Vision Of A Continent

IT is conference season in London and I have been attending policy and strategy sessions with professionals from all over Asia. Meeting fellow Asians in another continent is an interesting experience. We are as curious about each other as the Europeans are about us. There is ample opportunity to satisfy this curiosity, as Europeans (in general) tend to treat 'Asians' as a homogeneous group, with 'Asian values'.

This leads to Asians clustering together during coffee breaks and cocktails, and meeting informally in the evenings. We talk a lot about the 'Asian values' that Europeans endow us all with. What are Asian values? Do we share the same values?

Ask a European and you get a two-part answer. Asian values are moral and economic. Moral values include respect for the family, deference to seniority and a desire for social order even at the expense of democratic dissent. Economic values include hard work, a desire for technological superiority and a strong corporate culture.

Talk to other Asians and things are not so clear cut. Korea and Japan have high divorce and suicide rates, plus an alcohol problem. Youth militancy, drug addiction and prostitution bedevil all the Asian 'tigers'. Corruption is as much of a problem in these countries as in India and a recent survey ranked Indonesia (not India or Bangladesh!) as the most corrupt Asian country. The subcontinent is democratic but 'hard work' is not a virtue that we normally credit ourselves with, what with our abundance of national holidays. And many Asians envy Indian democracy.

This pooling of experiences leads to an inevitable conclusion. 'Asian values' are a western concept. The desire to find answers for the rise of the continent as an economic power has led to some simplistic and lazy generalising. Unfortunately, many of us from the subcontinent also generalise about Asian values, perhaps for the same reasons as the Europeans.

Is there any common ground, then? I think there is, though not of the sort that western elites are comfortable with. An important point of departure is the way the individual is viewed. In the West the individual is treated in a compartmental fashion. The State has no business intervening in the market, nor do managers treat workers as anything more than inputs in the production process.

In Asia, things have been different. The individual is treated as part of a social framework that includes family, State and local community. Certainly, feudalism, casteism, gender inequality and other forms of exploitation have been rampant in Asia as much as anywhere else. Yet, the philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism and South Asian reform movements encourage inclusive solutions to economic and social problems rather than compartmentalised ones. For this reason, Asian notions of individual emancipation share a vision of a responsible community, where collective action is desirable and inclusiveness is paramount.

Within western thought, the popular brand of philosophy among contemporary elites is utilitarianism, the cornerstone of mainstream economics. Utilitarianism emphasises maximisation of individual satisfaction and the right of the individual to be selfish in the pursuit of happiness. With the decline in the popularity of socialism in these countries, the only philosophy that exists is utilitarianism. Indian elites, too, are increasingly seduced by utilitarian thinking.

This difference in moral thinking has important implications for the political and economic choices that we have to make. A consequence of utilitarian-style thinking is the That cherite and Reaganite notion that the State must always play a minimal role in shaping political and economic institutions. The result is some sort of shopkeepers' vision of the political economy where the problems of economic policy are reduced to those of a shopping centre. Consumers demand goods and services which are produced by the market, while the State manages the infrastructure and polices the shopping centre. The IMF and the World Bank have sought to extend this logic to developing nations as well. Some of our own intellectuals have embraced this simplistic shopkeepers' vision with a naivete that's breathtaking. However, this is not, and cannot be, the Asian way.

Countries aren't shopping centres. They can't run like shopping centres any more than an aircraft company or a computer firm can, and for a similar reason: they need to anticipate the future. This requires strategic thinking. Strategic thinking requires vision and policy. Japanese and Korean policymakers have been at one with Nehru and Mahathir in asserting the importance of strategic vision in economic development. This strategic vision is provided by a State that is dynamic and inclusive. The Japanese have for long been unhappy with the monotone prescription of State-downsizing offered by multilaterals. Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China and Malaysia all have active, interventionist States.

Now these countries do not have scandal-free politics, nor are their bureaucracies any more or less competent than ours. The difference lies in the fact that the Asian tigers do not equate reform with downsizing. They also take economic statecraft seriously.

Our evenings often end with an agreement about what Asian values could be. Concern for the underprivileged, communities that reject exclusive notions of nationalism (like communalism) and accept the need for affirmative action and an active, visionary, policymaking State that works through consensus and not despotism. We also agree that none of us have all these things but at least we know what we are looking for. And that we have a lot to learn from each other. 
* (The author is a political economist at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)