For two thousand years, Europeans have believed that the Chinese, Africans and all other human beings saw the world as they did, i.e. centered around Europe, and that they were full of admiration for the supposed material and intellectual superiority of Europeans. Over the past century, this sense of planetary centrality has shifted to an idealized Europe, the United States of America, which still thinks of itself as superior to the rest of the world, and is convinced that this superiority is accepted by all other human beings.
In reality, this has never been the case: None of the peoples inhabiting the other continents has ever recognized the superiority of the West, its religion, its legal system or its way of life, even when they had to endure its domination. Just as they have never recognized the superiority of any previous invader.
If we are to have any chance of understanding today’s world, and assessing how others are going to behave, we need to know how each of us sees the world and situates himself in it. So, very briefly, the Russians see themselves as an immense millennial power, envied, encircled, persecuted, martyred, never giving in. Africans see themselves as the first men, the wisest, the first civilized, martyred and enslaved by countless invaders, particularly Arabs and Westerners. Indians see themselves as the oldest civilization in history, the richest and most complex, at the forefront of philosophy and science for millennia. The same could rightly be said of the way Persians, Hebrews, Arabs and many others see themselves. None of them recognizes the superiority of the West.
Today, among all these views, there is one that is particularly important to understand, because it will impose its mark on the world for at least the next three decades: that of Asia.
For modern Asians, who express themselves through their politicians, writers, artists and intellectuals (read at least the books by Kishore Mabhubani[i] and George Yeo), the situation can be summed up as follows: If Western civilization has dominated the world for the last two centuries, it’s an anomaly compared to the last two millennia, which were dominated by Asia. And the 21st century marks a return to the natural pre-eminence of the East. For the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians and others, the West is wrong to believe itself economically and morally superior. It is wrong to think that the simplicity of its monotheism is superior to the polytheistic complexity of Asia. It is wrong to think that its faith in democratic ideals and human rights confers any moral or material superiority. It is also wrong to believe that its values and way of life are universally envied and that it is destined to rule the planet forever. For Asians, the West must come down from its pedestal and accept that it no longer dominates anything. Neither materially, nor politically, nor morally.
Economically, that’s for sure: in fact, from the year 1 to 1820, the world’s two richest economies were those of China and India. And while in 1989, the European Union’s GDP was still ten times greater than China’s, the two have been equal since 2025; by 2050, the EU’s GDP will be half that of China, which since 2016 has also exceeded that of the USA in purchasing power parity and is set to overtake it in real terms before 2040. China is already outpacing the West in most of the technologies of the future, and is training far more engineers than Europe and the USA put together.
It also has good reason to believe that it has returned to the center of world trade: 145 countries, representing two-thirds of the world’s economy, will be trading more with China in 2025 than with the United States.
Politically too: the Western idea that democracy is the best political system, and that everyone will eventually bow to it, is, according to the Asians, an optical illusion. In fact, for Indian and Chinese intellectuals, Asian political doctrines have nothing to envy of the Western democratic model. According to them, Asian political systems are much more tolerant of divergent thought, and have a much better system for selecting elites and leaders, giving far less preference than Westerners to the rich, and far more to the competent. Asians also know how to take into account the interests of the poorest people much better than Westerners, so much so that today, a human being, whoever he or she may be, will choose China and not the United States if asked in which country he or she would prefer to be born, without knowing in which social milieu he or she will end up. It’s true that, since 1980, the American working classes have been declining and suffering from obesity and violence, while China has succeeded in the most extraordinary program to eliminate mass poverty.
Finally, from an Asian point of view, the West’s claim to be the champions of human rights doesn’t hold water when you consider the corruption that reigns there, and the way in which the poorest, minorities, migrants and other vassalized peoples are treated.
The pride a people takes in the rest of the world is essential. It provides the motivation that drives innovation and growth.
Westerners have a lot to answer for. In fact, the Western model has become the norm in Asia, where more than ever, people dream of living the life of an American petit bourgeois as it exists only in films and TV series. And the West has good reason to fight to avoid being won over by the vertigo of illiberalism, the antechamber to the Asian models of despotism of which those who crush their own peoples are so proud.
As ever, the future will largely be determined by a fairytale battle, sometimes pompously referred to as a “struggle of civilizational models”. Whoever believes in his or her own will win.
[i] Living the Asian Century, an undiplomatic memoir
Kishore Mahbubani, Hachette book group