again. To him,

many leading global minds do not understand this because their mental maps have been trapped

by narrow Western worldviews. In his last book entitled The Great Convergence: Asia, The West

and the Logic of One World 15, he argues that Asia had lived in an essentially unbalanced world.

“The flow of ideas reflecting 500 years of Western domination of the globe” has been for a long

time a one street (from the West to the East). He criticizes the Western triumphalism after the

end of the Cold War, whereas Western intellectuals were convinced that their minds and cultures

were open, self critical comparing with ossified Asian mind and culture and that “they had no

sacred cows.” He insists on the necessity for the Westerners to begin to see for the first time in

500 years that it was in fact a two way flow in the passage of ideas between the East and the

West.

That‘s why it is urgent to see the world and to write history in a comparative and connected

perspective. Since already some decades, scholars of Postcolonial studies, coming from “the rest

of the world” have questioned the Western supremacy in many fields, in particular in the

historical field, arguing on behalf of their respective cultural traditions and sources . It is now

urgent for Asians and Westerners, to overcome a simplistic dual vision East versus West and to

reconsider the vision of the past, present and future as a connected world with an ancient and

permanent circulation of peoples, ideas and goods.

14 This book has been published in 9 countries of which 2 India, China, Myanmar, Turkey and Malaysia) but

also The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (published in 5 western countries US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ita ly, and 7 in Asia Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam). 15 The Great Convergence: Asia, The West and the Logic of One World , Public Affairs , First Trade Paper, 2014