When China Rules the World полностью

The twentieth century was characterized by the ideological cleavage between socialism and capitalism, an era ushered in by the October Revolution in 1917 and which found expression in the onset of the Cold War after 1945, until finally coming to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989- 91. That world, where every conflict and division was refracted through the prism of this wider ideological schism, then proceeded to evaporate with great speed. American neo-conservatives believe that the new global divide is the war on terror – what they like to describe as the Fourth World War (the third having been the Cold War) – but this represents a basic misreading of history. The era we are now entering, in fact, can best be described as one of contested modernity. Unlike the Cold War, it is not defined by a great political or ideological divide but rather by an overarching cultural contest. The emergence of new modernities not only means that the West no longer enjoys a virtual monopoly on modernity, but that the histories, cultures and values of these societies will be affirmed in a new way and can no longer be equated with backwardness or, worse still, failure. On the contrary, they will experience a new sense of legitimacy and, far from being overawed by or deferential towards the West, will enjoy a growing sense of self-confidence.

Hitherto the world has been characterized by Western hubris – the Western conviction that its values, belief systems, institutions and arrangements are superior to all others. The power and persistence of this mentality should not be underestimated. Western governments feel no compunction or restraint about lecturing other countries on the need for, and overwhelming virtue of, their versions of democracy and human rights. This frame of mind is by no means confined to governments, who, for the most part, simply reflect a popular cultural consensus. Many Western feminists, for example, tend to assume that gender relations in the West are more advanced than elsewhere, and that they are more liberated and independent than women from other cultures. There is a deeply embedded sense of Western psychological superiority which draws on powerful economic, political, ideological, cultural and ethnic currents. The rise of a world of multiple modernity challenges that mentality, and in the era of contested modernity it will steadily be eroded and undermined. Ideas such as ‘advanced’, ‘developed’ and ‘civilized’ will no longer be synonymous with the West. This threatens Western societies with an existential crisis of the first order, the political consequences of which we cannot predict but will certainly be profound. The assumptions that have underpinned the attitudes of many generations of Westerners towards the rest of the world will become increasingly unsustainable and beleaguered. The West has thought itself to be universal, the unquestioned model and example for all to follow; in the future it will be only one of several possibilities. This is a scenario that, at least until very recently, [420] the West has been almost entirely unprepared for, as Paul A. Cohen, cited at the very beginning of this chapter, suggests. In future it will be required to think of itself in relative rather than absolute terms, obliged to learn about, and to learn from, the rest of the world without the presumption of underlying superiority, the belief that ultimately it knows best and is the fount of civilizational wisdom. The bearer of this change will be China, partly because of its overwhelming size but also because of the nature of its culture and outlook. China, unlike Japan, has always regarded itself as universal, the centre of the world, and even, for a millennium and more, believed that it actually constituted the world. The emergence of Chinese modernity immediately de-centres and relativizes the position of the West. That is why the rise of China has such far-reaching implications.