The US and China continued a kind of prewar ritual during the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit held in Papua New Guinea at the weekend.
For the first time since 1993 the summit failed to produce a formal written declaration because of a stand-off between “western powers pushing back" against China’s increased influence in the world, according to The Australian newspaper.
The reported dispute was between Mike Pence, US President Donald Trump’s deputy, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Details of the confrontation filtered through the newswires over the weekend. I should say “through the internet”, but I am of a generation that remembers standing at a bank of tickers spilling long sheets of news reports from around the world on to the newsroom floor.
On the surface, the dispute was about regional influence, international economic relations, global co-operation and the multilateral system, especially the rules that underpin the World Trade Organisation. A deeper issue at stake, which everyone has probably internalised, at least intellectually, is the shift in power “from West to East”. You can throw a stick in any direction and hit a comment on, or a panic over, this shift.
Astute observers may have been following the braggadocio of liberal triumphalism, evidenced by Steven Pinker’s rather middle-brow praise of the enlightenment, rationalism and scientism, and the celebratory suggestion that ‘now is the best time to be alive’.
More specifically, it is the apparent decline of Europe and North America in global affairs, and the rise of mainly China and India. Although Russia, Brazil, and an arriviste SA may want to believe they are central to the challenge against the West.
This specific change lies at the heart of two deeper shifts that are under way. If you will pardon me, they are philosophical and historical shifts. It is about what we think or how we feel about the decline of “the idea of the West”, which we have come to associate with European enlightenment and modernity and all things good and great, from the internal combustion engine to the smartphone.
Astute observers may have been following the braggadocio of liberal triumphalism, evidenced by Steven Pinker’s rather middle-brow praise of the enlightenment, rationalism and scientism, and the celebratory suggestion that “now is the best time to be alive”.
We just will not tell that to homeless people and those who are on food stamps in the US; people sleeping in doorways in Greece; displaced people in Syria; the Rohingya, who are being driven from their homes in Myanmar; migrants on the Mediterranean; Palestinians in Gaza; the Roma in Italy; and the women who are being raped every minute of every day in places around the world; or point to the great Pacific garbage patch.
This triumphalism is matched, as it were, with a panic around the dissipation of “the West” as an idea and what the former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, described in his book The Fate of the West as “the world’s most successful political idea”.
Emmott ties this decline to the 2008 global crisis, which started in the West, and what he described as “the fateful mix of arrogance, misinformation and ineffectualness that was displayed in Afghanistan and Iraq”.
We will find little agreement on this philosophical issue. The historical issue is easier to explain. At least I think it is. The rise to prominence of China and India is in many ways a return to the global power relations before the Europeans went on their empire-building escapades. It would be disingenuous to ignore the advances the Industrial Revolution brought to the world and which started in Britain’s midlands. Before all of this, China and India ruled the world through global manufacturing and trade.
During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the British in particular fought tooth and nail to destroy imported manufactured products and even banned the sale of cotton in England between 1686 and 1774 to shore up British industry. For all its gains — and they have been plentiful — the Industrial Revolution was ostensibly led by the textile industry and was more than likely spurred on by opposition to the importation of cotton from the East.
The historical record shows, also, the way Europe benefited from technology exchange (one of modernity’s great boasts) in lacquer, cotton and porcelain, among others.
My favourite example is the way we typically point to Europe, and Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type printing, as the “modern” origins of the (printed) written word. Yet there is evidence that China produced written texts in about 206-208 BCE. This will probably be meaningless to some folk, but the historical economic data confirm that “the East” dominated global political economic affairs centuries before the arrival of “the West”.
Just maybe, then, the “idea” of the West came and is on its way out.
• Lagardien is a former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University and has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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