Asia and Europe - Kissinger

 ASIA AND EUROPE: DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF BALANCE OF POWER The term “Asia” ascribes a deceptive coherence to a disparate region. Until the arrival of modern Western powers, no Asian language had a word for “Asia”; none of the peoples of what are now Asia’s nearly fifty sovereign states conceived of themselves as inhabiting a single “continent” or region requiring solidarity with all the others. As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia. There is no memory of a common empire comparable to that of Rome. Across Northeast, East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, prevailing major ethnic, linguistic, religious, social, and cultural differences have been deepened, often bitterly, by the wars of modern history. The political and economic map of Asia illustrates the region’s complex tapestry. It comprises industrially and technologically advanced countries in Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore, with economies and standards of living rivaling those of Europe; three countries of continental scale in China, India, and Russia; two large archipelagoes (in addition to Japan), the Philippines and Indonesia, composed of thousands of islands and standing astride the main sea-lanes; three ancient nations with populations approximating those of France or Italy in Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar; huge Australia and pastoral New Zealand, with largely European-descended populations; and North Korea, a Stalinist family dictatorship bereft of industry and technology except for a nuclear weapons program. A large Muslim-majority population prevails across Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and sizeable Muslim minorities exist in India, China, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines. The global order during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was predominantly European, designed to maintain a rough balance of power between the major European countries. Outside their own continent, the European states built colonies and justified their actions under various versions of their so-called civilizing mission. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, in which Asian nations are rising in wealth, power, and confidence, it may seem improbable that colonialism gained such force or that its institutions were treated as a normal mechanism of international life. Material factors alone cannot explain it; a sense of mission and intangible psychological momentum also played a role. The pamphlets and treatises of the colonial powers from the dawn of the twentieth century reveal a remarkable arrogance, to the effect that they were entitled to shape a world order by their maxims. Accounts of China or India condescendingly defined a European mission to educate traditional cultures to higher levels of civilization. European administrators with relatively small staffs redrew the borders of ancient nations, oblivious that this might be an abnormal, unwelcome, or illegitimate development. At the dawn of what is now called the modern age in the fifteenth century, a confident, fractious, territorially divided West had set sail to reconnoiter the globe and to improve, exploit, and “civilize” the lands it came upon. It impressed upon the peoples it encountered views of religion, science, commerce, governance, and diplomacy shaped by the Western historical experience, which it took to be the capstone of human achievement. The West expanded with the familiar hallmarks of colonialism—avariciousness, cultural chauvinism, lust for glory. But it is also true that its better elements tried to lead a kind of global tutorial in an intellectual method that encouraged skepticism and a body of political and diplomatic practices ultimately including democracy. It all but ensured that, after long periods of subjugation, the colonized peoples would eventually demand—and achieve—self-determination. Even during their most brutal depredations, the expansionist powers put forth, especially in Britain, a vision that at some point conquered peoples would begin to participate in the fruits of a common global system. Finally recoiling from the sordid practice of slavery, the West produced what no other slaveholding civilization had: a global abolition movement based on a conviction of common humanity and the inherent dignity of the individual. Britain, rejecting its previous embrace of the despicable trade, took the lead in enforcing a new norm of human dignity, abolishing slavery in its empire and interdicting slave-trading ships on the high seas. The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct, technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world. With the exception of Japan, Asia was a victim of the international order imposed by colonialism, not an actor in it. Thailand sustained its independence but, unlike Japan, was too weak to participate in the balance of power as a system of regional order. China’s size prevented it from full colonization, but it lost control over key aspects of its domestic affairs. Until the end of World War II, most of Asia conducted its policies as an adjunct of European powers or, in the case of the Philippines, of the United States. The conditions for Westphalian-style diplomacy only began to emerge with the decolonization that followed the devastation of the European order by two world wars. The process of emancipation from the prevalent regional order was violent and bloody: the Chinese civil war (1927–49), the Korean War (1950–53), a Sino-Soviet confrontation (roughly 1955–80), revolutionary guerrilla insurgencies all across Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War (1961– 75), four India-Pakistan wars (1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999), a Chinese-Indian war (1962), a Chinese-Vietnamese war (1979), and the depredations of the genocidal Khmer Rouge (1975–79). After decades of war and revolutionary turmoil, Asia has transformed itself dramatically. The rise of the “Asian Tigers,” evident from 1970, involving Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand, brought prosperity and economic dynamism into view. Japan adopted democratic institutions and built an economy rivaling and in some cases surpassing those of Western nations. In 1979, China changed course and, under Deng Xiaoping, proclaimed a nonideological foreign policy and a policy of economic reforms that, continued and accelerated under his successors, have had a profound transformative effect on China and the world. As these changes unfolded, national-interest-based foreign policy premised on Westphalian principles seemed to have prevailed in Asia. Unlike in the Middle East, where almost all the states are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy, in Asia the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics. The various nations emerging from the colonial period generally affirmed one another’s sovereignty and committed to noninterference in one another’s domestic affairs; they followed the norms of international organizations and built regional or interregional economic and social organizations. In this vein a top Chinese military official, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Deputy Chief of General Staff Qi Jianguo, wrote in a major January 2013 policy review that one of the primary challenges of the contemporary era is to uphold “the basic principle of modern international relations firmly established in the 1648 ‘Treaty of Westphalia,’ especially the principles of sovereignty and equality.” Asia has emerged as among the Westphalian system’s most significant legacies: historic, and often historically antagonistic, peoples are organizing themselves as sovereign states and their states as regional groupings. In Asia, far more than in Europe, not to speak of the Middle East, the maxims of the Westphalian model of international order find their contemporary expression—including doctrines since questioned by many in the West as excessively focused on the national interest or insufficiently protective of human rights. Sovereignty, in many cases wrought only recently from colonial rule, is treated as having an absolute character. The goal of state policy is not to transcend the national interest—as in the fashionable concepts in Europe or the United States—but to pursue it energetically and with conviction. Every government dismisses foreign criticism of its internal practices as a symptom of just-surmounted colonial tutelage. Thus even when neighboring states’ domestic actions are perceived as excesses—as they have been, for example, in Myanmar—they are treated as an occasion for quiet diplomatic intercession, not overt pressure, much less forcible intervention. At the same time, an element of implicit threat is ever present. China affirms explicitly, and all other key players implicitly, the option of military force in the pursuit of core national interests. Military budgets are rising. National rivalries, as in the South China Sea and Northeast Asian waters, have generally been conducted with the methods of nineteenth-century European diplomacy; force has not been excluded, though its application has been restrained, if tenuously, as the years go by. Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historical international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ, soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere (an art still remembered and practiced today in some quarters). In Asia’s historical diplomatic systems, whether based on Chinese or Hindu models, monarchy was considered an expression of divinity or, at the very least, a kind of paternal authority; tangible expressions of tribute were thought to be owed to superior countries by their inferiors. This theoretically left no room for ambiguity as to the nature of regional power relationships, leading to a series of rigid alignments. In practice, however, these principles were applied with remarkable creativity and fluidity. In Northeast Asia, the Ryukyu Kingdom for a time paid tribute to both Japan and China. In the northern hills of Burma, tribes secured a form of de facto autonomy by pledging their loyalty simultaneously to the Burmese royal court and the Chinese Emperor (and generally not straining to follow the dictates of either). For centuries, Nepal skillfully balanced its diplomatic posture between the ruling dynasties in China and those in India—offering letters and gifts that were interpreted as tribute in China but recorded as evidence of equal exchanges in Nepal, then holding out a special tie with China as a guarantee of Nepal’s independence vis-à-vis India. Thailand, eyed as a strategic target by expanding Western empires in the nineteenth century, avoided colonization altogether through an even more elaborate strategy of affirming cordial ties with all foreign powers at once—welcoming foreign advisors from multiple competing Western states into its court even while sending tribute missions to China and retaining Hindu priests of Indian descent for the royal household. (The intellectual suppleness and emotional forbearance demanded by this balancing strategy were all the more remarkable given that the Thai King was himself regarded as a divine figure.) Any concept of a regional order was considered too inhibiting of the flexibility demanded from diplomacy. Against this backdrop of subtle and diverse legacies, the grid of Westphalian sovereign states on a map of Asia presents an oversimplified picture of regional realities. It cannot capture the diversity of aspirations that leaders bring to their tasks or the combination of punctilious attention to hierarchy and protocol with adroit maneuver that characterizes much of Asian diplomacy. It is the fundamental framework of international life in Asia. But statehood there is also infused with a set of cultural legacies of a greater diversity and immediacy than perhaps any other region. This is underscored by the experiences of two of Asia’s major nations, Japan and India