27 OCTOBER 2000
LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS
IIAS Annual Lecture
Asia and Western Dominance
On 27 October 2000, Professor Deepak Lal of the University of California was welcomed to Leiden, the Netherlands, by the IIAS to deliver the Annual Lecture. Entitled 'Asia and Western Dominance: Retrospect and Prospect', a shortened version of the text is presented here.
* By DEEPAK LAL
I am deeply honoured to deliver this year's annual lecture of this Institute. My theme is the complex interrelationships between the great Eurasian civilizations since the Age of Discovery. When a young student of history at St Stephen's College in Delhi, Sardar K.M.Panikkar's Asia and Western Dominance (1953) had fired my imagination. As I joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1963, Jawaharlal Nehru paid us probationers a visit, asking if we had read Panikkar's book, and I was pleased to be able to say I had. Panikkar's book representing the Indian establishment's view of the world around 1950 is the basis for this lecture in which I mainly want to outline the lineaments of an emerging confrontation between Asia and the West. I will look at the historic engagement between the great Eurasian civilizations since the voyages of discovery and examine the extent to which the hopes of an independent and strong Asia, melding its own traditions with the modernity that the West had forced on it, have been achieved.
Panikkar distinguishes five periods in the West's modern engagement with Asia. It began as a crusade. The Portuguese strove to outflank Muslim power and cut off the lucrative spice trade from the Muslims who, by rapid conquest, had gained control over the traditional trading routes through the Levant. Notwithstanding their supremacy at sea, the Portuguese could maintain only those few outposts on land that were tolerated by the native rulers.
This crusading period came to an end with the Reformation. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, trade was the West's main interest and evangelization was definitely on the wane. In this period, Western powers were content to set up trading outposts on the coast and whenever they sought to extend their territory they got a bloody nose.
Then came the age of conquest (1750-1857) initiated by the British in India. While reigning supreme at sea, the western powers were, even without overwhelming military power on land, able to take advantage of the crumbling of the Moghul and Manchu empires' central authority and the collapse of much of these empires into warlordism
Foreign merchants were often aided by the native merchant class, which had grown rich and powerful as their agents. As Panikkar sardonically remarks, the famed battle of Plassey in 1757 was 'a transaction, not a battle, a transaction by which the compradors of Bengal, led by Jagat Seth, sold the nawab to the East India Company' (p.100). The subsequent conquest of India and the carving up of China has left a fear of fissiparous tendencies and of the native mercantile and commercial classes in the historical memories of the contemporary elite in these countries.
The next phase from the mid-nineteenth century till the Great War was the high noon of Empire. The imperial powers particularly the British in India and the Dutch in Indonesia now had to administer vast territories. This resulted in the need to create modern administrations, which led to the introduction of the Rule of Law, a principle fully alien to the native legal traditions, hence producing the need for a large body of indigenous administrators. In his famous minute on education, Macaulay stated the aim to raise a native English-educated middle class 'who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern: a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.' Looking at me you can see how far he succeeded!
Nationalism and retreat
The creation of an English-speaking class of creoles also led to the rise of nationalism so characteristic of the period of retreat from the Great War until, in India, 15 August 1947. Here, Panikkar is understandably rather romantic in his views for, as Benedict Anderson has cogently argued, most Asian nationalism was in reality a creole revolt similar to that in the Americas.
In India, Macaulay's children, like the American creole elite, had an irremediable, inferior status, despite being English in every respect except 'in blood and colour'. They too had first sought to remove the restrictions on their advancement. Only when these demands fell on deaf ears, sounded the cry for full independence. This feeling of exclusion among the Macaulay's children, which in large part provoked the nationalist revolt against Western domination, was heightened by both missionary zeal and the doctrine of racial superiority that the British, in particular, adopted during the high noon of their empire.
As I showed in my Hindu Equilibrium, the economic effects of the Raj's liberal, free trade policies were generally benign. Similarly in China, a thriving indigenous class of entrepreneurs and capitalists grew up, particularly around Shanghai in the interwar years. Nonetheless, most of the nationalist Asian elite came to have a profound suspicion of commerce and free trade, forced upon China and Japan by unequal treaties. So, taking the Russian revolution as a role model, many nationalists wished to keep the good things the West had brought: science, technology, modern legal traditions, and large multi-ethnic nation states (India and Indonesia), while throwing off the yoke of Christianity, free trade, and extraterritoriality. Surely, Asia was going to be reborn.
Economic failure
These hopes were to be belied. Instead of a period of peace and growing prosperity, Asia has since seen turmoil and mayhem, much worse than anything during western dominance. The major fault line was economic, with failures flowing from the adoption of the Russian model of development in India and China and with newly independent populations suffering under predatory, local tyrants. There was an alternative 'Asian' model, pioneered by Japan, which delivered the Asian miracle in the 1970's and 1980's in some of the 'Gang of Four' countries. But its internal weaknesses finally came out in the recent Asian crisis.
Then entered the IMF. This institution has increasingly become the international debt collector for foreign banks, as well as an important tool of US foreign policy. Though couched in terms of economic efficiency and the need for good governance, the West is using commerce and bank-funding conditions as a form of extraterritoriality to promote its own morality, thus provoking resistance. An understandable nationalist backlash could easily turn into the economic nationalism that in the past half century has blighted Asia's economic prospects.
Culture and development
I recently argued in Unintended Consequences that the rise of the West was associated with its material and cosmological beliefs changing from the common Eurasian pattern. This change was due to two Papal revolutions: the first inaugurated individualism and the second paved the way for an efficient market economy, and eventually for the Industrial Revolution.
Though in the West the change in cosmological and material beliefs was conjoined, there was no necessity for this conjunction. Once the institutional bases for an efficient market economy are known, they can be adopted by societies that do not share the same cosmological beliefs. It is thus possible to modernize without westernizing. But this is not found acceptable by our modern-day, western moral crusaders particularly in the US. Given its domestic homogenizing tendencies, the US (along with various other western countries) is attempting to legislate its 'habits of the heart' around the world: 'human rights', democracy, egalitarianism, labour and environmental standards. These so-called universal values are actually part of a culture-specific, proselytizing ethic of what remains at heart western Christendom.
A continuing narrative
Nowhere can this continuity be seen as clearly as in the attempts to foist on the world the green agenda under the slogan of 'sustainable development'. The proposed ban on burning fossil fuels will hurt India and China the most, posing serious threats to their possibilities of developing. The Greens oppose both forms of 'capitalism' the free trade promoted by Smith, as well as continued burning of fossil fuels, underlying intensive growth, and carrying the potential of eradicating mass structural poverty thereby leaving little hope for the world's poor.
It would take us too far afield to substantiate this argument in any detail but since Augustine's City of God, the West has been haunted by its cosmology. Notwithstanding the death of the Christian God, since Nietzsche, the theme of Augustine's 'City' was to go through further mutations in the form of Marxism and Freudianism, and the most recent and bizarre, Eco-fundamentalism, which has replaced God with Nature. But why should the rest of the world subscribe to this continuing Augustinian narrative cloaked in different secular guises?
Another western mantra is that democracy is required to protect the individual property rights, essential for economic development. The post-war development experience of twenty-five developing countries (Lal-Myint 1996) displayed no relationship between the form of government and economic performance, nor is democracy likely to be an inevitable byproduct of development, as many hope particularly with reference to China. If democracy is to be preferred as a form of government, it is not for being instrumental in promoting prosperity at times it was not but for promoting liberty: another western value.
Finally, with regard to 'human rights', the West is convinced of their universality, but with US unwilling and the United Nations too weak to maintain global peace, the hope now is to resurrect a form of extraterritoriality in the name of human rights. The various tribunals being set up for Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo are symptomatic of this trend. Yet, even in the West, the moral theory justifying human rights remains elusive. Civilizations with very different cosmological beliefs will not readily accept that a particular western ethical predilection has any universal validity. The western attempt to force its cosmological beliefs on the rest will be fiercely resisted, and might even lead to a backlash against globalization if, like free trade in the past, it comes to be linked to new variants of Christianity and extraterritoriality.
Future thoughts
In its modern encounter with Asia, the West has sought to change ancient civilizations to its own image. Asians, beginning with Japan, have seen the utility of adopting the West's material beliefs. But they have resisted attempts to change their cosmological beliefs, and continue to do so. Panikkar rightly foresaw: 'though the influence of Europe and the penetration of new ideas have introduced vast changes in Asia, and may lead to even greater changes, Asian civilizations will continue to develop their marked individuality and remain spiritually and intellectually separate from Christian Europe' (p.506).
The current moral crusades in the name of the environment and human rights are part of an old story of the encounter between Asia and the West. They will again be resisted but, meanwhile, they have the potential of causing grave disorder and setting back the worldwide victory of the West's material beliefs, the acceptance whereof promises to abolish the ancient scourge of mass poverty in Asia. *
References
B.Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, London: Verso (1991).
A.Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th century,
New Haven: Yale University Press (1989).
D.Lal, The Hindu Equilibrium,
Oxford: Clarendon Press (1988), 2 vols.
D.Lal, 'Ecofundamentalism', International Affairs, vol. 71, July (1995), pp. 22-49.
D.Lal, Unintended Consequences: The impact of factor endowments, culture and politics on long-run economic performance, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1998).
D.Lal and H.Myint, The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth: A comparative study, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1996).
K.M.Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, London: Allen and Unwin (1953).
Professor Deepak Lal is the James S. Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
E-mail: dlal@ucla.edu