Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

by Gideon Rachman

Russian intellectuals ‘craved to be accepted as equals by the West, to enter and to become part of the mainstream of European life. But when they were rejected or they felt that Russia’s values had been underestimated by the West, even the most Westernised of Russia’s intellectuals were inclined to be resentful and to lurch towards a chauvinistic pride in their country’s threatening Asiatic size.’

If the West was indeed in terminal decline and the future was Asian, it made perfect sense for Russia to look east and towards China.

this combination of population and economic pressures – combined with historical grievances – make it inevitable that China will one day lay claim to Russia’s energy-rich east.

more informal ‘invasion’ is already taking place through mass Chinese immigration into the Russian east,

Ukraine’s misfortune was that, in the era of Easternisation, it had found itself on the borderlands between East and West.

The fact that the West no longer dominates the world economy in the way that it did, even in 1990, has opened up new strategic choices for many countries. Turkish companies, for example, have prospered by expanding rapidly in Russia, the Gulf States and Central Asia.

Russian allegations of corruption, mismanagement, brutality and far-right influence in Ukraine had just enough substance to them to help Moscow in its information war with the West.

great powers granted each other ‘spheres of influence’. Wars were avoided by informal understandings between the big powers that they had a veto over what happened in their neighbourhoods.

Moscow’s argument about spheres of influence was one that found a clear echo in Beijing – where the Chinese government is also trying to establish a national sphere of influence, in the South and East China Seas.

Chan urged the Ukrainians to face the fact that they would always have to accommodate Russian power: ‘I am five foot three and I’m ugly,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to deal with it. You have also got to deal with facts.’

survival meant maintaining a keen awareness of the sensibilities and preferences of powerful neighbours.

one phenomenon of the later Obama years was the re-emergence of a fashion for political ‘strong men’ as leaders – particularly in Asia.

There were many good reasons for Turks to feel fed up with Brussels. Being kept in the antechamber of the EU for more than fifty years was humiliating.

‘Political Islamists now tend to view the West in general, and Europe in particular, as a civilisation in political, economic, social and moral decline.’

Rather than being a beacon of Western-style liberalism for an Arab world in ferment, Turkey under Erdogan became a fulcrum for Muslim denunciation of Western inaction over the unfolding tragedy of the civil war in Syria.

there were said to be more journalists in jail in Erdogan’s Turkey than in Communist China.

The ‘white’ Turks tend to be secular, relatively well-off and more urban. The ‘black’ Turks are pious Muslims and tend to be poorer and more provincial.

For generations, Turkey was a country that had looked one way only – towards the West. The East, for the Ataturk secularists, represented only backwardness and poverty.

Orban hailed instead the authoritarian model of development visible in Asia as the model of the future.

build an ‘illiberal state, based on national foundations’.10 The prime minister cited Singapore, China and Turkey as possible inspirations.

The new African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, had been funded entirely by a $200 million grant from China.

‘the world’ was not giving up on Africa – just the Western world. The view from China was rather different.

Chinese businesspeople and workers were less likely to be dismayed by African conditions than their more cosseted Western counterparts:

China’s two-way trade with Africa grew twentyfold between 2000 and 2010, from $10 billion a year to $200 billion. That made China comfortably Africa’s largest trading partner.

‘China is increasingly replacing the West as the new face of globalisation in Africa.’

For China’s growing influence in Africa is the most prominent example of China emerging as a truly global power – with an economic and diplomatic reach that extends well beyond its own Asian hinterland.

The expansion of Chinese influence in Latin America, although less commented upon, was in many ways just as remarkable as China’s growing presence in Africa.

China’s hunger for Brazilian soy, sugar, meat, iron and copper. Much as with Africa, China’s thirst for natural resources and commodities was the driving force of a remarkable boom in two-way trade.

China has the ambition and the finance to consider projects that would transform the infrastructure of a far-off continent in America’s backyard.

as the populations of China, South Korea and Japan age and then shrink, so growth in East Asia will slow. By contrast, India and Africa have much younger populations. Over the long run that might mean that the Indian Ocean rim displaces the Pacific Rim as the most dynamic area in the global economy.17

Spooked by the sight of Chinese expansion in Africa and Latin America, Japan has also tried to respond.

Just as shrewd Latin American countries had once profited from the geopolitical competition between the USSR and the US, so now they found themselves as players in the emerging geopolitical rivalries in East Asia.

China might replicate old patterns of exploitation that were once patented by the countries of Europe.

China’s foreign policy emphasised ‘non-interference’ in the internal affairs of the African governments it was dealing with – and many African leaders clearly welcomed the contrast with fussy Western ‘conditionality

Critics of China’s methods respond that whilst African leaders might be delighted by the deals they could do with the government in Beijing, ordinary Africans were not always such clear beneficiaries.

Obama’s message that ‘Africa doesn’t need strong men, it needs strong institutions’ provided a strong contrast to China’s stress on personalised diplomacy and ‘non-interference’ in the domestic affairs of African nations.

much of the world is still wired through the West by looking at some of the key institutions that underpin the global economic and political order. These include high-profile international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF; but they also include much lower-profile organisations that are often regarded as technical and apolitical in nature – such as Swift or ICANN, the organisation that manages internet domain names,

Finally, there is a form of international wiring that goes beyond formal institutions: the forms of money and the laws that are most widely used around the world.

The fact that the dollar is the world’s leading reserve currency is, perhaps, the single biggest source of American institutional strength

The fact that so many institutions – formal and informal – that are critical to the governance of the global economy and international politics are located in the West is a major source of political power. But will this advantage endure in the era of Easternisation?

If economic might is what ultimately matters, we can expect more of the world’s wiring to run through Asia in the future. But it is also possible that other factors are important. History plays a part.

However, the institutional inertia produced by history cannot be expected to preserve the West’s advantage indefinitely If international institutions no longer reflect the realities of the world around them, they will eventually become irrelevant

The most important non-economic Western edge goes beyond history. It is the West’s reputation for the rule of law. As long as the US and the EU are perceived as running institutions that enforce rules predictably, impartially and swiftly, powerful people and institutions may continue to prefer to use institutions based in the West.

if the West begins to use that political power too overtly then the rest of the world’s faith in the impartiality of institutions based in the West will diminish. At that point, the drive to set up alternative structures will accelerate, eroding one of the West’s remaining great advantages in the competition for international political power.

‘If you ranked sanctions on a scale of one to ten, Swift would be a ten – and right now we’re still only on a three or four.’7

The decision to award the World Cups to Russia and Qatar were symbols of that order, and ‘Western countries are powerless to change FIFA.’

The dollar and the law are two powerful forces that mean that, even as the global economy Easternises, much of the world’s wiring still runs through the West.

China’s system of commercial law was designed by the Communist Party and its courts remain under party supervision. India’s democratic system and common-law tradition makes its legal system sound more attractive in theory – but delays in the court system are notorious.

there are already signs that Asia’s growing economic weight is beginning to shift things. Singapore, whose legal system is based on English common law, is gaining an increasing share of the international arbitration business,

Robert Mundell, a Nobel laureate in economics, once put it: ‘Great powers have great currencies.’