Back to the future

Back to the future

Ho Kwon Ping
The Straits Times, 10 December 2008

AS IF the demise of American-style capitalism was not enough, more bad news about 'the new declinism' of the American global order recently made the front page. The United States National Intelligence Council's (NIC's) periodic global trends report caused The Guardian to headline: '2025: the end of US dominance'.

The fact that it was the NIC that issued this prediction was probably more shocking than its conclusion. After all, the observation that 2025 would see 'a world in which the US plays a prominent role in global events, but is seen as one among many global actors' would be surprising only to the most die-hard advocates of the American Imperium. But because modern history has always been about the inexorable rise of Western civilisation, it has been difficult for many Westerners to conceive of a world where multiple civilisations co-existed.

History teaches us that we can look back to see the future: Around 150 years ago, an event of enormous significance occurred, but it passed without notice. 1852 was the year when, for the first time in human history, one of the world's major nations had more of its people living in cities than in the countryside. That country happened to be England.

Over the next 100 years, England rapidly advanced to become the world's pre-eminent imperial power. That it was the first and most urbanised nation in the world was a major contributor towards its dominance. The massive rural-tourban migration provided human fodder for Britain's factories, army and navy, as well as consumers for Britain's industrial revolution. The notion of a working class, which was to lead to the fierce ideological conflicts of the 20th century, was entirely a result of urbanisation.

What is the point of this historical anecdote? Well, the very same trend which propelled little England to become one of the world's most powerful empires is now playing out in the world's largest country, China.

Today, 40 per cent of China's population is already living in cities. When the Chinese Communist Party assumed power in 1949, only 12 per cent cent did. Every year now, from 25 million to 30 million Chinese villagers move to the cities. Within the next 10 years, 300 million to 500 million of them - more than the entire population of Western Europe - will have made that journey. By 2015, China will reach the same tipping point as England did in 1852.

The same is happening in India, though at a slightly slower pace. In 1950, marginally more Indians lived in cities than did Chinese - roughly 17 per cent compared to China's 12 per cent. But by 2015, when more than half of China will be urban, only one-third of Indians will live in cities. Only around 2050 will India reach the rural-urban tipping point.

Whether urbanisation is the cause or the consequence of powerful socio- economic trends - or whether urbanisation brings more social ills than progress - is not relevant. What is important is that urbanisation is a leading indicator of rapid, though not necessarily equitable, economic development.

This demographic trend is so inexorable, we will see not just the economic or political resurgence of Asia but a paradigm shift in civilisational relationships.

Civilisations are not just about geopolitical or economic power. They involve value systems and belief structures. The past 200 years have witnessed the dominance of Western civilisation, through a combination of military and technological prowess, backed by vibrant political and economic systems.

The weight of demographic evidence indicates the re-emergence of two ancient Asian civilisations to global prominence. Economic and political change occurs in short-wave cycles; civilisations rise and fall in very long-wave cycles. The decline of Asia took 200 years; its rise will be equally long.

What will the world look like then? There will be a re-balancing of economic and political power, obviously. But more fundamentally, Western cultural norms will no longer be the yardstick by which non-Western societies measure themselves. We will see a world with competing value systems, rather than the sanitised, homogeneous globalisation that Davos-philes imagined.

To glimpse what the world will look like in the next century, we have to ironically go back 300 years, to the 17th century. That was the last century when the world was not dominated by any single civilisation. Let's take a look at a random year - say 1652, exactly 200 years before the seminal year of 1852.

In 1652, Oliver Cromwell crowned himself protector of England. The Tokugawa shogunate in Japan celebrated its first 50 years of power. The Manchu dynasty in China, only 10 years old then, was still virile and innovative. The Taj Mahal had just been completed in India. Isaac Newton had yet to discover gravity and the Islamic and East Asian civilisations were more advanced in science than Europe. These four cultures - Chinese, Indian, Islamic and the Western - had contacts with one another but none was dominant.

Fast forward 100 years later to 1752. That year the British East India Company seized Bengal. A decade later the steam engine was patented and not long after the cotton gin was invented, launching the Industrial Revolution. The Age of Reason, leading to a most unreasonable Age of Imperialism, was about to dawn. Another 100 years later, England became the most urbanised nation in the world, which propelled it (and the West in general) to become the world's dominant economic, military and political power. Despite two devastating world wars in the last century, this dominance lasted another century, till the anti-colonial movements of the mid 20th century.

The 1652 world, when no civilisation was dominant, is a world that non-Western societies can easily handle, and perhaps even long for. To the West, such a world might seem slightly unnerving, perhaps even frightening.

Allow me at this point to be provocative. China, and to a lesser extent India, will be a major player in this re-ordering of world civilisations. Islam will be the other. Both are coming at it from totally different directions: Asia from outside the Western framework, and Islam, ironically, from within.

If there is a clash of civilisations, it will not occur in the Middle East. The most profound encounters between Islam and the West today is not occurring in Lebanon or Gaza. It is occurring in the immigrant enclaves in Birmingham in Britain or Detroit in the US - within the very heart of Western civilisation. The fact that recent terrorist arrests in Europe have involved native-born nationals is significant.

The challenges to Western civilisation are real. Whether they result in a 'clash of civilisations', as Samuel Huntington envisages, or a peaceful transition to a new world order with multiple centres of power, each governed by its own cultural norms, will depend on the willingness of the West to accommodate the new powers.

If the transition is to be peaceful, the Western world must acknowledge three basic mindset changes.

First, the fact that Western civilisation has dominated the globe for several hundred years, does not necessarily make it the natural order of things. One would think this is a no-brainer, but the speeches of some Western leaders suggest that concepts like 'manifest destiny' are still very much alive, especially among so-called neo-conservatives in the US.

Second, it is very likely that 100 years from now the world will again resemble the world of 1652, with no dominant civilisation. Whether there will be, as globalisation advocates predict, a single world culture, or competition between different but interconnected civilisations, remains to be seen - but we should not assume it will be the former.

Third, what happens in the next 10 years is likely to shape the future, as an increasingly assertive Asia finds itself blocked by a resistant West, and a disillusioned Muslim minority within the West rejects Western civilisational values.

What should responsible Western intellectuals and companies do? For a start, they can be the midwives, rather than the abortionists, of a new world order with several competing, broadly equal and constantly interacting civilisations.

And what we all need to do is remember that the greatest lesson of history is not that demographics is a great shaper of trends - which indeed it is - but that the cause of the downfall of every single civilisation since time immemorial has been hubris.

Hubris - that quality of believing what you want to believe of yourself; that singular lack of self-doubt which eventually clouds wisdom and overrides our better judgment - that is the greatest danger civilisations, East and West, face.

The writer is chairman of the board of trustees of the Singapore Management University. Think-tank is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures in Singapore's tertiary and research institutions.

It is very likely that 100 years from now the world will again resemble the world of 1652, with no dominant civilisation. Whether there will be, as globalisation advocates predict, a single world culture, or competition between different but interconnected civilisations, remains to be seen - but we should not assume it will be the former.

Copyright 2008 Singapore Press Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Published by OneSource Information Services, Inc., December 2008