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enormous cultural diversity.” But he also realizes that modernity for non-Western countries, often imitating that of the US, can be destructive of the cultural past and like Bollywood may result in not always pleasant cultural mongrels. Its author, Fareed Zakaria––international affairs celebrity, writer, editor of Newsweek International as well as presenter of CNN’s GPO––writes eloquently on what he calls “the rise of the rest”.
A good example of the book’s more upbeat mood is found in chapter 2, where Fareed Zakaria quotes Harvard’s Steven Pinker’s assertion that, “today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence”. The book’s main arguments are delivered in seven chapters where Fareed Zakaria sets out his challenging arguments. They go something like this: as in a boxing ring––due to a number of historic, political but mainly economic reasons––there has been a current undisputed champion on the world stage since the end of World War II (the USA, whose present power and future role are analyzed in chapters 6 and 7), which has been able to establish and maintain a unipolar world dominance for several decades. But with the unprecedented growth of the global economy, a main challenger (China, analyzed in chapter 4), and a main ally (India, analyzed in chapter 5) have for the first time entered the ring.
Even then, the economic rise of the rest, which in the geopolitical arena also includes Russia, Japan, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, has not yet been able to dislodge American unipolarity, but has instead created what Chinese politicians cunningly describe as “many powers and one super-power”. In this book Fareed Zakaria sets himself the difficult task of trying to envision the advent of that other post-American world that he mentions in the title of his book.
In anticipation of what may be seen by some as a doubtful standpoint he states that even if the rural poor in South Asia, China and Africa have not participated in what he terms the third Great Expansion of the global economy, the largest the world has seen, they are nonetheless essential players. It is a phenomenon that was triggered by “the movement of Western capital to Asia and across the globe”. This new phase has occurred only during the past two decades and comprises two billion people participating in a global market and trade that up to then had been controlled by a “small club of Western countries”. It therefore seems ironic that it is this small group of Western nations, which have more recently introduced capitalism and democracy to the rest, that have nurtured a mass culture in non-Western societies that now rivals them.
The historical reasons for the rise of Europe and the US are considered in chapter 3, where Zakaria returns to a more conservative view and firmly dismisses assumptions claiming that the past 200 years of Western hegemony have been a kind of historical abnormality that was largely the result of unfair colonial practices. Zakaria disagrees because, as he explains, such assumptions are often based on an erroneous study of GDP that excludes GDP per capita and which only provides a partial reading of historical reality. While he is clearly aware of the cultural importance of events such as the exploits of the Chinese admiral 鄭和 Zheng He or the building of the Taj Mahal––both occurring during the years of Western ascendancy––the author maintains that the reason the West (by which he means Western Europe and the US) overtook non-Western civilizations was simply because the latter had stagnated. The examples he gives for China to illustrate the point are the introduction of mechanical clocks and cannon by the Portuguese. Even if China had used early versions of the cannon centuries before, at these later times their use had been forgotten and now needed Europeans to operate them.
Although the current global economic downturn has weakened some of Zakaria’s arguments, The Post-American World still strikes one as opportune. Only a few weak points stand out. There is a perhaps inevitable use of jargon. There are also instances of historical generalizations leading to inaccuracies, such as the claim that mechanical clocks and cannon were introduced to China by the Portuguese. This is not quite so; it was really Jesuit missionaries of various nationalities, mainly Italian and German, who introduced mechanical clocks and cannon as part of missionary strategy in China, even though in the case of cannon, Portuguese soldiers were indeed needed to operate them. But these sporadic inexactitudes do not by any means invalidate Zakaria’s main premises.
The subject of the book will no doubt appeal mainly to economic and political historians, political analysts and the like, but there is also much that is thought-provoking and informative, especially for anyone curious or concerned about the many unknowns that the resurgence of China and India as economic powers poses for the future of humanity.
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César Guillén-Nuñez, B.A. (London), M.A. (Pennsylvania), M.Phil. (London), is Research Fellow at the Macau Ricci Institute and Art Historian specialising in Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art. He has written several books and numerous articles on his speciality, as well as on China Trade and Contemporary Art. |
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| Issue 6.3 |
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Remembering—
A Shared Duty
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