{"id":966,"date":"2018-09-25T22:44:12","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T20:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/?p=966"},"modified":"2024-08-08T21:49:12","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T20:49:12","slug":"anti-westernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/?p=966","title":{"rendered":"Anti-westernism"},"content":{"rendered":"

[NL<\/a>]<\/p>\n

“Many Asian intellectuals<\/a> became some of the most eloquent – and earliest – critics of modernity<\/a>. … With their anti-modern sensibility … they anticipated Europe<\/a>‘s own thinkers, who were forced to re-examine their nineteenth-century belief in a progressively rational world by the slaughter of the First World War. … In fact, it was European principles of nationalism<\/a> and civic patriotism that almost all native elites embraced in order to beat (or at least draw level with) the West in what seemed a Darwinian struggle for the future. …<\/p>\n

Resistance<\/a> to the West required [well] urgent adaptation to Western ideas<\/a> of organizing state<\/a> and society. … there was one Western idea in particular that proved irresistible to Muslim as well as Communist anti-imperialists …: the institutions<\/a> and practices of the nation-state<\/a>: clear boundaries, orderly government<\/a>, a loyal bureaucracy, a code of rights<\/a> to protect citizens<\/a>, rapid economic growth through industrial capitalism<\/a> or socialism<\/a>, mass literacy programmes, technical knowledge and the development of a sense of common origins within a national community. … More than fifty new nations, with new names, borders and currencies appeared in just two decades after 1945. …<\/p>\n

But the transition from criticizing foreign rule and instigating mass-movements to establishing a stable basis for self-determination proved to be very difficult. … The imported ideological passions of the Cold War aggravated political tensions in many countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia. Separatist movements broke out in Kashmir, Aceh, East-Pakistan, Tibet and Sri Lanka. …<\/p>\n

We can see that the seemingly wholesale adoption of Western ideologies<\/a> (Chinese<\/a> communism<\/a>, Japanese imperialism) did not work<\/a>. Attempts at syntheses (India’s parliamentary democracy<\/a>, Muslim Turkey’s secular state, China’s state capitalism) were more successful, and violent rejections of the West in the form of Iran’s Islamic Revolution<\/a> and Islamist movements continue to have an afterlife.<\/p>\n

Many new nations<\/a>, such as Pakistan, never recovered from birthing traumas. … A year after the Arab Spring and the collapse of several pro-Western dictatorships, chaos and uncertainty may loom over a wide swathe of the Arab world for some years. But the spell of Western power has finally been broken. … The sense of humiliation that burdened several generations of Asians has greatly diminished. …<\/p>\n

Yet this success conceals with an immense intellectual failure, one that has profound ramifications for the world today and the near future. It is simply this: no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy … Gandhi, their most rigorous critic, is a forgotten figure within India today. Marxism<\/a>-Leninism lies discredited and … China<\/a>‘s own legacy of ethical politics and socio-economic theory remains largely unexplored. …<\/p>\n

The ‘Bejing Consensus’ has even less universal application than its Washington counterpart; it sounds suspiciously like merely a cynical<\/a> economic argument for the lack of political freedom<\/a>. …<\/p>\n

The earliest Asian modern intellectuals were beholders to European ideas. … Europe itself took hundreds of years to develop and implement the concept of a sovereign<\/a> nation-state, only to then plunge into two world wars that exacted a terrible toll from ethnic and religious minorities. …<\/p>\n

Much of the ’emerging’ world now stands to repeat, on an ominously larger scale, the West’s own tortured and often tragic experience of modern ‘development<\/a>‘. In India and China, the pursuit of economic growth<\/a> at all costs has created a gaudy elite, but has also widened already alarming social and economic disparities … The privileged<\/a> Chinese minority aspires to nothing higher than the conveniences and gadgets of their Western consumer<\/a> counterparts … a third of Indians live in conditions of extreme poverty<\/a> and deprivation. More than half of the children<\/a> under the age of five in India are malnourished. …<\/p>\n

The disasters … can no longer be explained away with reference to the logic of development<\/a> as manifested in Europe’s history. … The hope, that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers<\/a> in India and China will one day enjoy the lifestyle of Europeans and Americans<\/a> – is as absurd and dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by al-Quaeda<\/a>. … It condemns the global environment to early destruction<\/a>, and looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic<\/a> rage and disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots – the bitter outcome of the universal<\/a> triumph of Western modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.”<\/p>\n

aus:Pankaj Mishra: From the ruins of Empire. London: Penguimn 2013 (Orig.-Ausg. 2012), S.302-310<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

04\/18<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[NL] “Many Asian intellectuals became some of the most eloquent – and earliest – critics of modernity. … With their anti-modern sensibility … they anticipated Europe‘s own thinkers, who were forced to re-examine their nineteenth-century belief in a progressively rational world by the slaughter of the First World War. … In fact, it was European […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5366,"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions\/5366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woydt.be\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}