by Parag Khanna
Religious diversity has also been a pillar of Asian civilization stability. Vedic Brahmanism, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, and Buddhism were established faiths centuries before the advent of Christianity, which along with Islam emerged from West Asia. These religions often coexisted in harmony as they adapted to local circumstances. Buddhism is inseparable from the religious and cultural psyche of East Asia, where Confucianism was also a common bond that provided a means through which elites could understand one another even when their relations were adversarial. In Tang China, it was declared that “Buddhism is the sun, Taoism is the moon, and Confucianism the five planets.” Upon the arrival of Nestorian Christians and their idea of “one God,” the Tang emperor issued an edict stating “The Way has more than one name. There is more than one Sage. Doctrines vary in different lands; their benefits reach all mankind.” The early caliphates, Mongols, Mughals, and Ottomans are all examples of Asian empires whose inclusive religious tolerance aided their expansion by reducing fear among their new subjects. Though discriminatory taxes were levied on minorities in many societies, in most cases they did not amount to persecution. The third Mughal emperor, Akbar, decreed that any Hindus converted to Islam could return to Hinduism without penalty. Fascinated by all regional faiths, he even attempted to craft a syncretic doctrine of his own fusing Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Hinduism.
It is almost impossible to explain the historical role of one faith without the others. In South and Southeast Asia, syncretism between Hinduism and Buddhism was most common, with an Indianized Mahayana Buddhist culture emerging in many of the early Southeast Asian kingdoms. The Khmer Empire that dominated much of peninsular Southeast Asia from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries was a Mahayana Buddhist Hindu dominion. The resplendent Angkor Wat in Cambodia began as a Hindu temple in honor of the Lord Vishnu but by the twelfth century had become a Buddhist temple. Even the nihilistic Pol Pot dared not desecrate it. Today it is the only building on a national flag. The Srivijaya Empire of Sumatra was also a Hindu-Buddhist civilization.
On top of this layering, South and Southeast Asian culture cannot be explained without Islam, brought by Arab traders along maritime networks and its coexistence for more than one thousand years with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Though Islam has Arab origins, Muslim populations are larger the farther east one travels through Pakistan and India toward Indonesia, the largest Muslim-populated country in the world. Today the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims live in Asia (and 300 million in Africa).2 For Asians, Islam cannot be viewed as foreign and adversarial. One might suggest that the fundamental differences among Asia’s dominant religions are the reason they have been able to coexist in stability: they are so dissimilar yet each is so numerically robust that the conquest of one by the other is both spiritually unthinkable and logistically impossible. Asians have no choice but to live and let live.
Generally speaking, Islam’s relations with the prevailing political orders also become more accommodating farther east of the Arab world. Despite the gruesome 2017 ISIS siege of the southern Philippine citiy of Marawi on the island of Mindanao, which ended with martial law and the killing of key Indonesian militant leaders, Muslims represent at most 5 percent of the Philippines population and appear to be motivated as much by drug money as by ideology. With its overwhelmingly Muslim population, Indonesia remains the center of debates about whether Islam can coexist with secular governance. In recent years, some Indonesian (and Malaysian) citizens have returned from fighting in Syria and pledged loyalty to ISIS. Religion has also become a political football in recent elections in Indonesia. But Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have established a task force to track and confront ISIS and other militants operating across the archipelago, while Muslim clerics from organizations such as Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulema (which combined have nearly 100 million members) speak out against radicalism and avoid politics in order to focus on social development. In keeping with their country’s history, they urge Muslims to respect both democracy and religious pluralism.
Asia’s other most significant Muslim countries are also prioritizing a subordination of Islam to pragmatic governance. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has initiated a broad liberalization program, especially around the rights of women, while also curbing the radical Wahhabi clergy’s grip on the nation’s Islamic identity. In Pakistan, the government has banned radical Islamist groups from political campaigning while the growing urban class is taking a stand against Islamist intimidation. Central Asian states have also succeeded in controlling the Islamist groups that gained converts during the fragile 1990s. In Uzbekistan, the most at-risk country in the former Soviet Union, the government of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has launched a program to train imams in government-sponsored centers. Unlike in the fourteenth century, West Asia today looks up to East Asia’s success—and is learning lessons from it on how to manage political Islam flow from east to west.
Asia and the West
In addition to Asia’s history of diversity, there are also lessons to be learned from its rich history of precolonial connectivity. Asia’s commercial and cosmopolitan cities formed a network of hubs spanning numerous multiethnic and multilingual empires. In the tenth century, the Tang Dynasty’s imperial library had 80,000 volumes, while the largest library in northern Europe at the time, in the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, had only 800. European explorers themselves remarked at how India’s and China’s cities were larger than London and Paris. Over many centuries, cities from Baghdad to Delhi to Chang’an served to exchange and revitalize knowledge from near and far. In key areas of science and technology—irrigation and bridge building, clock making and gunsmithing, papermaking and navigation—Asia was the inventor and Europe acquired the knowledge secondhand. Paper entered the Islamic domain after the Arab victory over the Tang in AD 751, after which imprisoned Chinese papermakers transmitted their skills to Muslim craftsmen in Baghdad and Damascus, then Egypt and Morocco, and eventually Spain and Italy.
In each phase of Asian history, geopolitical competition for territory and trade routes expanded the reach and intensity of the whole system. Encounters between Arabs and Mongols pushed both each to explore new pathways (and allies), to subdue or evade each other, and to reach key markets. Already in the thirteenth century, the Mongols managed to link much of the world known at the time. For numerous Song Chinese and Southeast Asian maritime entrepôts, external trade was crucial to the survival of local economies. The Chola, Srivijaya, and Ming all jockeyed for control over Indian Ocean trade routes long before the arrival of European merchants.
For most of history, then, Asians have been far more aroused by one another’s imperial ambitions, especially the expansionist Arabs, Mongols, Timurids, Qing and other powers. Until the sixteenth century, the West remained on the sidelines of the thriving Asian system, and before 1800, trade flows among Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Siamese, Javanese, and Arabs were still much greater than those within Europe. Only in recent centuries have Western societies actually been a geopolitical concern in Asia. Yet even as European empires persisted into the twentieth century, it was Japan that besieged the Pacific Rim from Vladivostok to Darwin. Today, despite the US military presence in East Asia, China’s ambitions consume the region’s geopolitical forecasting far more than do those of the United States.
Asians view Europeans’ arrival and ascent in their terrain far more as the product of luck than ingenuity. Had it not been for the Ottomans’ sacking of Constantinople and threatening of Europe from the east, Europeans would have been less motivated to explore westward in search of East Asia (landing in America instead). And had the Ming Dynasty not chosen to retreat inward in the late fifteeenth century, it is unlikely that Europe’s East India companies would ever have established advantageous positions against the Ming fleets. Europe thus gained the most from Asia’s premodern globalization, acquiring knowledge of weaponry and navigation from Asia that it used on trade routes opene
d by India and China. When Asians look at the colonial period, therefore, they see an era of complacency, not inferiority. Their collective lesson is that when they are in conflict with one another, outside powers will exploit them.
For European nations—small and geographically insignificant as they were—to become global empires, they had to become Asian powers first. The Spanish first brought Asia into a global transoceanic trading system, but commerce did not connote dominance. Rather, the global trading system would merely have been a transatlantic one without Asia’s participation as a customer and supplier. Only by militarizing trade could Europe assert hegemony. Still, even at the peak of European imperialism, Western powers were not able to displace the cultural, religious, and linguistic systems of Asia. English today is widespread as a global language of convenience but has not displaced indigenous languages anywhere. French has all but disappeared, even from its former colonies. When it comes to religion, West Asians had much more success on the rest of Asia than did European proselytizers. Christianity is dominant only in the Philippines but numerically overshadowed elsewhere in Asia. By contrast, from the eastern Mediterranean through Iran, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia, Islam’s hold on much of Asia’s Indian Ocean littoral has been unbroken.
Colonialism’s mix of capitalism, technology, and manpower did, however, give areas of Asia a head start into the modern world. Hong Kong and Singapore became leading financial centers, drawing Asian talent from near and far, Gulf monarchies harnessed oil deposits through joint ventures with Western companies, and railways helped forge a more united Indian subcontinent. When it comes to migration, colonialism’s lasting legacy has been to make Asia even more Asian. European empires from the Portuguese to the British moved Malay and Indian merchants and slaves by the millions across the greater Indian Ocean realm. Steamship ferry services across the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea galvanized regional migration. At the same time, the pan-Asian anticolonial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inspired Asians to rediscover a common spatial and political understanding of Asia. Though colonialism was a humiliating experience, it nonetheless provided a common layer on which Asians are now building a post-Western future. Asians are realizing that they have much more to learn from one another than from the West. Ultimately, perhaps the greatest Western legacy will have been to accelerate the self-actualization of Asia.
Asia After the West: Uses and Abuses of Western Experience
Given Asia’s rich historical record of intercivilizational interactions, it is odd when Western scholars make analogies to European history to explain Asian states’ behavior. Is Germany’s nineteenth century rise a better way to interpret China’s ambitions today than a combination of Tang and Ming history? Should the United States really hold up India as a continental counterbalance to China when India’s golden era was under the seafaring Chola Dynasty, which ruled the waves? Can Iran be confined to its present national boundaries when for much of history Persian empires reached the Mediterranean Sea? Since we are talking about China, India, and Iran, surely it makes more sense to assume that Chinese, Indians, and Iranians think and act more through analogies with their own histories than with the West’s.
Unlike in the West, where religious conflict has been a defining attribute of the system’s formation, Asians have long tolerated one another’s belief systems, demonstrating over many centuries a capacity for interethnic and religious coexistence at the international level. They have managed, in the words of the German strategic scholar Andreas Herberg-Rothe, “harmony with difference.” Today, despite religious differences, India’s ties with the Gulf Arabs, Iran, and Indonesia are getting stronger with each passing year of military and commercial cooperation. Confucian and Muslim societies at opposite ends of Asia have little to fear from each other. They form not a geopolitical axis but a restoration of the Silk Road commercial axis.
A similar logic applies in the geographic domain. Whereas European history features consistent fear of a singular regional hegemon, Asia’s geography makes it inherently multipolar. Natural barriers absorb friction. Vast distances, high mountains, and other natural boundaries such as rivers protect Asians from excessive encroachment on one another. Taken together, the combination of geography, ethnicity, and culture has significantly contributed to Asia’s recent wars among neighboring powers—China and India, China and Vietnam, India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq—ending in stalemate. And whereas European history teaches that wars occur when there is a convergence in power among rivals, in Asia, wars occur when there is a perception of significant advantage over rivals. Thus the more powerful China’s neighbors such as India, Japan, and Russia grow, the less likely conflict among them becomes.
Additionally, though European and Asian history both feature major sedentary empires, Asia’s many nomadic tribes played a crucial role in advancing Asia’s dizzying linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity. Bridging societies and cultures such as the Sogdian supplied the missionaries, scholars, and translators of the ancient Silk Road. Nomadic cultures also wielded significant geopolitical power. The Huns plundered through India and Europe, the Scythians and Parthians controlled trade networks spanning from Rome to China, the Seljuks roamed patches of eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia, the Arabs marched across Central Asia and sailed to India and Southeast Asia, and the Mongols showed how nomadic peoples could build the largest empire of the premodern world.
To the extent that Western scholarship uses Asian analogies to divine the future, it often chooses the wrong ones. The most common is to suggest that Asia’s future will resemble China’s tributary system, which operated primarily from the late sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, during the Ming and Qing dynasties. But the geographic scope of the tributary model never reached meaningfully beyond East Asia. Furthermore, the tributary system revolved around trade; China exercised minimal political or military hegemony. China has never been an indestructible superpower presiding over all of Asia like a colossus. Indeed, China’s defeat at the Battle of Talas in the eighteenth century, submission to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, partial colonization by Europeans in the nineteenth century, and invasion by Japan in the twentieth century all remind us that China itself has not been immune to conquest. Western theoretical abstractions paint a false choice for Asia between hegemony and anarchy, whereas the reality is much more rooted in Asia’s multicivilizational, multipolar past.
There are, however, Western colonial influences that have been baked into the fabric of the region, perhaps only slowly (if at all) to be undone: state sovereignty over fluid borders, religious and ethnic national divisions over multiethnic identities, consumerism and materialism over clan and kinship. There are exceptions to these shifts, but each has shaped Asia to a considerable degree. Asians must now decide to what extent Western legacies will be Asianized and what elements of Asian history will be recovered.
The most pertinent questions facing Asia are about neither ideology or hegemony but rather about how to demarcate and share territory. Asia’s main tensions are not between civilizations but between nations. Asian civilizations have maintained deep patterns of mutual respect and learning for millennia, while post–World War II sovereignty and nationalism have left a legacy of boundary disputes that still need to be resolved for Asia to fully return to its precolonial fluidity. The zero-sum nature of sovereignty requires clarity as to who owns what territory or water. Modern international law has imposed a sense of finality and permanence. The desire to ratify territorial claims has sharpened dormant tensions. Had India never been partitioned, would Kashmir have become the site of an international war, civil conflict, and insurgency claiming more than 100,000 lives since 1947? As a multiethnic princely state, Kashmir was made up of Buddhist Tibetans, Hindu pandits, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and Punjabi Sikhs. After centuries of misrule by Mughals, Afghans, and Sikhs, it was far from a well-run and cohesive society. But it is hard to imagine a worse outcome than what has happened since the cementing of
ethnoreligious divide-and-rule after Britain’s hasty departure. Kashmir and Palestine are just two examples of how Asia today remains littered with conflicts that combine the legacies of European colonialism, exigencies of state sovereignty, and local ethnolinguistic factions. Even Asia’s foreign-manufactured security challenges have become regional ones. Many Asians, especially Arabs and Indians, continue to blame the West for their unresolved boundaries and sectarian politics, but this is of little value in conflict resolution. Asians, not Westerners, will suffer the most from fighting over terrain they have long shared.
The principal lesson from Asia’s geopolitical history is that no one power’s dominance has lasted for very long before meeting sufficient resistance—internally, from neighbors, or both—to dash its hopes of eternal hegemony. Whether the Mongols, Ming China, or imperial Japan, Asia’s disparate societies have proved too diffuse and impenetrable to be fully absorbed by others. Over the millennia, Turkic, Persian, Arab, Indian, and Russian empires have also sought to establish hierarchies in Asia with themselves as the core power. Asia will always be a region of distinct and autonomous civilizations, a number of which, including China, India, and Iran, have an ingrained sense of historical centrality and exceptionalism. As a result, the most any power has achieved is to be a thriving subregional anchor in a multipolar Asia—very much the scenario unfolding today.
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The Return of Greater Asia
After centuries of colonialism and Cold War division, coherence is returning to Asia. All of Asia’s subregions are bending toward a common gravity. In the two countries that bridge western and eastern Eurasia—Russia and Turkey—Asian geography has been considered secondary to European political orientation. But today, both powers are embracing their roles in the Asian system. The same is true for key geographies of the so-called Middle East—the Mashriq (Levant) and Khaleej (Gulf)—whose nations and kingdoms are loosening their dependencies on the West and turning to Asia to build future strategic ties. Even core geographies such as Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, which were once too underdeveloped or isolated to participate fully in the greater Asian story, are now pillars of it. And regional anchors Australia and Japan, whose Western leanings have defined their global orientation, are discovering their inevitable Asianization as well.