← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia
01:17:51
Loading summary
Transcript113 lines
- [00:00]
A
Well, good evening. Welcome to the London School of Economics. Can you all hear me? That's the first. Not very well. I'll speak more. How about now? Is that better?
- [00:13]
B
No, no.
- [00:16]
A
I think the only way is I'm going to have to speak loud. Can you hear me now? Okay. My name is John Gray. Until I retired from academic life, I was professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. And I'm going to be moderating tonight's dialogue, which will be partly between myself and Pankas Mishra seated next to me and partly with yourselves. What we propose to do is he and I will talk for discuss his new book for maybe about 40 minutes and then you'll have 45 or 50 minutes yourselves to ask questions and have a dialogue with the author. Perhaps I can begin by saying that one of the things I noted when I was at the LSC 10 very happy years is that it's a truly global institution, one of the most global institutions, of course, in a. I don't have to repeat the cliche in one of the most globalized cities in the world, but the LSE is genuinely global. And what Pankaj Mishra's book is examining, I think is the ways in which the world we have today in which European and Western primacy have ended or are ending, is rooted in the history of the west and of non Western countries in the last century and in particular in the way in which Western ideas were accepted or rejected or modified in non Western countries. And of course, just to anticipate, one of the features of the book is he doesn't assume that what the west is and what the non west is, is fixed. It changes over time. But he's concerned to analyze that process. And I admire the book greatly, as I've said in various contexts. And one of the reasons I admire it is it seems to me to be to pierce the myths, the historical and other myths that have actually grown up in the west and in non Western countries. It's a myth, demystifying book in many ways and therefore for that reason, not a comforting book. But I'll now turn to Pankaj, who's written earlier books on similar themes, including a very interesting book called the Temptation of the west, who's a novelist as well as a critic and a historian. And maybe just begin by asking the most obvious question, but it's the one I'd love to ask is on why did you write this book?
- [03:08]
B
Now, thank you, John. Can you all hear me? Oh, oh, I'm sorry about that. Can we do something about that. If we switch this off, would that be slightly better?
- [03:27]
A
Before we switch it off, can I. I forgot to mention, if any of you want to tweet as we're going along, Larissa, there is a hashtag there. Tweet. A tweet hashtag, which is lse mishra. Okay.
- [03:45]
B
Whatever that means. I'm not a tweeter, but I'm learning a few things. To answer your question, there were several, Several things that went into, I mean, several reasons why I wrote this book. But I think the most important one was that not being able to find a place for these very long, complicated histories of places like India and China in the dominant narratives of our time, which are narratives essentially with the west at its center, at their center, histories of essentially of Western modernity, in which every other country is given a certain kind of ranking, as it were. You know, you're number two, you're number three. Catching up, catching up, catching up. And even the sort of nationalist histories that I grew up on in India, and indeed that's been experienced for a lot of other people from Asian countries, they had very little space for some of these figures I write about in the book. People who are not necessarily leaders or the most important nationalist figures in their respective countries, but they were in many cases, marginal figures. They were poets, they were mystics, they were eccentrics. But they were the first people to respond to the challenge that this very unique challenge that the west posed to their societies. And these people, some like Liang Chechao, for instance, or Jamal ad Din Al Afghani, were very hard to find because they were cosmopolitan figures, particularly Al Afghani. So they belong to many particular histories, many particular national histories. But it was very hard to find them in any larger narrative about the world we live in. So I wanted to sort of write a history of this particular, or an account of this particular cosmopolitan moment in Asia where these people were trying to formulate a response to Western imperialism, to Western modernity, and also talking to each other, learning from each other, learning from Japan. Japan plays a very crucial role in this story. And I think really to sort of create another space for these histories, these cosmopolitan figures to be discussed and the challenges they confronted, the challenges to which they and the people who came after them then sort of responded to by building anti colonial movements, by building post colonial states, proper state building programs. And that's another history altogether that is, of course, extremely well represented in nationalist histories. But these people were being left out from both the history of the west, the history of Western modernity. And the histories of nation states and.
- [06:49]
A
The various different intellectual and cultural leaders you discussed, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and others. Am I right in saying that they regarded the challenge of the west as not only one of exploitation and of an imperial power, military and other power, but as a kind of cultural challenge to the very foundations of their own societies, a danger to their own societies beyond the economic and the military?
- [07:23]
B
Absolutely. I think the sort of the story of the overt exploitation and the violence and the terror, that's actually a very small part of this narrative. And this book doesn't contain too many details of various atrocities or various crimes committed during the course of European subjugation of Asia. But what was more important, and as you say, a challenge that was felt at a very profound level was that this whole idea of this whole model, this whole social, political, economic model that the west had brought with itself and that posed a challenge to these older societies was something that really threatened to uproot millions of people, hundreds of millions of people in these societies. And to boil it down in very sort of simple terms, the basic assumption of this particular socio economic model, the autonomous, the self motivated, the self directed individual. This was an extraordinary challenge for societies which were largely communitarian in their orientation, where the idea of the individual, the sort of self seeking to take it further, the profit maximizing individual, wasn't so well advanced. This was the profoundest challenge that now everything, economic arrangements, our political arrangements, our social arrangements have to be built around this model of the individual, of satisfying his or her desires, of his or her needs. And this at a very profound philosophical level was really the greatest challenge for them that now we have to kind of overturn centuries of our existence which is based upon other principles altogether. This was a challenge as much as for people living in Muslim society as for people living in societies which had been directed for a long time by value systems derived from Confucianism or Buddhism. And in that sense it was really a much, much, much more serious and deeper challenge than that posed by just well equipped militaries and, and for the better firepower.
- [09:54]
A
And they didn't all agree, these cultural and intellectual leaders at all. Because I was very struck by some of the quotations you give of intellectuals in China, for example, who one of whom you quote as saying, I'm entirely ready for the traditions and cultural inheritance of China to disappear completely if that's the price we have to pay not to be entirely dominated by the West. In other words, if the price we have to pay in order to resist the west is to become like the West, I'll pay it. So some thought that way and others like Aurobindo in, sorry, Tagore in India who visited China and you describe his visit, he was widely criticized, even attacked in China because he thought that he did want to resist the influence of the west and the power of the west and the exploitation and the domination of the West, Western imperialism in the simplest sense. But he was concerned, he was anxious that a great deal could be lost by that. So there were deep divisions among these intellectuals, weren't there?
- [11:09]
B
Absolutely. Particularly for the first generation, which was still closer to older ways of being and feeling. And I think Tagore is actually a fascinating instance because, you know, he is, if you measure his influence politically today, it's practically non existent. But I think he's, as I said before, I mean it's marginal figures who often eliminate a larger political and sort of social situation. And I think his journey, the way in which he was attacked, viciously attacked in China by budding communists at that time and then of the way he was then marginalized within India, she really shows us how the people who were attacking him, what they were saying was we don't need what you're telling us about Confucianism or about the greatness of our traditions. We've been so humiliated by the west, we've been so utterly defeated. And it's a kind of defeat that's not just, it's not just military defeat, it's spiritual defeat, it's moral defeat that the only way we can regain our dignity is by, you know, having a hard line party that organizes a mass movement that then goes on to create a strong nation state and you know, please go away to India. You are from a country that's been now occupied by foreigners for decades, if not centuries and it's a pathetic little place. And we have no, we can't allow you to give your speeches to impressionable Chinese. You're going to corrupt them. And there are a lot of people even within China at that point who are conducting this debate with the sort of very young members of the then extremely young Communist Party that where you're taking China, this is going to be disastrous. And, and we cannot, that many hundreds of millions of people cannot adopt these ways of the west without creating a completely untenable situation for future generations to come. I mean, extremely prophetic words. And Tagore is also a prophet in that sense, in sort of seeing really where all this was going. So I think in that sense, focusing on marginal figures like that, people who were, in the end, losers of history rather than the winners, sort of clarifies our situation so much more clearly, especially.
- [13:40]
A
Since, as you say, some of the predictions or intuitions of these marginal figures seem to have been at least partly borne out by events. I mean, would you agree that interesting question which is partly answered in your book is, is that when people attacked Tagore in China and elsewhere and said we need to emulate the west, emulate its forms of government, its forms of organization, its forms of power, if we're not to be destroyed by it completely and remain forever under the Western heel, when they became communists or Marxists, were they aware that they were adopting a Western ideology? I mean, was that actually a process of Westernization for them? That's to say, when one reads them, it sort of sounds like that, that they were adopting what they saw as a hyper modern, hyper Western ideology in order to defeat the west at its own game.
- [14:43]
B
Well, I think they would probably present it as something they were getting from the Russians, who were also supposedly, in the language of. In the language used at the time, an Asiatic country, which was also an agrarian country and which was trying to industrialize and modernize and become strong again against Western powers. And the Russian Revolution, for a lot of them, was a model of that sort.
- [15:10]
A
But paradoxically, you begin the book with the Battle of Tsushima, when the Japanese navy destroyed the Russian Imperial Navy in 1905, and at that time, that's to say, before the Bolshevik Revolution, they were perceived as a European power.
- [15:27]
B
Absolutely.
- [15:27]
A
In Asia.
- [15:28]
B
Exactly.
- [15:29]
A
So something had happened in between.
- [15:30]
B
Something had happened. And also what happened was that Lenin, when he came to power, canceled all the special concessions czarist Russia had acquired in China. So that made him seem particularly sympathetic to the Chinese. And he also made a lot of noises about how, you know, people all across Asia have to rise if we are to liberate ourselves from the. From the tyranny of Western imperialism. So they. The Russians, became extremely attractive to a whole generation of Chinese activists. A lot of them went to Moscow as early as 1920.
- [16:03]
A
Chiang Kai Shek.
- [16:04]
B
Chiang Kai Shek. And the Russians, of course, came and set up academies, military academies, where a lot of the major figures of the Chinese nationalist movement were. Were then trained, including Chiang Kai Shek. But there was, I think, they thought of themselves. And Mao, I think in particular, thought of himself as, in many ways, giving Marxism or turning Marxism into something with Chinese characteristics, because Marxism hadn't really theorized about revolution in an agrarian country. And he was almost the first person I mean, the Russian Revolution was very much imposed from above, but he, he was actually trying to create a revolutionary army in the countryside and then encircled the cities. I mean, that whole sort of theory of guerrilla warfare and how we capture state power which is still being used in various parts of the world, that to him was much, much more important. But it was, I mean, it was, objectively speaking, it was very much an ideology with its origins in the west. And the interpretation they applied to Chinese society that is essentially feudal and various other concepts that they borrowed from Western Marxism were deeply flawed. And that led to the kind of disasters we saw after the Chinese took, after the Communists took power in 1949, where one misinterpretation after another led to major, major calamities.
- [17:45]
A
I mean, your book's a book of history and a book of biography on the biographical side, focusing on people, on intellectuals who, as you say, are marginal. So many people won't have heard of it retells many of the historical episodes of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. But it's also intended and I'm sure does illuminate aspects of the situation we're in now, because now, of course, there isn't. Although technically the Chinese regime is the People's Republic of China, it still owes allegiance to the Maoist inheritance. It is in other respects a version of capitalism, a tough version. India has evolved in some respects in a, in a capitalist way. What does the analysis of the book and these marginal but in some cases prophetic figures, what do they tell us about our situation now and in the future that we can discern now?
- [18:51]
B
I think there's sort of, I mean, someone like Tagore, for instance, who was extremely clear sighted in describing the dangers of nationalism or of building a heavily armed nation state along the lines Japan was doing in the early 20th century. And in many ways his warnings have been borne out by, in fact, the country that he belonged to, where so much national energy, national resources have gone into holding on to the territory of the nation state, of keeping various minorities under an iron heel to the considerable detriment of various other things such as health and public health, education, all kinds of things that should have been done in India, in India and in a place like China. I think Liang, because he was so obsessed with the idea of China, this very weak empire full of people who really didn't think of themselves as citizens of China, who were, who belonged to this very disparate, this very sort of scattered population which had no sense of nationality and that we his sort of great imperative was that we need to strengthen ourselves internally. And I think he was also more exposed in some ways than Nehru to the power of the West. He traveled to America and his accounts of America, fascinating about how America at that moment is breaking free of this sort of society. It had been for a long time a smallish pre industrial society was coming into its own, looking for investments, business opportunities for its investors and businessmen around the world and flexing its muscles in East Asia and elsewhere and Latin America, of course. So Liang realized that China had to build up a comparable industrial strength. And in that, I mean, this is something he shared with his communist critics too. And one of the things he said which has proven to be true is that what we need to really concentrate on is state capitalism. We need to encourage our businessmen, our big industries to be internationally competitive and the state has a role to play in this, and that everything else should be basically sort of secondary consideration that this is the most important thing China can do, because the world we are living in, all the businessmen of respective countries are backed by state power in America, in Germany, Britain, of course, China directly suffered during the Opium War and directly witnessed the power of businessmen backed by powerful political lobbies back in London. So that lesson he had absorbed and he was actually a critic of socialism. He thought socialism doesn't work and wouldn't work in China at that particular insight of his, which was finally realized after several decades. So it's very interesting to look at that particular moment when he's kind of observing the world he's living in and saying, what does China need to do? And to see then over decades, over several disasters, over several missteps and calamities, how China then arrives at that particular solution, adopts a model of state capitalism which in many ways resembles quite a bit that of Japan. This is how Japan also started in the late 19th century, by encouraging a close nexus between the state and industry. So there are many ways in which these people sort of illuminate and throw light on the world we are living in and also show how the history of modernity is not this one singular history of the west or of the west, of Western modernity, that countries and nation states have evolved different models of it. Models that work for them may not work for other countries or other peoples, but certainly something quite well suited to their own circumstances.
- [23:23]
A
One of the things I found most valuable in the book is the way it dislodges this discourse, which has been common in the last 10 or 15 years, of the west versus the rest because although it's an account of the interaction of east and west, one of the implications of the book is that the conflicts that might shape the next couple of generations may not be between the west and non Western countries at all. They might be among what we think of as what are now thought of as non Western countries. And I think that's one of the. That's perhaps you could say something about that because that's one of the respects in which your analysis, particularly towards the end of the book, contains possible warnings of dangers ahead.
- [24:13]
B
Well, because I mean, I think what we've done in large parts of Asia is repeat this particular and quite tragic journey of modernity, really in the sense that here are all these countries in Europe trying to modernize, trying to catch up with England, of course, in the first instance, and then competing for resources and territories around the world. And then of course you have this extraordinary bloody 20th century which after which you have the rise of post colonial Asia and you have again nation states modeling themselves on the Western model. And now after about 50, 60 years, we see them again doing the same thing, competing for resources around the world. It's China in Africa, the Indians in Latin America desperately running to find new commodities, sort of trouble free sources of energy, supply for themselves, water, which is now becoming a big problem both in Southeast Asia and South Asia. And it's hard not to imagine a scenario where these countries fight the kind of wars that we saw that we witnessed in the last century, in the century previous to that, because they haven't actually evolved, they haven't formulated a convincing answer to the particular social and political and economic models that was first suggested to them and actually in many ways forced upon them. So it's sort of, in many ways it's a tragic tale. It's not really about the rise of Asia or there's nothing triumphalist about that. The rise of Asia could be you're.
- [26:16]
A
Not opposing one triumphalism against another at all?
- [26:18]
B
Not at all. No. I think that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. And it's being actually blind to actuality. It's being blind to the world we are living in, which is not only full of conflicts, but portends many more conflicts in the future. Not to mention the fact that it's historically inaccurate in many, many, many significant aspects. The fact that the west is not this unitary construction and that the rise of the west was premised on a great deal on what happened in the East. And this is not something that happened uniquely within the territory we defined as.
- [26:56]
A
The west and also as you bring out that up till a couple of hundred years ago non western countries were economically and in other respects more vital and advanced than western ones. So what's happening to the west is simply a reversion to a longer historical normalcy and yet it seems to be adamantly denied. I mean my own experience in America is that in America the argument is our decline is entirely self inflicted, which implies we can reverse it at will if we just have. So it's nothing to do with the emergence of these, the re emergence of these other powers. Nothing to do with that. It's simply that we've made a series of mistakes and so there's denial there. But I suppose there could equally be denial and in on among Asian elites.
- [27:48]
B
And well, I suppose the good thing about the Asian Elise, is that there are a lot of bad examples, bad cautionary tales out there for them to learn from. Whereas you know, the situation described in America even to a certain extent here is very much a case of being stuck in a time war. Yes, people haven't really moved on, people haven't sounds horribly condescending, we haven't opened their eyes. It's a different world out there. And to remain to strike these kind of neo imperialist postures at this moment is just ludicrous apart from everything else. So I think what has happened, this is a much larger subject but there's a kind of political culture that we've seen in the last 10 years which has allowed people to wage wars, political leaders to strike these imperial postures for the bankers to go berserk. We've seen all kinds of things happen. One of the things we haven't really looked at what has happened to intellectual culture in Anglo America where all kinds of fantasies have prevailed quite like the ones that allowed CDS or something like CDS to become a great financial innovation. I think similar disasters and calamities have occurred in our intellectual life and we haven't really quite focused on them yet. But they're part of the same syndrome of this weirdly right wing and right wing is probably dignifying it weirdly reactionary sort of political culture that we've seen in the last decade.
- [29:32]
A
But I mean the essence of it I suppose is denial, isn't it? I mean if one wanted to use a semi psychological or cultural term, which is that there are obvious facts in terms of the shift of manufacturing, of energy, of power, the fact that most of the western countries are heavily indebted, profound, almost insolvent, many of them, these are facts and yet against that background of changed actuality, there's a persistent retreat into denial. Sort of denial through fantasy, which makes it.
- [30:05]
B
Which makes it more dangerous in many ways. And, you know, and that denial is shared by not just among political leaders, by large section of the commentary. I mean, people writing editorials in the major newspapers or people writing opinions columns, they are still using the same language of Western supremacy, which looks more and more ridiculous by the day.
- [30:38]
A
Well, I mean, how many of us have read things in newspapers saying, well, it's good what India's doing, but can't they be quicker? Can't they catch up with us more quickly? I mean, here we are kind of basking in the sunlight of perpetual wealth. This doesn't look quite like that now, but up to 2007, absolutely. Up till 2007, it was practically impossible to get a hearing for the kind of history. I mean, there were people producing the history, but they weren't getting much of a hearing for the kind of history that you're producing.
- [31:11]
B
No, I think that's right. It was very difficult to argue, and obviously I'd been writing back then that there was another world coming into being not so far from you, and one.
- [31:28]
A
That had existed a couple of hundred.
- [31:29]
B
Years, one that had existed and there were these imaginations and subjectivities out there which had their own histories who had looked at the world, who had experienced history in a different way and had other ideas about their future. And those ideas involve you as well. But there was a kind of. There has been a kind of blindness to all that.
- [31:54]
A
So the paradox is that the anti imperialist and anti colonialist movements of the whole of the 20th century didn't really shift this in the Western countries.
- [32:03]
B
They did not.
- [32:04]
A
Partly they challenged it.
- [32:05]
B
They challenged it. They challenged it politically. But in many cases those post colonial endeavors were failures and spectacularly so in some instances which invited yet again the attitudes of pity and condescension. Condescension that, you know, here you've declared a free nation state after great fanfare, after great struggles, and there you are back to being a basket case. So that also, I think, created, again, these help encourage the sort of new imperialist attitudes that maybe we can go out there and teach the natives the virtues of free trade and humane governance all over again. So I think the post colonial era, in some sense, in the way the post colonial era began, I think we probably have seen the end of that. I mean, we're into some other era. I'd not like to call it post post colonial era. But I think the Arab Spring was the clearest indication of that in many ways, that we've kind of, we've suddenly moved on from that. And there's a strange new world now appearing before our eyes. And, you know, it'd be hard to find our, certainly using the same old guidebooks and directions that we've been given by, by our newspapers and our think tanks and our sort of television anchors. I think it would be very lost in this new world.
- [33:43]
A
We'll open it up in a moment. But if you had to try and summarize in a few minutes what was the. I don't mean a simple lesson, because maybe that noticeable lesson can be drawn from this in some ways tragic narrative. But if there was one thought that you had writing the book, which you would want people to apply when they read the book, what would it be?
- [34:13]
B
I think it's the way in which the nation state finally became the main idea that most people in Asia, I think it's safe to say almost everyone, every major country or elites in all major Asian countries, adopted for themselves in order to match the power of the West. And that has proved to be, I think, the most tragic idea in the history of Asia in the last hundred years, in the, in the sense that the nation state, with its particular origins in Europe, presupposing more or less homogenous population, you know, clearly defined territories in the nation state, let's not forget, was created after a whole lot of violence and bloodshed here.
- [35:06]
A
Absolutely.
- [35:08]
B
And it, which continued late into the 20th century, a lot of ethnic cleansing, a lot of bloody suppression of minorities. And to adopt that idea for societies which had been traditionally multi ethnic, multicultural, multi religious for centuries and centuries has been a disaster. I mean, leaving aside all the other problems that the nation state brings in its wake. But the political idea of the nation state for countries like India and China, but the, of course, the tragic side of it, there were people who were forced into embracing and adopting that, because that seemed to me, that seemed to them the best kind of guarantee against repeated violations by the west and by the West's soldiers and merchants and diplomats. And in adopting that, they basically created, you know, potential for any number of tragedies and calamities in the future.
- [36:13]
A
Thank you very much. Well, what I'm going to suggest now is that we open it up more broadly. There are people around you all with roving mics. What I'm going to suggest is that we take questions in threes and that each person, when they ask their question, could announce who they Are. I mean that just helps me to remember. And I will then ask Pankaj to reply or respond to each of those in threes and we'll carry that on till 8 o'. Clock. So you've got 45 minutes. There's let me see, gentleman at the back and one here in a red and let me see. Yeah, I saw you first. Yeah, so it's one of the front. So we've got three people. So the gentleman at the back. What would you like to raise?
- [37:15]
B
My name is Sarkar. I've lived in this country for 50 years. Only reason I'm my questions is too short one. One is can the Britain or the western countries claim credit to improve the genetic pool of Chinese and Indians by killing them off? That's the one. And second is. I assume this is ironical.
- [37:40]
A
No, it's serious.
- [37:41]
B
I'm pretty serious because I've seen famine in Calcutta in 1942. The 5 million people died in the streets of Calcutta.
- [37:50]
A
And the second thing is. Second question is in 1 15th of.
- [37:54]
B
August, few years ago, what 35 years ago I was. I went to Calcutta Cathedral and I saw a name. One is ics. He's a wychemist and he treated subject races fairly I thought. I found hard to find out what Wikimest is and then I sent both of my sons to Winchester and Cambridge. I wonder whether they will fulfill my three so that they can return the favor to the natives.
- [38:24]
A
Thank you. This the gentleman in the red. I was one.
- [38:28]
B
My name is Jason, I'm from Toronto. I'm a teacher. I was wondering, Sir Mishra, if you.
- [38:34]
A
Could comment on the East's rise of.
- [38:37]
B
The mirroring of their use of things that are normally deemed Western. So for example Western the amounts of.
- [38:43]
A
Oil for example that we use in.
- [38:45]
B
The west or technology and communications that we use in the west. In the west.
- [38:47]
A
For example, Marshall McLuhan commented on how.
- [38:50]
B
The east tries, really has tried really diligently in the past 50 years, 100.
- [38:55]
A
Years to really mirror the communication style.
- [38:58]
B
Of the west using much more electricity, the Internet for example, all sorts of technologies.
- [39:02]
A
I was wondering if you could comment more on that. We've got one more in the front and then I'll take some from upstairs.
- [39:10]
B
Thanks. I'm Usman.
- [39:12]
A
I just wanted to ask you about.
- [39:14]
B
The kind of idea that many of these thinkers had of the west being kind of materially ahead and on the other hand the east having its own kind of cultural distinctiveness but at the same time that thought is. I mean is there A contradiction or tension between the universalism of that thought and this kind of almost self orientalizing aspect of Eastern values or whatever. And do you think that like, is there a legacy of this? And when we hear about people talking about Islamic finance or Asian values or is what we're seeing today something different? I think it's a complicated issue in the sense. Obviously a lot of the ideas people like Tagore had about their own traditions were borrowed, were taken from the scholarship that had emerged in Europe, in Germany, in the first century about India and the knowledge about Indian philosophies, about Indian religions. So it wasn't certainly true in the case of Tagore. It wasn't a direct absorption of Indian tradition. It was definitely mediated. Which raises the question, what did he do with that? I think. But I think he did something very interesting, which is that he used to that particular tradition and he conducted a dialogue with the tradition within Europe itself. Mind you, in Germany, Germany's interest, or German scholars interest in India or Indian philosophy was not just incidental or an accident of history. It was very much a response to what was happening in France with the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution. They were trying to construct an alternative narrative for themselves and for Germany. And Tagore, in opening up a dialogue, was seeking a resource, an intellectual resource with which he could counter these sort of new ideas about industrial civilization, about modern civilization. So I think that argument that he had simply borrowed this stuff from Oriental, Oriental scholars based in Europe, it's not. That doesn't invalidate what he was trying to do. There might have been a bit of self Orientalizing, but I think we have to move away from, you know, those kinds of paradise and paradigms where, you know, the word orientalism or Orientalizing becomes, you know, something. Something you should not be doing or something to stay away from. I think it was a very. It was a very fruitful exchange that he was. That he. That he had with that and counterposing, you know, notions of spirituality or Asian values, you know, deriving, delving deep into Confucian traditions. Again, it very much depends on who's doing it. You know, once the Chinese state starts doing it, once, once a state that actually calls itself communist, indulges mostly in sort of capitalist practices and claims to be inspired by, or certainly claims to be drawing from Confucian in asking for a harmonious society. I think we have every reason to be suspicious of that. But it doesn't invalidate this particular critical tradition of Confucianism or of any number of Asian traditions one can think of As a kind of intellectual, intellectual resource. The other question, which was about.
- [42:57]
A
Communications.
- [42:58]
B
Communication.
- [42:59]
A
So the question that's there was about the adoption by non Western societies of Western means of communication. Was that the principal aspect or more than that, Some people might not have heard that the questioner is saying not only means of communication but also types of energy source that are being adopted in non Western countries on a kind of reproducing those in Western countries.
- [43:32]
B
Yeah, in every, every respect. I mean, you know, once you, this is something, this is the discovery so many of the people I write about make that it's not possible to borrow a single thing from the West. It's not possible to borrow say better guns or better ammunition or even, you know, sort of new military skills. You had to, you had to buy into the whole package. And so whether it's communications, whether it's oil, this is something you have to do if you're going to catch up, if you're going to be sort of a country that is going to fulfill this promise. It has held out to its, you know, 2.4 billion people in both India and China, this promise of bringing them up to the level of middle class consumers in Europe and America. Then you have to do all these things, go looking for oil companies to buy in Canada, which they've just done successfully earlier this week, which is I think a huge step, which of course someone like Lee Ann Chacha would have completely approved of. Here is a state controlled company that goes into North America. It was rebuffed six years ago by the Americans. Now it's found the Canadians eager customers there and you become a competitor to ExxonMobil. This is the game they realize they have to play. Now.
- [45:07]
A
The question is saying, has the demand for these kinds of things come from the bottom up or the top down?
- [45:12]
B
I think it's more complicated, especially in a place like, like China, where the party and the state derives so much of its legitimacy from appearing to meet the material demands of its, of its populations and offering them this sort of utopia of, you know, essentially urbanization, modernization, of moving people from villages to the cities. So they're very much sold on this model. Mind you, they were also sold on this model when they were officially communist. That's part of the, again part of the whole package.
- [45:50]
A
We have three speakers up above. The gentleman at the end there is the first.
- [45:57]
B
I'm just trying to follow the drift of your argument. 20th century was dominated by communism, a universalistic ideology born in the west versus nationalism, which is again an arbitrary creation of the West. In that fight, self evidently nationalism won, but in its wake it has created genocide. Nationalism has been redefined to such an extent that in countries like Sri Lanka, for instance, it has led to genocide of one section of the community by another. And same thing in Africa. Now, of course the capital wants globalization, but it is throwing up contradictions even far greater than the ones we witnessed in this titanic struggle between nationalism and communism. Where do you think we should go now? If you reject nationalism, what other motivational force there in the world that you can mobilize people to resist the tyranny of the West? Thank you.
- [47:06]
A
Thank you. And there are two. One at the back in a very.
- [47:13]
B
Yeah, I really enjoyed your spot with Niall Ferguson. However, we on the left should be able to have adult arguments with people on the right. And I'll give you an instance in the two or three chapters on empire on India In Empire, Niall Ferguson's love of India comes through. I went to a lecture by a.
- [47:46]
A
Renowned guardian loved historian on her forthcoming.
- [47:53]
B
Work on Macaulay, and not one syllable of love for India came through her talk. So what I'm saying is beware the Guardian intelligentsia bearing gifts, just as the LSE should have been. Beware of Gaddafi bearing gifts.
- [48:22]
A
Thank you. Wait, wait, wait.
- [48:24]
B
Just one. Yes, yes, one. One quick question. Are you a third worldist or a one nation, and I'm speaking metaphorically anti imperialist.
- [48:39]
A
Thank you. And there's the lady sitting. Hi.
- [48:47]
B
Thank you. I'm Tanvi. I. All these years that I've lived in England, I've complained about how my question relates to the similar thing, complained about how the student syllabus doesn't include Britain's imperialist past. And now from your article I hear that it is going to be included, but written by Niall Ferguson. And as a parent I'm very concerned and I'm wondering what can we do to stop this?
- [49:14]
A
Okay, Prakash.
- [49:20]
B
I wish I had an answer to that, but I think to take the questions in the way in the order they were asked, it's very difficult to suddenly come up with an alternative to this whole idea, this extremely influential idea of the nation state at this point in history, as you say, it was used to mobilize large populations, bring them around a shared, however artificial, a shared identity, a flag, a government with clearly defined borders. But there are ways in which we can conceive of more relaxed notions of sovereignty, particularly in extremely conflict ridden zones like South Asia, for instance, where so much of our energies and resources have gone into fighting battles over often over territory. India And China too. So if we could sort of make even small steps towards solving some of these problems that are caused by hardline nation state nationalisms, we would have made some progress, some progress there. But I think we are moving away in the age of globalization from this sort of reality which used to exist and is growing in some sense weaker by the day of large populations who can be galvanized around the idea of nationalism, because lot of people in those populations feel extremely left behind by the economic growth many of their compatriots in the same populations have enjoyed, are enjoying. So there are new reservoirs of discontent and appearing in national populations, whether it's India or China. Look at the number of protests there every year, the social unrest indeed turning into extremely violent movements in places like India. So the old idea of the unitary nation state with its well organized and patriotic population, I think it's sort of over now. I think we're looking at new paradigms, we're looking at new conflicts opening up with a nation state and new challenges opening up to nation states internally. It's very hard to see where this will all, where this will all end. But we certainly kind of moving away from that older notion of it. Regarding the man with the killer apps, I think I sort of, I feel that again, I mean going back to what I said earlier, that I think it's not personalities really people like him who are important so much as the larger culture that they embody, the larger culture of debate and discussion and argument. And I think that's something which has shown serious signs of degeneration, if I can be allowed that word in the last 10, 15 years, where people who are essentially demanding wars, creative destruction in various parts of the world, completely unmindful of the violence and the suffering and destruction they would cause in these places, have enjoy such respectability. I mean we in the last 20th century. The 20th century is full of cautionary tales of intellectuals, people who make a living through writing, through thinking, lending their prestige, lending their sort of moral reputations to ghastly political projects. This was seen most clearly in communist countries where any number of intellectuals were happy to justify murder, mass murder in many cases. To see that happening in the so called free world has been some of the more depressing and demoralizing spectacles of the last few decades. Obviously some of that went on in the Cold War too, where many people turned a blind eye to the hot wars that were being fought in various parts of the world. Not only a blind eye, was simply oblivious to them in many instances. But now in this globalized, interconnected world. To assume those kinds of postures, to call for war, to call for a new imperium. I just find that. I just find that astonishing that not just the fact that there exists such people, but they enjoy a kind of prestige and reputation that intellectuals should not really have. People who basically have a fundamental belief in violence as a way to essentially create political realities. This is what we were faulting communist intellectuals for all the time for believing for violence as a way to a functioning state or a functioning economy. This is the reason why we demonize, we stigmatize, Mao Zedong or any number of people. Why have we suddenly made this belief again respectable is something that's deeply puzzling and baffling.
- [55:39]
A
Thank you. I'm going to take another three. There's one person been waiting. So we've got two more down here. The gentleman here has got his hand up and one more at the back. Thank you. But to begin with, who's been waiting.
- [55:54]
B
Up there, My name is Nitin Mehta. It is true that colonization was no more than a theft and a rape of a country and its people. It cannot be justified on any ground. However, Pankaj, your condemnation of colonization and the imperialists you see everywhere does not convince me. You can't see anything wrong with a lack of democracy, free fanaticism, the wholesale repression of people's rights and a concerted attempt to turn the clock back in many decolonized countries. Most countries have been free now for over 50 years. It is time to stop blaming the colonialists for all our ills. Except for India, notable exception. True freedom eludes most countries. Yet you have never acknowledged India's achievements and you condemn the country regularly in your articles. It is also fallacy to believe that the imperialists only brought things to the colonized countries. India was an ancient civilization which had made progress in science, mathematics. It was very surprising to hear the gentleman there saying Western communications. I'm sorry, what's Western communications? I could say India invented the concept of zero and mathematics. So every communication is. So what I would like to say is I do believe that this country has moved on from being an imperial power. It is a free country. Some people will talk about their imperial past. It is a free and fair country where you can express your wish views. I can mine and I think I don't see any conspiracies that you say.
- [57:31]
A
Okay, thank you. Reply. We've got two more gentlemen there.
- [57:38]
B
Good evening. I'm Shintaro from Japan and I'm an investment banker. Trading bonds and I feel very interested and very respect the blindness and the tragic journey. I have experienced the subprime in my workplace seeing this national crisis of the sovereign debt. And on the other side, I believe Japan was very efficient economy 400 years before. But however, I have to work hard to live with my family. So I have to do the best and follow this big wave for my day to day life. So my question is regarding the big change happening right now with this new paradigm of the poverty and the social unrest. Do you think we need to just wait this to happen or what should we do from our day to day ideas and also belief that what should we follow?
- [58:42]
A
Thank you. And there's a speaker at the back who's also been waiting for a while.
- [58:48]
B
Would you like to say a little bit more about Japan? I think you said it was central.
- [58:51]
A
To the story.
- [58:54]
B
From many points of.
- [58:55]
A
View, apart from the military, Tsushima and.
- [58:58]
B
Singapore and so on. One could really say that Japan was.
- [59:02]
A
A serious obstacle to the remaking of Asia. Thank you, Pankaj.
- [59:07]
B
Yes, Japan is really, as I said, crucial to the story. Not just to the neighbors. I should have actually started with that. To its immediate neighbors, but also to people in extremely geographically remote places like Egypt and Turkey, who were looking up to Japan in the late 19th century as a model to be admired as a nation state that had been as a country that had been broken into by Western power and had been forced to modernize. And it was doing that very rapidly and successful enough to actually beat China in 1895, demand equality from other Western powers. And then finally in 1905, it beats Russia. And this is how the book begins. Enormous surge of pride in the accomplishment. What other people saw as a fellow Asiatic country defeating a major white power. And from that point onwards, a lot of people, in fact many of the people that I describe in the book actually travel to Tokyo and become in some sense disciples of Japanese modernity. How Japan has managed to modernize and also hold on to some of its traditions, have an emperor and at the same time have a constitution, have a very, very strong constitution. In fact, the constitution was something a lot of other Asians were obsessed with and thought this was a secret to Japan's success. A lot of Asians who were suffering under despotisms of various sort. But then there's the twist in the story where Japan, in the process of becoming a strong nation state, realizes that it needs resources from the Asian mainland. That's just too small a country to sustain its rapid growth and its rapid population growth. And it sort of begins to develop these very strong imperialist ambitions essentially to sort of edge out Europeans from the parts of Asia they dominate and to grab those parts for themselves. And that finally, to cut a very long story short, leads to the invasion of China. There are several other invasions and colonization before that happens, of course. But then in the 1930s, the major war with China is fought. So that becomes. That becomes that whole particular conversion, that feeling of solidarity with Japan. But Japan also encourages some very senior politicians and writers and intellectuals in Japan, encourages feeling of Pan Asianism, form associations where many, many Asians are invited and encouraged to settle in Japan and carry on political activities, activities there that turns into this imperial adventure. And so a lot of these people who have been looking up to Japan are truly disappointed by this. So in that sense, what the gentleman said about it becoming an obstacle to Asia is very true to certainly Pan Asia. But at the same time, let's not forget that without Japan, without Japan's independence intervention in the Second World War, we might have seen probably the European empires there might have stayed on for a couple more decades or three more decades. It was really Japanese power that basically ended European domination of Asia during the Second World War. It was an extremely brutal affair. Tens of millions of people died in that. But I think in the end what happened was that it was shown to the natives that European power is finished. And the Europeans did try to come back. But this time the natives, many of whom had been trained by the Japanese, a lot of local nationalisms, had been encouraged by the Japanese military and many politicians, and that they were back there. They had formed parties, political parties, often mass movements, and that the returning European powers simply could not deal with the fact of these very strong nationalist movements all across Asia. They tried. They tried to hold on.
- [63:54]
A
The wars in Southeast Asia, I suppose, were the primary beginning with the French, absolutely the primary expression of them trying to come back and hang on or re. Establish themselves re establishment.
- [64:05]
B
Then, of course, there were the Dutch Indians, who were the first ones to be. To be. To be thrown out. And then the French tried. And then the French venture in Indochina was then disastrously extended by the United States. But that also had to end at some point. It became impossible really to, you know, recreate European power in quite the same way there in Asia. So Japan, at one hand, may have destroyed the chances of a larger Asian confederation, which, mind you, which was always a slightly idealistic and impractical idea to begin with, but it also really was instrumental in the liberation of Asia from Western imperialism.
- [64:58]
A
The question in the middle was the question on. Do you want to repeat your question?
- [65:03]
B
Yes. So sorry.
- [65:07]
A
Yes. I mean, if I can repeat. Is this right? Do we have to just wait for events to unfold or is there some change that can be encouraged now for the. Well, the kinds of conflicts. I mean, do we have to wait for these kinds of conflicts and difficulties to emerge, or is there something that could be done now which would be what, constructive?
- [65:30]
B
I wish I had an answer to that because these conflicts have such. Had such long histories, you know, for. To make interventions at this late hour, it's like being. It's like being a. It's like being at a fire station. The major fire is raging and you're being asked to, you know, go up there and put out this fire, but it's practically impossible. You know, you've just got one engine. So it's. I think it's. It's some of these. Some of these conflicts which have been in the making for a long time, the conflicts over resources, for instance, I just cannot see how they can be stopped or prevented. Because unless you have a major turning point in the history of the world, which never happens, let's not even dream about that, where we radically revise all our notions of economic development or political organization. But I don't think people ever enter into such radical revisions of their entire way of being political or economic.
- [66:46]
A
Another three. I've got two already, and a gentleman here, so that makes three from downstairs, starting with the speaker at the back.
- [66:56]
B
Do you see regionalism within India and China increasing? We're seeing it in Europe, after all. Look at Spain, look at the tensions within this country now, and a referendum shortly on Scottish independence. But I make the point about India particularly. You've seen the decline of Congress, the.
- [67:15]
A
Rise of regional parties, tensions between the states over water.
- [67:19]
B
And then in China, obviously, you've got the ethnic problems around the edges, and indeed in Burma, too, with people like the Karen and so on. The nation state as a concept, as a straitjacket, I mean, people are bursting.
- [67:30]
A
Out of it all over.
- [67:32]
B
But the second and related point isn't this, again, that so much of this is basically an imperial inheritance. There are distinguished historians around. Let's forget Neil Ferguson and look at James Barr in the Near East. And you see the problems the French and the British created in the Middle or Near east, with their mandates, Syria and Iraq, drawing lines in the sand. And basically we're still paying for that now. And the only way, seemingly, to keep those countries together, Syria and Iraq, or with dictators what's going to happen now?
- [68:04]
A
Thank you. And speaker at the end, taking off.
- [68:08]
B
From your point about how the west, how a lot of post colonial states have adopted certain values and principles from the west, perhaps blindly, like the idea of the autonomous individual without calibrating the context of it. Well, maybe these ideas are not like of equality, freedom and the powers of reason, etc. Now when we're aware of the fact that they've become so associated with the west while rethinking our institutions, we still may want to engage with them not blindly, but strategically in some way. And you know, for that reason, how important do you think it is to deconstruct this idea of, you know, equality, freedom being inherently Western so that when post colonial states engage with them rebuilding their institutions, they're not, they don't seem like they're automatically indebted to the west or that they're becoming Western in some sense.
- [68:57]
A
Thank you. And at the front.
- [68:59]
B
Yeah, thank you, Alicia. Pankaj. My, as I put in this way, India having massive human resource, where most of the intellectuals and generation is migrating to Western countries to find some space over there, it's a kind of brain drain and we are losing it. Of course we are making an impact. Our remark on global arena, that we have huge human resource. But I feel we are losing some kind of opportunities as I speak now in India now there is a huge opportunity for FDI in retail. A if you take, we are losing some kind of opportunities due to the politics played by, played internally. How we gonna address these kind of issues? See, we can make more impact by allowing where Western market to enter into Indian market and we can expand in that way. We can make more impact on global work, global market.
- [70:05]
A
Thank you, Pankaj.
- [70:08]
B
I think the whole question, Let me start with the lady here. The whole question of certain ideals being Western in origin, as it were, and that we need not disregard them simply because they happen to come to us from the west at a particular time in our respective histories. I mean, I don't actually think that, you know, ideas of freedom or equality or dignity, there's anything particularly Western about them that they belong to, you know, different. All the many parts of the world, all the many cultures and intellectual political traditions. So in terms of, you know, how do we rethink our relationship with these. We have to sort of think about specific situations. For instance, if you're thinking of people living in tribal areas in India where they have lived in these very dense forests for centuries and centuries and evolved certain lifestyles, I think for them, the idea of the individual consumer and producer, the man who wears a T shirt and goes to work for Google and drinks Coca Cola, is completely alien. And they don't want to be that person. And yet they are being forced into becoming that person. They are being driven out of their traditional habitats because the land they live in, the forest they live in, harbour incredible wealth of commodities which are greatly in demand in the rest of the world. So we have to resettle them in the sort of jargon that is used. And that seems to me a real loss, is that we cannot acknowledge that these people have certain traditions and lifestyles which may not coincide perfectly with the ideas that are cherished in the modern world at large about ways of deportment, professionalizing our lives and working in large cities and all of these things that they don't want to be that and they are. That we may be able to, you know, within a large nation state like India, have these different values in play. I think that's, for me, is sort of rethinking about these notions about these ideas. I think the other subject you mentioned about the nation state and regionalism, that is. I mean, that is a. That is now becoming a serious problem, which goes back to what we were discussing earlier about the strains, the stresses are beginning to show in this always slightly very rickety model of the nation state, that it is unable to contain the aspirations and various desires, especially in the age of globalization, because they've been fed and they've been stoked in this particular era a great deal, whether through bringing huge amounts of foreign investment or allowing for FDI in retail or any of those things. What it has done is created a culture of aspiration and a culture of expectation. And people not being able to fulfill the desires that that have been given to them means that they are going to look for political redress. And I think one of the manifestations of that discontentment is regionalism and desire for separate states or sometimes in some cases, if you're an ethnic minority, for outright secessionism, which is the case in Tibet, for instance, or Xinjiang or Kashmir or. Or the northeastern, northeastern states. So I think those strains are going to. Those divisions are going to deepen and not heal because they've been now put under great stress by an ideology which basically does not respect national borders, which circulates its fantasies of the good life indiscriminately across, you know, diverse populations, and at the same time weakens the authority of states, weakens the authorities of governments. So, you know, creating scope for greater Regionism and sort of almost, you know, secessionism of.
- [75:03]
A
So I guess one of the paradoxes we could end on is that this latest Western project of globalization is itself undoing some of the forms of statehood that were adopted in other parts of the world as a protection against the West. So globalization, you see as, I mean, one of the ironies is that it's been celebrated as a form of Western triumph. But your analysis in the book and elsewhere is that it's extremely ambivalent.
- [75:34]
B
Absolutely. I think it's, it's because it creates, it sort of, it basically reduces what it asks national governments or national states to do is become facilitators for businessmen and investors, create business friendly climates across their respective countries. And this immediately brings these governments or states, whether they are elected or unelected, in the case of China, into conflict with local populations, most of whom are not receiving the benefits of economic growth or benefits of globalization. And so sets up sort of conflicts within these, within these countries internally and brings into question the whole legitimacy of these particular states. So the state, the state is being weakened not in the way people originally thought, people like Thomas Friedman, that, you know, the flat world, the flat world, but the state is being weakened by political pressures from within, by the kind of social unrest and it's unable to respond to them and is increasingly resorting to violence in order to deal with that kind of unrest.
- [76:54]
A
Well, thank you very much on that. Again, I think cautionary note we'll end. Can I mention before we thank Pankaj for his engagement with the audience that copies of Pankaj's book, and by accident, some of mine are available to be purchased outside at the back as you go out. And if any people want to sign them, Pankaj and I will be happy to do so. But I think now I've learned an immense amount. My thoughts have been stirred by what Pankaj has said. So I'm very happy to thank him for what he's given us tonight. It.