The Western vision of the world originally assumed (two hundred years ago) its civilizational and cultural homogenization based on Western values. This is the stigma attached to universalism. And capitalism, spreading around the world since the 19th century, and its globalizing vocation were supposed to objectively homogenize cultures because they required a uniform ethics of management and making money. It was also naively believed that capitalism would promote the democratization of societies. However, it turned out that even today capitalism in its state (China) or oligarchic (Ukraine, Moldova) version has suppressed democracy.
However, the sunset of the West did not have to occur for the belief that the cultural Westernization of the world would never happen. Different regions would preserve their identity. But what if these identities begin to clash? The spectre of a world split into opposing civilization blocks has disturbed international relations researchers since the end of the Cold War. Huntington described the clash of civilizations as the axis of world politics for years to come. While the so-called the Islamic civilization would be united by values organically growing out of religion, the Sinocentric civilization would have a mainly cultural background (Confucian and others). Huntington’s prophecies haunt even today. Quite recently Netanyahu attempted to define the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms of the clash of civilizations.
It was from East and Southeast Asia that the most coherent ideological opposition to the Western concept of values emerged in the 1990s.
The concept of the so-called Asian values emerged out of political need. After the collapse of the world communist system and the discrediting of the communist ideology itself, it was necessary to find a new ideological cover for the authoritarian and dictatorial regimes operating in Asia. For this purpose, the concept of the so-called Asian values was conceived. The dialogue on the global forum on democracy and human rights has once again become politically divisive. Fukuyama’s vision of liberal values as the final stage of civilizational development has been contested.
Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew became the prophets of a new Asian cultural identity. Not the freedom of the individual and his egoistic aspirations, but political stability and social order became the priority in their policy, because only economic growth could be based on them. And economic growth for poor societies is the mother of all priorities. In practice, these theses received a huge blow as a result of the so-called Asian economic crisis in 1997-1998. But they were quickly revived thanks to China’s economic success. The so-called the Beijing Consensus was coined, which states that growth and prosperity can be ensured more effectively under authoritarian rule.
China’s economic achievements gave it self-confidence in politics and made its voice more assertive in the debate on human rights. China did not want to dodge the debate. The Chinese had a strong argument behind them, not so much related to communist ideology and the thesis about the superiority of social rights over political rights, exploited by the Soviets in the 1950s, but based on the so-called Asian values, the axiom of the superiority of collective rights over individual rights. And moreover, by developing an unprecedented foreign aid campaign in Asian and African countries, they gained support in UN debates. Chinese aid provided on a no-strings-attached basis weakened Western pressure for democratic reforms in the developing countries. Doubts had to grow as to whether the so-called Western values are the best solution for everyone.
The fundamental mistake was for the West to enter into pointless comparison discussions with China and the Global South and banter about whose values are better. And to do it with its usual touch of megalomania.
Of course, the so-called Asian values have the right to exist whatever they may mean. But they in no way necessarily contradict Western values.
Certainly, both in China and in other Asian societies, there is a strongly rooted respect for authority, the demand for discipline and submission to authority, and acceptance of hierarchy. Mao himself had to somehow look for justification for the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, and he found it in the need to drastically crush traditional social habits that served as a barrier to communism.
Extreme tribalism is undoubtedly an anachronism practiced in many Asian countries. But not the only one.
Because isn’t the caste system an anachronism in India (or in Nepal) that has been carried around for centuries? It creates a community of almost 70 million Dalits, deprived of a sense of equal dignity and socially disadvantaged. In total, it is said that over 150 million people blindly apply the caste code. It is constitutionally outlawed in India and every Indian government does its best to uproot its relics.
Or take the female genital mutilation. The Malaysian government itself estimates that over 80 percent Islamic female children (newborns) undergo circumcision, and in Indonesia – almost 50%. Girls’ genital mutilation is common among the Bohra community in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Or look at the women rights discrimination practised by the Taliban.
And seppuku as a right and duty of the samurai class in Japan (fortunately not practised for several decades)?
But it is not on such anomalies that the so-called Asian values are based after all. Nobody in his sober mind would link them to such values at all.
Because the requirement of blind obedience, caste discrimination, religion-based mutilation or honorary suicides cannot be included in the concept of values. Even if they have been practised for millennia.
If we look honestly, both in the East and in the West, the core concept of human rights is the dignity of the human individual. Everything else is a cultural superstructure.
Therefore, in practice, it is convincingly seen that belief in Dharma does not prevent the building of democracy in Thailand, and the teachings of Confucius do not complicate the functioning of democracy in Taiwan, and the alleged lack of the word “rights” in Sanskrit does not prevent reference to human rights in India. Perhaps, as Fukuyama wrote, the divine origins of China’s empire make it difficult there to understand the concept of “the rule of law.” Perhaps the merging of secular and religious power practised at the dawn of Islam, as Fukuyama described, made the progress of democracy so difficult not only among Arabs and Persians, but even among Pakistanis. Perhaps Buddhism is not conducive to building strong and efficient state apparatuses. Nevertheless, the emancipation of the human individual, catalysed by his rise from poverty and access to information technologies, is a universal and irreversible phenomenon. And emancipation means promoting self-awareness. And where there is self-awareness, there is dignity. Where there is dignity, there is the desire for freedom. And the desire for freedom will always lead to democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
Of course, Chinese (and not only Chinese) propagandists have long stopped arguing that democracy as such will always be at odds with communitarism, respect for authority, collective obedience and discipline, promoted by the so-called Asian values. Just as Putin invented the ideological prosthesis of “managed democracy” for state capture, they began to promote “minben” as a form of Asian democracy, an alternative to Western liberal democracy. While in a liberal democracy, power is legitimised by elections, in a Minben democracy, power is legitimised by its achievements.
And Chinese experts more actively than anyone, bashed Western electoral democracy without restraint. According to them, it produces only chaos and tensions, it is in fact the rule of the rich, the dictatorship of capital. And their leaders felt so confident that they no longer needed the excuse of Asian values to cover their oppressive own policy.
Minben, in contrast, is identified with meritocratic power. The same Fukuyama admitted that when it comes to making large-scale decisions under time pressure, meritocracy beats democracy. But COVID-19, although it initially served the Chinese as a manifestation of the effectiveness of their authoritarian government in dealing with its consequences, led to a renewed spread of the pandemic, which was embarrassing for the authorities, when Western societies had already basically dealt with it, and in addition the government’s policy had triggered public anger and protests.
One thing is certain: for the West, the so-called Asian values are not a threat. Attempts to transplant them to our soil are doomed to failure. Well, maybe they will be smuggled in in the form of some Eurasianism. But even in Russia their elites will not openly admit to follow pure the so-called Asian patterns. Even in Central Asia, political elites will not identify themselves with them so openly.
I once called for intensifying intercultural dialogue with Asia. The West made an attempt to talk to the world of Islam (dialogue of civilizations), but left the Asian world to itself. The West also did not try to create common political projects with Asia, for example in the field of the rule of law. It once seemed to me that the obvious proposal for a global joint action with Asia should be the fight against corruption. I was not surprised when Armenian experts, trying (with European Union funds) to study and transfer good anti-corruption practices to their home soil, did not take Polish or Romanian (transformational) solutions as models worth imitating, but the institutional and legal mechanisms of Singapore and Hong Kong or the Philippines. However, no joint initiatives have been attempted in this regard.
After decades of debating exercises on the so-called international forums, I came to the conclusion that discussions about the so-called liberal values and the so-called Asian values only legitimize the distortion of the universal nature of dignity rights. So now I advise not to engage in discussion, to remove the topic from political debates. Just talk on the basis of international law and legal standards.
Another issue is how Western identity will continue to evolve. Huntington treated North American and European civilizations as a unity, a solid block. And yet there are subtle cracks in this block. The community of global political interests of the West made the cracks almost invisible. Will these splits become more severe?
The fundamental question is whether the West is a real construct not only as a political community, but also as an axiological community.
The US-European Union dialogue on democracy, human rights and the rule of law is very intense. However, it concerns primarily third countries and the possibility of joint Western action on global forums in this field. There is little discussion about differences between each other, although they are taken note of, for example the issue of abolition of the death penalty. It is a publicly known point where the parties’ positions clearly diverge. We also look at social rights differently in the USA and in Europe, differently at the limits of freedom of speech, and differently at restorative justice (penitentiary policy, etc.).
However, one may sometimes get the impression that in recent years the axiological paths of European and American societies have increasingly diverged. Europe has clearly accelerated its liberalization course, legalizing abortion on demand, euthanasia and same-sex marriage. Liberalization is taking place in a socially peaceful manner, even if there are political forces contesting this course. In the United States, for example on the issue of abortion, there has been a conservative backlash, now being politically reacted to in many states, the society is deeply divided, and the dispute sometimes takes the form of a culture war.
Will these differences between European and American societies deepen? The European and American approaches to human affairs, democracy and the rule of law have obvious and strong common roots. The French Revolution and the American Revolution were sister off-springs of the Enlightenment and the concept of natural rights. It is true that conceptually, for years, human rights in the USA have been identified more with the so-called constitutional rights, and in Europe they were extended (under the undoubted influence of socialist ideology) to socio-economic rights.
Sensitivity to discrimination, inequality and intolerance developed differently in the USA and in Europe. For years, Europe has been particularly sensitive to the effects of class division (especially in Great Britain, France, Germany), and the United States – to the racial division. Growing disparities in income have only recently drawn attention to class differences in the USA, and the mass influx of emigrants to Europe has made us aware of the role of the factor of ethno-religious differences. The specificity of immigration to the USA (the main stream comes from Latin America) means that religion (Christianity) has become the main shock absorber of ethnic tensions. In Europe, religious diversity (the main influx of migrants are Muslims) increases ethnic tensions.
European and American societies are going through a period of turbulent change. The turbulence results from demographic, technological, ecological and, above all, economic changes (slowing growth). Each society reacts in its own way. Will the resulting changes in social moods translate into politics? After all, Trump declared in the past the European Union an adversary, an enemy (at least in the field of trade).
Will populists on both sides of the Atlantic destroy not only the European Union, but also the West as such?
The most important difference with political connotations between Europe and the USA, which translates into the approach to human rights and the rule of law, is a different approach to the role of international tribunals and international law in ensuring the application of rights. Not only does the United States see no guarantee in international law for securing human rights in the United States, but it also a priori rejects the possibility of submitting itself to the jurisdiction of supranational tribunals. If we, as the West, are to push the world towards an axiological community, if we are to create the foundations of a new global management system, then the paths of the USA and Europe may unfortunately diverge. And if they split up, will there be no space for shared bold visions of the future?
And I see this belief in America’s absolute sovereignty that stands above all else as a serious obstacle to building the institution of “One World”, even when the autocratic camp collapses and true democracy reigns in Russia, China and the Islamic world, and in Sub-Saharan Africa the army is restricted to barracks forever.
Where a separation between Europe and the US would be desirable is undoubtedly the issue of Europe taking full responsibility for the state of democracy and human rights in the broadly understood area of Europe. During the decades of the Cold War, the United States was primarily the guarantor of the fight for human rights in (communist) Europe. Obviously, only the American voice had the power that the Soviets and the totalitarian regimes in their zone had to reckon with. However, it turned out that in the last thirty years, when it came to strongly expressing disagreement with human rights violations, whether in Russia or elsewhere, Europe again looked to the USA and waited for it to speak up. In recent years, and certainly since Trump’s presidency, Europe has fortunately stopped looking the other way. Even if the Council of Europe has an anemic voice, the European Union, primarily concerned about its own cohesion, has been forced to “strategic autonomy” in the policy of human rights and democracy.
The mother of all laws in international relations is entropy. It means a progressive fragmentation of identities and interests. But also the convergence of entities in international relations.
Supporters of the new theory of convergence, this time called great convergence, were inspired to make bold theses by the development breakthrough that took place in China and other Asian countries. And its supporters also appeared in the countries of the Global South. They believed in the One World vision.
They derived its inevitability from economic globalization, the tightening of the network of economic connections, and the tendency to create a single world market. They noticed that globalization serves to make up for economic and technological backwardness, equalizes living standards, allows the South catch up and even overtake the West. And if only the West would stop talking about the Washington Consensus, values and democratic standards. So they began to reassure the West that this new unified world would inevitably harmonize in terms of rules as well. Because technological progress will result in the primacy of modern science, the principles of logical reasoning, a new social contract and the principle of multilateralism in international politics being established everywhere. And if this is to happen inevitably, the West should stop its policy of ostracism, isolation and sanctions against countries that have not yet matured to Western expectations.
In these “Eastern” visions of One World, there is no place for axiological considerations. This vision contains obvious contradictions in the reasoning. On the one hand, it is shown that in all emerging economies there is a transition to the Western model of university life and the associated requirement of rationality, but it is omitted that the Western model does not necessarily apply in some countries to the social sciences, where freedom of scientific research and expression is still visibly restricted. However, the West is to be reassured by the prospect of the inevitable emergence of a common global ethic, based on the principle “don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you.” And entrusting the new meritocracy the reins of government in the world will give us all confidence in the right course to a better world. Procedure and legitimacy (democracy!) will not be important, but qualifications and effectiveness (so-called output legitimacy) will be important, they claim. And, according to them, there is no point in debating about improving democracy. The future is meritocracy. Because technological progress will inevitably bring it to power. And it will be a totally globally converged meritocracy. More on the fact that this is just another false illusion related to Pax Technologica soon.
