The nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked the Age of the West. But this era is now coming to an end. By the middle of this century, when the West will be responsible for a great deal less than half the world’s GDP, the Age of the West will have passed. The rise of China, India, Brazil, Korea, Taiwan and many other developing countries marks a huge shift in the balance of economic power, but it also has much wider implications. Economic prosperity serves to transform the self-confidence and self-image of societies, thereby enabling them to project their political and cultural values more widely. A striking characteristic of the Asian tigers has been the way in which, during the process of modernization, they have steadily shifted from a seemingly insatiable desire for all things Western as the symbol of the modernity they so craved — combined with a rejection of the indigenous, which was seen as synonymous with poverty and backwardness — to a growing affirmation of the indigenous in place of the Western. In the 1970s, for example, few Taiwanese would entertain the idea of traditional Chinese furniture, but by the early nineties this attitude was starting to be superseded by a growing interest in traditional artefacts. Similarly in pop music, for example, Western influences were replaced over the same period by local and regional mando-pop (Chinese-composed pop music sung in Mandarin). [416] In other words, tradition, rather than being rejected, has been progressively rearticulated as part of a new and native modernity. [417] The same general picture applies across the whole of East Asia, including China. In 1980 few knew or cared much about other countries in the region: all eyes were turned to the global mecca, the United States. The lines of communication were overwhelmingly east- west — in terms of information, music, politics, technology, education, film, aspiration and desire. Most East Asians knew far more about what happened in New York, Washington or London than in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing or Kuala Lumpur. East Asians still remain remarkably intimate with what emanates from the United States — certainly compared with the overwhelming ignorance that Americans display towards East Asia — but the situation has changed markedly. Hung Tze Jan, the Taiwanese publisher quoted earlier, well describes this changed mentality: ‘When I was at high school and university, we focused all our efforts on Western literature and ideas. My son is in his early teens and in contrast to me he has the opportunity to create something new — to read both Chinese and Western literature.’ [418]
In the future, then, instead of there being one dominant Western modernity (itself, of course, a pluralistic phenomenon), there will be many distinct modernities. It is clear that we have already entered this era of multiple modernities: by the middle of the century we will be firmly ensconced in it. Hitherto, we have lived in a Western-made and Western-dominated world, in which the economic, political and cultural traffic has been overwhelmingly one-directional, from the West to others. That is already beginning to change, becoming a two-way, or more precisely a multi-directional process. An interesting illustration of how the old pecking order is steadily being disrupted, even inverted, can be found in the world of cricket. Formerly, cricket was largely dominated by England, together with two former white settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand. But in 2008 India, which already accounted for around 80 per cent of the game’s revenues, established the Indian Premier League and its eight teams, representing various Indian cities and states, proceeded to sign up many of the world’s best cricketers, much to the chagrin of the English cricket authorities, who have always thought of themselves as the centre of the game. The future of cricket now manifestly belongs on the Indian subcontinent, where the character, flavour and evolution of the game will increasingly be determined. [419] If Manchester United and Liverpool enjoy a global fan base in football, then the likes of Punjab and Chennai may well blaze a similar trail in cricket.
The Age of the West was not only marked by economic and military dominance but by Western ascendancy in more or less every field, from culture and ideas to science and technology, painting and language to sport and medicine. Western hegemony meant anything associated with the West enjoyed a prestige and influence that other cultures did not. White skin colour has been preferred globally — in East Asia too, as we saw earlier in this chapter — because it was synonymous with Western power and wealth. Western-style clothes have been widely adopted for the same reason. English is the global lingua franca because of the overweening importance of the United States. The history of the West — in particular, the United States and Western Europe — is far more familiar to the rest of the world than that of any other country or region because the centrality of the West has meant that everyone else is obliged, or desires, to know about it. Western political values and ideas are the only ones that enjoy any kind of universalism for a similar reason. But now that the West is no longer the exclusive home of modernity, with the rest of the world cast in a state of pre-modernity, the global equation changes entirely. Hinduism will no more be a byword for backwardness. Nor will Indian clothes. It will no longer be possible to dismiss Chinese political traditions as an obsolete hangover from the days of the Middle Kingdom, nor equate the Western family with modernity and dismiss those of India and China as remnants of an agrarian age. To growing numbers of people outside the West, Chinese history will become as familiar as Western history is now, if not more so. The competition, in other words, between the West and the rest will no longer be fundamentally unequal, pitting modernity against tradition, but will take place on something that will increasingly resemble a level playing field, namely between different modernities. We can already see this in the corporate world, where Korean, Japanese and Chinese companies, bearing the characteristics of the cultures from which they emanate, compete with their rather different Western counterparts, often with considerable success.
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.
[416] According to Johnny Tuan, who runs his own pop music label, Western pop music, the music of choice for many in the 1970s, now represents a very small segment of a market in which mando-pop is overwhelmingly dominant. Interview with Johnny Tuan, Chairman, Rock Records Co. Ltd, Taipei, March 1999; also interview with Wei-Chung Wang, Taipei, March 1999.
[417] Another example is the revival of traditional instruments, for example, the