How Asia and China can revive the West's waning institutions
A world adrift desperately needs global thinkers, most of all from Asia. Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani fits the bill with his new book, in which he calls for a more robust UN, IMF, and WTO – led by the emerging global powers. Let’s hope his optimism about this revival is justified.
China's Communist Party chief Xi Jinping (R) meets with UN General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Dec. 27. Op-ed contributor Nathan Gardels praises a new book from Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani that looks at shifting leadership in Western-born institutions like the UN. 'For Mahbubani, the old institutions should remain, but under new management.'
Wang Zhao/Reuters
The rise of Asia is the single most important historical development of our era. Yet, few voices from the region have stepped forward to address what role Asia, and above all China, must play in shaping Globalization 2.0 – an interdependent world in which no single nation has the upper hand.
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In his new book, “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World,” Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, at last rises to the challenge. In a way, it is no surprise that a former UN ambassador from one of the smallest countries in Asia has the largest vision. Singapore – probably the most global state anywhere – has thrived by its wits in navigating the ever-shifting rapids of globalization.
Mr. Mahbubani’s magnum opus is so far the most comprehensive and objective proposal out there to update the world institutions – the United Nations, the Bretton Woods organizations like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and the World Trade Organization – by accommodating them to the rise of the rest. Indeed, he evinces more faith in those institutions than their Western founders, who, as he acidly notes, are starting to see their own creation as a disadvantage now that power is shifting away from their control.
With characteristic Asian pragmatism, Mahbubani’s essential argument is not for the creation of new institutions that enshrine the global power shift, but rather for closing the “democratic deficit” by filling up the old bottle of the West’s rule-based system with the new wine of the rising rest. For Mahbubani, the old institutions should remain, but under new management. In a departure from his trademark agitating manner, what makes Mahbubani’s proposals so provocative is their very moderation.
Indeed, by Mahbubani’s lights, the greatest paradox of the present historical moment is that the “common norms” that have made Asia successful and are the basis of “the logic of one world” have been adapted from the West. In this, the long-time apostle of non-Western modernity arrives at the mirror-image conclusions of historian Niall Ferguson, the long-time champion of the virtues of Western imperialism. Mahbubani’s common norms more or less overlap with Mr. Ferguson’s famous “killer apps” of modernization, which Ferguson sees as becoming more robustly embraced these days in the East than the West. Neither could be further from Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.
The common norms for Mahbubani are: modern science and logical reasoning, free-market economics, a social contract that accountably binds ruler and ruled, and multilateralism. Ferguson’s six killer apps are: competition, science, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and the work ethic.
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