Suddenly, there is one face that comes to mind when I read Kishore Mahbubani's book entitled Asia. The New Hemisphere of the World: The Inevitable Shift of Global Power to the Orient, the face of a famous mahogany chef from Malaysia, known as Chef Wan.
Chef Wan is a cookery program host that aired the series on Fox TV called East Bites West. In the show, this cheerful man, travels in Western countries to compete with a variety of eastern dishes he makes with the most resembling and most popular Western foods in the region.
Apparently, the Western tongue prefers Eastern cuisine and Chef Wan often appears as the winner of the competition. In addition, Chef Wan also teaches a variety of healthier and cheaper eastern recipes to Western audiences. This simple-looking entertainment event can show how the East appears to excel in Western audiences, though only seen in terms of the taste of food alone. Beyond that, the writer's sudden remembrance of Chef Wan is due to the very intriguing title of the show, East Bites West.
Unfortunately, in the world of ideas, the West precisely constructed the orientalists always excel from the East (Asia). Peak of excellence that can be traced from the post-Cold War era. In this era, says Francis Fukuyama, the world of ideas will feel more boring because of Western domination. According Fukuyama, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the berlin wall in 1989, has placed the United States and the West at the top of the pyramid of global power. There will be no dialectical process in history. There is no evolutionary ideology of mankind. There is only a single ideology of Western liberal democracy.
Thus, in Fukuyama's view, "History has Ended." The US and the West will lead the world through the idea of liberal democracy without being at least threatened by other ideas that can displace it. This idea, according to the West, must be a role model by other parts of the world, if countries want to enter the "post-history" world. In short, the ideal world is a world that follows all the systems and pillars of Western policy.
In its development, the Western beliefs were hit hard enough, one of them with the publication of Mahbubani's work. In the New Asia Hemisphere of the World: The Inevitable Shift of Global Power to the East, Mahbubani who is also a lecturer and professor of Public Policy Practice on Public Policy Lee Kuan Yew School, National University of Singapore, strongly rejects Fukuyama's presumption. In fact Mahbubani calls his book as his ultimate anti-thesis of Fukuyama history. Correspondingly, Mahbubani with strong evidence says that now Western influence has declined, while Asia continues to rise from adversity. That is, because Western values are no longer sprouted in the heart of the West, but are embedded in the souls of Asian countries.
As in Mahbubani's earlier work, Can Asia Think ?, Asia's New World Hemisphere book: The inevitable Global Shift of East Power also has a common perspective. In this book - the original edition was published in 2008 - Mahbubani has remained consentant to his conclusion that Asia will be a place of global global power. Here Mahbubani wants to convince his readers, both in Asia and in the West, to prepare to witness a new history, where the West is no longer a single global power and will soon share that power with Asia.
The new history, according to Mahbubani, will be characterized by two important developments. First, we will see the end of the era of Western domination in world history. However, that does not mean the end of the West. Secondly, we will see the re-emergence of Asia, remembering from the first year of AD to 1820, China and India have consistently been the two largest economic forces in the world. Mahbubani believes they will return to that natural position in the 21st century.
Interestingly, Mahbubani said, the rise of Asian countries is actually happening because it mimics the seven pillars of Western policy that has actually hegemonized Asia for the last 200 years. Meanwhile, the West is beginning to leave its policy pillar itself, causing a setback for its country. These seven policies include: free markets, science and technology, meritocracy, culture of pragmatism, culture of peace, law enforcement, and education. This is what Mahbubani called March to Modernity.
March to Modernity (marching toward modernity) became the key word for Mahbubani to explain the long process of Asian change from a "backward" region to a calculated global power. The Asian community, through its seven pillars of Western policy, has managed to improve its backwardness in various fields.
Japan became the first Asian country to start the Asian revival. The Meiji restoration marked the rise of Japanese civilization in the 1860s. The Meiji reformers assigned to escape Japan from the threat of colonization and Western domination that swept across Asia-sailed across the West to discover Western best practices. These Japanese people managed to draw the lessons well: they found seven pillars of Western wisdom and each of these pillars proved to be mutually reinforcing.
What the Japanese do is then followed by China and India in their own way. In the field of geopolitics for example, Mahbubani illustrates how China can approach countries in the region to cooperate in creating economic progress.
China has embraced Southeast Asian countries to establish Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), while on the other hand, the West, led by the United States, has called on its allies to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even in the Cold War era, there has not been a large-scale war involving countries in Asia. It shows that Asian countries prefer dialogue in solving the problem of inter-state relations, rather than disputes. Disputes among Asian countries are always resolved through diplomacy. That is the implementation of the pillars of Asian peace culture. Meanwhile, in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the United States actually took the opposite step. The United States is always one-sided to support Israel because of the strong political pressure in the country.
In the contemporary case, the US wiretapping scandal, dismantled by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee contractor for National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden, against its closest allies in Europe and other countries also shows that the West is no longer a civilization with culture of trust with each other. The peace of democracy that the US has coveted has been a myth. West transformed into a country full of suspicion. Or if he follows his thesis Fukuyama, the West has plunged back into the flow of history.
In the field of economics, Asia also demonstrates its ability to compete in the world by following an open market mechanism and driving the growth of the global economy. Mahbubani again took the example of the success of modernization of China and India. Imagine, the two countries have succeeded in developing science and technology with amazing and poverty was gradually successfully derived. The level of economic growth was spelled out the most rapid in the world. Meanwhile, Europe and the US continued to show decline. This can be seen from the economic crisis that haunts the US and Europe since 2008.
The modernization of China alluded to Mahbubani has succeeded in reducing the number of its population living under absolute poverty from 600 million to 200 million inhabitants. In fact one of the key reasons why the United Nations launched the idea of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce global poverty by half in 2015 is due to China and India's success in reducing the number of poor people.
Mahbubani's assessment of the economic success of China and India is certainly not excessive. In 2007, Pete Engardio, senior author of BusinessWeek, in his book Chindia also mentioned the same thing. According to Engardio, the balance of power will shift to the East as China and India (Chindia) evolve. China and India, could have as much impact on the US role in the 20th century. Partly, due to economic take-off (consumption markets, manufacturing, investments, skilled labor resources, and global technological direction) both countries coincided. Furthermore, they complement each other's strengths.
Related to that, Deng Xiaoping for example boldly pointed out to the Chinese people in which direction their future lies: into march to modernity. Deng started it in a quiet little fishing village: Shenzhen. Deng in the village launched economic reforms in 1979. When Deng declared Shenzhen as one of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the village soon grew rapidly.
Between 1980 and 2005, Shenzhen's population rose from 13,000 to 11 million. The average economic rise of 28 percent from 1980-2004, according to the consulting firm based in Hong Kong, Enright, Scott & Associates, swelled from 270 million RMB (32.5 million US dollars) in 1980 to 342.2 billion RMB 41 billion US dollars) in 2004. Shenzhen exports reached 101.5 billion dollars in 2005. That number is equivalent to 13 percent of China's total exports.
This example shows, Shenzhen has become one of the four busiest container port cities in the world and the fourth busiest airport in China. So overall, the Shenzhen economy grew 126 fold and became the only region with the fastest growing economy in the world.
Meanwhile India, in addition to being one of the world's largest democracies, has also demonstrated its superiority in the world of science and technology. The Asian research boom in science and technology was the result of some of the visionary decisions India made decades ago. It was India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who first encouraged the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur near Calcuta in 1951.
It is through this IIT that India succeeds in creating superior human beings with brilliant minds. Even the CBS TV station in its news program watched by audiences, 60 Minutes, describes IIT as "the most important university you've never heard of." One host of the TV program, Leslie Stahl, said, "Put Harvard, MIT , and Princeton lined up, and you'll get an idea of the status of those schools in India. "
Inevitably, candidates of brilliant scientists from IIT origin are then absorbed by rich institutions in the US and Europe. Although some Indians feel lost with their scientists, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi says it is better brain drain than a brain in the drain (it's better to be a brilliant brain distributor than the brains just clogged in the channel).
Interestingly, when Asia began to succeed economically because of its policy of opening up, the West actually shut down. Europe and the United States are busy doing market protection to protect their own interests.
It is important to note that these are just a few of the successes of China and India with reference to seven pillars of Western policy. There is still a pillar of meritocracy, a culture of pragmatism, law enforcement, and education that makes both countries skyrocket into a country with a world-calculated power.
Not only in the region of East Asia (China) and South Asia (India), Mahbubani also noted another important player who must be paid attention to progress: Southeast Asian community (ASEAN).
According to Mahbubani, ASEAN's achievements are important to note because of its success in creating security and peace stability. At the end of the Cold War, Mahbubani in his book sarcastically said, if ever there was a prediction made about whether war would occur in the Balkans or in Asia, there is no doubt among the leading Western strategic thinkers that they predicted war would erupt in Asia. But the opposite happened? The European Union (EU) failed and ASEAN succeeded.
ASEAN, like the EU, was formed to promote regional cooperation, in addition to preventing war among its member states. But the EU is one step ahead of ASEAN, having reached the zero prospect for war affairs. The EU has also become an economic superpower force (with all its GDP of 13,386 billion US dollars), while the ASEAN economy is minipower (with a combined gross national income of only 857 billion dollars).
Yet there is still one positive dimension of ASEAN that Mahbubani noted is superior to the EU, namely in the matter of diplomacy. In this dimension ASEAN is more superpower than EU.
In the field of diplomacy, Mahbubani noted two achievements of ASEAN diplomacy that should be noted. First, about the entry of Vietnam to ASEAN. Throughout the Cold War, Southeast Asia was split between the non-communist and communist Indo-China, with Vietnam dominating the second (pro-Soviet) stronghold since 1979-1989). As a communist country, Vietnam has always seemed to be as strong and 'as bad as' North Korea (North Korea) which at times could trigger instability of the region.
But now Vietnam has abandoned its role as North Korea's 'North Korea' and became like Singapore. The country joined ASEAN in July 1995. Since then, Vietnam has begun to absorb ASEAN's vision of peace and prosperity until it emerges as one of the new economic leopards. Its economy grew from 21 billion US dollars in 1995 to 52 billion US dollars in 2005. Compare the EU that still can not solve the problem of Kosovo at that time.
Another ASEAN diplomatic achievement to be proud of is that the communities of the Southeast Asian countries have made a major contribution to the emergence of new forces in Asia peacefully. The long history of mankind shows, when great powers arise, there is a tendency for the emergence of new conflicts. However, when China and India (along with Japanese powers that continue to lead) emerged as great powers, the opposite happened. The great powers do not create the war-torn tensions in Asia but create new patterns of cooperation. And ASEAN here has played a key role by spawning a series of alafabetically stratified cooperation agreements: ARF, APEC, ASEAN + 3, ASEM, and EAS.
Forty years after the formation of ASEAN (1967), three economic giants in Northeast Asia (Japan, South Korea and China), despite creating other associations similar to ASEAN, but still the three countries feel comfortable discussing global challenges through a meeting initiated by ASEAN, especially ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan, South Korea). So it can be concluded, although ASEAN is economically minipower, diplomatically ASEAN deserves to be called as superpower.
With the rise of China and India into the world's calculated stage, and the successful ASEAN as a forum for the creators of stability of peace and security, it is appropriate that Asia should not be underestimated by the West. Now is the era of Asia biting West, East Bites West.
Indonesia, as part of the Asian community, needs to welcome this brilliant work of Mahbubani. According to the author's opinion, Mahbubani through his book, has shown a spirit that resembles the persistent struggle of the late Edward Said in releasing the East from the influence of Western Hegemony.
Therefore, we should be happy with the intellectual efforts made by Kishore Mahbubani in this book. In fact we need to welcome him with optimism for the future. Not only for Asia in general, but also for the Islamic world in West Asia and Indonesia especially those who are marching toward modernity (Marching to Modernity).
Now is the right time for Asian countries to sue the West. It's time for Asia to come forward to be the subject of global power. Related to that, at the conclusion of the study of this book, the author wants to quote a very elegant lawsuit from Mahbubani, "In the past, for 200 years the Asian nation has only become a spectator of world history. They try to survive the wave of Western trade, thought, and power that swept the world. But now, that era has passed. Asia is back on the world stage. This is a good time to pressure the West to share power with Asia. It is time for the West to celebrate the rise of Asia, and not to mourn the momentum of this history. This will certainly make the world more stable and more peaceful, including for those living in the West. "
