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Challenge Your Worldview: Are You Using the Lessons of European History to Predict Asia’s Future? With David Kang, Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California
Understanding the Roots of Eurocentrism
If I had a nickel for every time someone said, “Well Thucydides writes,” or “Well the rise of Germany in 1914 caused war, therefore, East Asia will be dangerous,” I would be a rich man. We instinctively use the lessons of European history to explain Asia’s future. And we got there for understandable reasons. In a way I don’t criticize people who use this. That’s what we learn. That’s what we learn in high school, particularly that’s what we learn in college and graduate school. Ph.D. programs, even IR programs that are cutting edge overwhelmingly use European examples and that’s how the discipline grew up. But it is instructive and we really should take it seriously that Europe isn’t the measure of all things and if there’s different examples or different experiences in East Asia and if they have different implications for the present or the future then we ought to take it seriously.
Deepening Your Knowledge of the East
This goes back to really an important theoretical point or a point about how we think about the world, which is that in many cases local knowledge is incredibly important. This is not something that says we just want to be sort of local gossips about unimportant trivial information, but local knowledge about situations is as important as any kind of broad theory about the way the world inevitably works. And we want to know both. We want to have some good theories, but we also really want to make sure that those theories apply to the region. And only with having that kind of knowledge can you really take East Asia on its own terms.
I do think that there is an incredibly important role for area studies knowledge, for scholars who know the region who have spent their lifetime studying. And obviously that sounds very self-serving on my part, but you can see this in the ways in which we have advisers to the U.S. government. The actual number of people who have deep knowledge of the region are easily outnumbered by those who have technical knowledge or nuclear weapons knowledge or arms control knowledge or regular generic knowledge of international relations. I just don’t think we’re even that aware of, much less supportive of having people who actually know the region. They only need one or two, and yet the number of people who expound on this is what China is doing who have no idea what China looks like but are IR scholars, IR theorists or arms control theorists far outnumber those who are actually China experts or East Asia experts or Vietnam experts.
Challenging the Eurocentric Worldview
In many ways this Eurocentric focus really does put us at a disadvantage in making policy towards Asia because in some ways we are talking ourselves into conflicts that I don’t think necessarily have to exist. And the perfect example is this whole Thucydides trap. If you go to DC right now or if you read almost any foreign policy magazine or even scholarly journals that talk about East Asia it is essentially a conventional wisdom now. Essentially I would say scholars and policymakers from the left and from the right – almost everybody takes for granted in the United States that China’s rise can be a threat, that we better be prepared to contain, that there’s going to be some kind of a titanic struggle. But most of this is based not on what China is doing but is based on a belief that it must inevitably happen so just wait. It may not be happening now, but it’s going to happen in the future. For example, I’ll do a talk and I’ll show evidence over the last 25 years that in many ways East Asia is more stable and defense spending is not a big as people think I’m met with a wall of skepticism where people are like, “No, no, no you don’t understand just wait. It’s going to happen in the future.” It’s not based on any knowledge, it’s not based on any evidence, it’s based on a belief about the world, but that belief about the world is informed from Europe and not East Asia.
East Asian countries today are actually not nearly as worried about each other as we assume that they should be because again, a European view of the world is drawn from 500 years of almost incessant fighting among these countries’ sort of routine bellicosity. So many of our games, our board games like Risk, it’s all about the balance of power; it’s all against all. Life is nasty, brutish and short. Most of the way we think about international relations is based on this sort of unending fighting, but that’s a European example. We look at the East Asian example as I said these countries existed for centuries, centuries with each other. That doesn’t mean they love China, but they’re certainly planning on living for centuries more with each other. Nobody is moving away in East Asia. And if we took the East Asian history and looked at the lessons for today it would be like wow Vietnam and Japan and Korea and China they may not love each other, but they certainly expect to have to live with each other for a long time.