Kishore Mahbubani
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HAS THE WEST LOST IT?
A Provocation
Contents
A New Order of Things
The Gift of Western Wisdom
Suicidal Western Wars
The Blindness of Western Elites
The Global Explosion of Travel
Why Hasn’t the West Noticed?
Western Hubris
Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs
A New Strategy: Minimalist, Multilateral and Machiavellian
The West on Autopilot: Europe and America Do Not Face the Same Challenges
A More Dangerous World
A Better World – for Americans and Europeans
So – Has the West Lost It?
Notes
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… there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI
A New Order of Things
Why is the West feeling lost? The answer is simple. In the early twenty-first century, history has turned a corner, perhaps the most significant corner humanity has ever turned – yet the West refuses to accept or adapt to this new historical era.
What is this big turn that history has taken? A brief comparison of the past 200 years with the previous 1,800 years will provide the answer. From AD 1 to 1820, the two largest economies were always those of China and India. Only after that period did Europe take off, followed by America. Viewed against the backdrop of the past 1,800 years, the recent period of Western relative over-performance against other civilizations is a major historical aberration. All such aberrations come to a natural end, and that is happening now.
So what is the problem? It is important to understand the nature of our times. The strategist Machiavelli emphasized this when he said: ‘The prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes. I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful.’1 Yet, even though the spirit of the times has changed, and even though the West will inevitably have to make major adjustments to adapt to this new era, no major Western figure has had the courage to state the defining truth of our times: that a cycle of Western domination of the world is coming to a natural end. Their populations, on the other hand, can feel these large changes in their bones, and in the job markets. This, in part, explains supposedly politically aberrant – to the elites at least – events like Trump and Brexit.
To reveal to their people the scale and speed of the changes, Western leaders should show the two charts below simultaneously. The frequently cited McKinsey chart (Figure 1) shows how long China and India were the world’s largest economies, as well as their sudden precipitous drop after 1820. The second chart (Figure 2), highlighted by commentator Martin Wolf, shows how China and India have regained their natural share as those of America and Europe have begun to shrink.
The Western share of the global economy will continue to shrink. This is inevitable and unstoppable, as other societies have learnt to emulate Western best practices. Does this mean that Western livelihoods are bound to get worse? The recent stagnation of incomes and rising job losses among the working classes in America and elsewhere seems to suggest that hard times are coming. R. W. Johnson describes well how wages have stagnated:
Figure 1. Share of total world GDP2
Between 1948 and 1973, productivity rose by 96.7 per cent and real wages by 91.3 per cent, almost exactly in step. Those were the days of plentiful hard-hat jobs in steel and the auto industry when workers could afford to send their children to college and see them rise into the middle class. But from 1973 to 2015 – the era of globalization, when many of those jobs vanished abroad – productivity rose 73.4 per cent while wages rose by only 11.1 per cent.
He also wrote, ‘On average in 1965 an American CEO earned 20 times what a worker did. By 2013, on average, the number was 296 times.’3
Figure 2. The changing shape of the world economy4
The incomes of many Western middle-class populations have also stagnated in recent decades. This is undeniable. But this trend can be reversed. Western leaders need to do a shrewd recalculation of the new global economic order and look for new opportunities for Western workers. As Machiavelli famously warned, ‘there is nothing more difficult … than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.’
The good news for the West is that the global economic pie is not shrinking. In fact, it is growing steadily, and will probably continue growing – with some significant changes. Until recently, much of global growth came from G7 economies, not the E7 economies.fn1 This has reversed sharply in the past two decades. In 2015, for example, the G7 contributed 31.5 per cent and the E7 36.3 per cent of global growth.
In short, the West has hitherto provided the locomotive driving global economic growth, and the Rest hitched their wagons to the train. China’s explosive growth in recent decades was fuelled by exports to America. Now, the Rest are providing the locomotive, and Western societies can deliver economic growth to their populations by hitching their wagons to the Rest.
This sounds simple in theory. In practice, it could be difficult. The West has been at the forefront of world history for almost 200 years. Now it has to learn to share, even abandon, that position and adapt to a world it can no longer dominate. Can this be done? So far, the West has failed to produce a coherent and competitive global strategy to deal with the new situation. Instead, it is flailing about, attacking Iraq, bombing Syria, sanctioning Russia and baiting China. All this adds to a sense of global turbulence.
The key message of this book is that there is a better option for the West, helped by analysis and advice, offered in friendship, from the Rest. A cold, careful and comprehensive calculation of how Western interests have changed, coupled with ruthless realism – indeed, a dose of Machiavelli – is what the West needs. However, Machiavelli remains also one of the most misunderstood figures of our time. Many in the West regard Machiavelli as the embodiment of evil. Leo Strauss, the famous American political scientist of the 1950s, called him a ‘teacher of evil’.5 In fact, as the great British philosopher Isaiah Berlin reminded us in his seminal essay ‘The Question of Machiavelli’,6 ‘Machiavelli’s values … are not instrumental but moral and ultimate, and he calls for great sacrifices in their name.’ Berlin stressed that the West’s derision for Machiavelli is derived from a ‘deep but characteristic misunderstanding of Machiavelli’s thesis’. As he explains, Machiavelli understands that ‘public life has its own morality’. In other words, Machiavelli advocates that a leader who makes him- or herself ‘responsible for the lives of others’ has to place their welfare first. A Machiavellian leader must thus always choose pragmatic morals over idealistic or dogmatic ones.
Happily, the West need not make any ‘great sacrifices’ today, because the state of humankind is far better than it was in sixteenth-century Italy. Although Western populations have been grappling with pessimism recently, a new dawn has broken over the rest of the world. Paradoxically, much of this has happened as a result of the West sharing its wisdom with the Rest. Sadly, the West remains remarkably ill-informed about the massive improvement in the human condition.
Imagine a world where virtually no human being goes to bed feeling hungry. Or where absolute poverty has all but disappeared. Where every child gets vaccinated and goes to school. Where every home has electricity. Where every human being carries some kind of
smartphone, giving him or her uninterrupted access to global treasure troves of information that were once the exclusive preserves of small elites. Most importantly, imagine a world where the prospects of a major world war are practically zero.
Most sensible people would describe such a world as bordering on utopia. Astonishingly few sensible people are aware that we live in a world where humanity is standing on the verge of achieving such a utopia. It’s the biggest truth of our times: in objective terms, the human condition has never been better.
Violence has fallen dramatically. Harvard’s Steven Pinker observes that ‘… today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.’7 He adds: ‘Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade.’8 Similarly, poverty has also declined dramatically. Oxford’s Max Roser says, ‘In 1950 three-quarters of the world were living in extreme poverty; in 1981 it was still 44 per cent. For last year [2016], the research suggests that the share in extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent.’ On literacy, he says, ‘In 1800 there were 120 million people in the world that could read and write; today there are 6.2 billion with the same skill.’9 Dr Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, has concluded, ‘We truly are living in the most exciting time to be alive!’10 Why? He documents how absolute poverty is disappearing, child labour is declining, infant mortality rates are falling, homicide rates are falling and average education and literacy rates are exploding all over the world.
Johan Norberg of the Cato Institute notes: ‘If someone had told you in 1990 that over the next twenty-five years world hunger would decline by 40 per cent, child mortality would halve, and extreme poverty would fall by three quarters, you’d have told them they were a naive fool. But the fools were right. This is truly what has happened.’11 Having experienced Third World poverty as a child, I know that nothing drags down the human spirit more than a sense of helplessness, uncertainty and fear of the future. A small regular income and access to basic goods like TV sets and refrigerators also improves one’s sense of well-being. In short, the eradication of poverty is spiritually uplifting. The world should rejoice at this change.
The Gift of Western Wisdom
This enormous improvement in the human condition is a result of a slow process of Western ideas and best practices seeping into other societies. The biggest gift the West gave the Rest was the power of reasoning.
‘Reasoning’ is a commonly used word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus: ‘To think (something) through, work out in a logical manner’. Western forms of reasoning have seeped into Asian minds gradually, through the adoption of Western science and technology and the application of the scientific method to solving social problems. Science and technology showed the power of empirical proof and constant verification. It led to the adoption of many new technologies, from modern medicine to electricity, from railways to cell phones, all of which improved lives significantly. The application of the scientific method also provided solutions for the seemingly insoluble problems Asians had experienced for millennia, including floods and famines, pandemics and poverty. Similarly, individuals also began to understand how reasoning could improve their personal sense of well-being. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘The world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs.’12 It did not go directly from the West to all other societies. East Asian societies, especially Japan and the ‘Four Tigers’ (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), were the first to absorb these ideas and practices, such as free market economics and empirical scientific research. Their success in turn inspired other societies. East Asia provided the first bridge between the West and the Rest.
As the spirit of Western reasoning seeped into Asian societies, it led to the soaring of ambition which, in turn, has generated the many Asian miracles we see unfolding today. It is also leading to success in Estonia, Botswana and Chile, three countries on three different continents.
This spread of Western reasoning, in turn, triggered three silent revolutions that explain the extraordinary success of many non-Western societies in recent decades. These silent revolutions have gone unnoticed in Western intellectual circles.
The first revolution is political. For millennia, Asian societies were deeply feudal. The people were accountable to their rulers, not rulers to their people. ‘Oriental despotism’ was a fair description of the political environments in all corners of Asia, from Teheran to Tokyo. Each person in Asian societies was supposed to know his or her place. India carried it to the extreme with its caste system. A person’s destiny was determined at birth. There was no escape.
The rebellion against all kinds of feudal mind-sets which gained momentum in the second half of the twentieth century was hugely liberating for all Asian societies. Millions of Asians went from being passive bystanders to becoming active agents of change. They took control of their personal destinies. Over time, the rulers of most Asian societies came to understand and accept that they were accountable to their people, not the people to them. These changes could be clearly seen in those societies that accepted democratic forms of government, like India and Japan, South Korea and Sri Lanka. However, an equally profound political revolution was taking place in the non-democratic societies.
This explains the extraordinary success of China over the past four decades. In theory, there was no change when China went from being ruled by one Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong, to another, Deng Xiaoping. In practice, a fundamental political revolution took place. Mao behaved exactly like a traditional Chinese emperor, issuing edicts that often caused great human suffering. By contrast, Deng focused all his energies on improving the living conditions of the Chinese people. He educated them enormously. He opened the world to them. In so doing, he completely changed the social contract between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people. All of Deng’s successors – Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping – know that, at the end of the day, they are accountable to the people. This explains the extraordinary transformation of Chinese society. 800 million Chinese have been rescued from absolute poverty in three decades.
This is also why many Asian countries, including hitherto troubled countries like Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines, are progressing slowly and steadily. In each of these four countries, various forms of dictatorship have been replaced by leaders who believe that they are accountable to their populations. Many of their troubles continue, but poverty has diminished significantly, the middle classes are growing and modern education is spreading. There are no perfect democracies in Asia (and, as we have learned after Trump and Brexit, democracies in the West are deficient, too). In theory, democratic processes are designed to deliver results that reflect the will of the people. Also, since each citizen is entitled to participate in the processes, the result should be accepted by all and result in national consensus building. Instead, democratic processes in the US and the UK have recently led to deep polarization, with virtual civil wars continuing even after election and referendum results have come in. Western theorists of democracy need to go back to their drawing boards to figure out where democratic processes have gone awry. In Asia, a different story is evolving. The political systems remain hugely imperfect. However, in a big shift from previous ‘despotic’ assumptions, most Asian leaders now recognize that they are accountable to their people, and as long as they have to demonstrate daily that they are improving their people’s lives Asian societies will continue to improve. This is one big gift that Western reasoning has made to Asia.
Today, Africans and Latin Americans are learning from Asian success stories. In 2008, Kenya launched Vision 2030,
an ambitious development programme that was heavily inspired by similar concepts in Singapore and Malaysia.13 Kenya’s northern neighbour, Ethiopia, has been explicit in its admiration and emulation of South Korea and Taiwan.14 In 2015, Ethiopian President Mulatu Teshome said, ‘Ethiopia is going through a national renaissance, following Korea’s model of development.’15 The World Bank’s South-South Knowledge Exchange Initiative has fostered the exchange of policy lessons and technical assistance between Latin American countries and their developing Asian counterparts. Costa Rica’s Investment Promotion Agency, CINDE, followed Singapore’s best practice and persuaded Intel to establish a processing plant in the country.16
The second revolution is psychological: the Rest are going from believing that they were helpless voyagers in a life determined by ‘fate’ to believing that they can take control of their lives and rationally produce better outcomes. In my lifetime, we have gone from my parents’ generation, who had zero university education, to my children’s generation, who are experiencing almost universal university education. Now multiply these experiences millions, if not hundreds of millions, of times. In the last thirty years, we have carried more people over the threshold of university education than we have in the previous 3,000 years.
It makes a huge difference if you believe that you can create a better life for yourself and your children. Billions more people believe that they can do this. This enormous psychological revolution also explains why the human condition is getting better.
The third revolution is in the field of governance. Here, too, the major transformation can be seen most acutely in Asia. Fifty years ago, few Asian governments believed that good rational governance could transform their societies. Now most do.
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