Asia today

Asia today

For the first time since the rise of the international system, it appears possible to say that Asia is moving from being an object of history to a subject. Colonialism was the most obvious sense in which the continent was turned into an unwilling appendage of others' economies, politics, values and wars. Asia was an object of colonial interest, degradation and remolding. Even after formal decolonization, its destiny was tied ultimately to the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism, and large parts of it suffered directly from the proxy battles between the superpowers.

It is only now, after the end of the Cold War, that it has an opportunity to become an actor in its own right, the author of its own destiny, an autonomous subject of world history. This is not so much because Asia has a monopoly of wisdom or virtue. It is because technological change, particularly in the areas of communication and transport, and global investment and trade patterns look set to favor what was a rich continent full of poor people.

There are two quite contradictory, but equally harmful, approaches that some quarters in the West adopt towards Asian voices. One approach is to dismiss them as the ephemeral pretensions of a global nouveau riche that is trying to talk back to the world's old wealth. The other approach is to profess fear over the rise of an Asia which, to the extent that it refuses to toe a Western line on democracy and human rights, is avowedly a threat to the Western system.

-- The Straits Times, Singapore