Western social science has made three metaphysical mistakes.
The first was to assume that its laws and lessons were, like the physical sciences, universally applicable to all societies. Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt captured the prevailing zeitgeist well when he wrote in 1983: “The world’s needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenised.”
That may have been true 40 years ago. It is no longer.
One indirect consequence of this assumption – that the whole world was converging towards a common set of tastes and aspirations – was that Western universities progressively abandoned area studies. This has left the West ill-equipped to see how profoundly the world has changed since the 1980s.
The second mistake was the belief that Western civilisation’s exceptional success over the past two centuries represented the historical norm. A century ago, many leading Asian minds shared this belief. In 1885, the Meiji-era Japanese reformer Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote that “once the wind of Western civilisation blows to the East, every blade of grass and every tree in the East follow what the Western wind brings”.
He added that Japan must “leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilised nations of the West”.
Buoyed by events of the past 200 years, the West took it for granted that its civilisation would remain superior to all others. Many Western minds continue to believe this implicitly, if not explicitly.
When Asian societies began to succeed, most Western observers assumed they would inevitably, like Japan, become more Westernised. That was seen as the only path to success. This assumption rested on a third metaphysical error: the conflation of modernisation with Westernisation. They are, in fact, very different processes. Both China and India are modernising without Westernising. They are rediscovering their own civilisational roots and are, in fact, becoming less Western in many respects.
The defining new reality of the 21st century is therefore not a world of emerging markets, but of re-emerging civilisations. To thrive in this multi-civilisational world, global corporations must abandon the outdated assumption that the world is homogenising. Not all the insights of Western social science travel well.
Western economists, for instance, tend to scoff at five-year plans, associating them with Soviet-era failures. Yet China’s five-year plans have been central to its extraordinary rise. In the year 2000, China accounted for roughly 5 per cent of global manufacturing output. Today that figure stands at around 30 per cent. By 2030, it could reach 45 per cent. Many factors drove this transformation, but deliberate state-led five-year plans played a critical role.
China’s success also reflects the fact that the appropriate balance between state and market must differ from Western norms. Why? Because the state has played a commanding role in Chinese life for more than 2,000 years.
Asian societies are shedding the sense of inferiority that they had developed during the era of Western dominance. As they regain their cultural confidence, they are embracing their own heritage, traditions and ways of thought – and the rest of the world is following suit.
We can no longer assume, like I did when I was growing up, that the West will remain unquestionably superior.
That observation struck at something profound. The Anglo-Saxon world and its institutions are no longer seen as the universal default. They are increasingly recognised for what they are: “local” institutions. And the rest of the world is insisting, with growing confidence, on being treated as an equal. In a song from their latest album, BTS give voice to this sentiment and speak to being treated as “aliens” in the West: “If you wanna hit my house, shoes off at the door … Show some respect, we aliens / Out of the East, the sun’s risin’.”
Multinational corporations that once saw no need to understand the history or cultural logic of other civilisations now find that such understanding is indispensable to remain globally competitive. We are moving from a mono-civilisational world to a multi-civilisational one. It is up to the West to reinvent itself.
Kishore Mahbubani is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore and author of “Has China Won?”. This article is based on a speech he gave at the 10th anniversary Emerging Markets Inspiration Conference hosted by Stockholm University.
Source: Opinion | The West was never the whole world. It’s time to move on