Timothy Garton Ash: Two Ways for West to Meet China
In the wake of President Obama’s China visit, Timothy Garton Ash puts forward two approaches the West could take to engage China. From the Malaysian Insider:
Diplomatically, the US will have significant possibilities of balancing Chinese power by strengthening relationships with Europe, India, Japan and other regional powers. A cooperative “strategic partnership” of all these powers is indeed the goal towards which we should work.
Yet beyond the hard power relations, there is an almost philosophical question about how the West engages with China. There are, it seems to me, two basic approaches the West could adopt. As he swayed on his tightrope, the end of Obama’s balancing pole pointed sometimes to one, sometimes to the other.
The first approach, which China’s rulers like, is for the West to say: “You have your traditions, your civilisation, your culture, your values, and we have ours. In a world of very diverse sovereign great powers, the only basis for international order is mutual respect. Inside our respective frontiers, we do it our way, you do it yours. Only thus can we avoid Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’.”
[...] The other approach, which I support, is for the West to start the search for a genuinely universal universalism, in a dialogue with China and other non-Western emerging powers. This could not be a purely Western-defined universalism, with the implication that all the essential universal truths were discovered in the West some time between, say, 1650 and 1800, and all other countries simply have to follow suit.
Rather, it would be a universalism which says something like this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, but maybe you’d like to suggest some other ones. We say life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; perhaps you’d like to make the case for harmony, security or transgenerational community. Then let us compare the aspirations, and the social realities, in the cool light of reason.”
POSTED COMMENTS: One Response
As always the so called educated take a myopic view of the world. The real future and balance of power lies with Africa. There arew several reason but any learned man wil research to find out. Have you seen the chinese dieing to develop a relationship with Europe,Japan, India and other regional powers? If America were to establish manufacturing basis all over Africa and consider the population of Africa and that of America as part of its population on paper and take that opportunity to enhance the skill and industry base of Africa, then only can America weaken Chinese power. The question is if All africa bought and exported their own fridges,computers etc with American investment, how much will china sell to Africa? and once that trend is set, Europe, Japan etc will follow America, further weakening Chinese econmic muscle and bring fair balance. At this stage America will be taking the lead and will revert ti its world leadership. Who will africa sell its minerals to? Europe or India or Japan or China……let the so called think again…but as they say, Obama and his team are playing chess and the rest of so called learned media are playing chceckers or something even more trivial. so let us see the choice his administration makes beause there are some africans who are waiting in the wings of leadership and have spent years lewarning the weakness in the so called developed world and with the support of anti-corruption agencies, they will work will the so called developed world or the so called developed world can hand the cake to China. Next time, I hope an indepth view of the world and the future is taking before putting pen to paper. A muscle of china can be measured by their hands on total control of America currency……….what hhas everyone been looking at?