'The West needs a wake-up call'

Kishore Mahbubani, the Singapore diplomat-turned-academic administrator, hopes for a more sensitive, less hypocritical, East-friendly West.

What is your dream for the new world order? Kishore Mahbubani's is a more caring, less hypocritical, more sensitive, East-friendly West. And he doesn't mince words saying so.

It is a theme that would warm the cockles of Indian hearts. It certainly has the western intelligentsia on the defensive "" presumably in an effort to coopt him, Mahbubani was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in September 2005.

Some dismiss him as an eastern nuisance. Others acknowledge the tour de force of his argument.

Singapore diplomat-turned-academic administrator, Mahbubani, rose to the rank of permanent representative of his country to the United Nations before taking over the Lee Kuan Yew Institute of Public Policy (Singapore's equivalent of autonomous think-tank cum policy framing body) as dean.

A clutch of books authored by him have a similar underlying theme, immortalised by Peter Sellers in The Party: "We Indians don't think who we are. We know who we are".

Substitute Indian for "we of the East" and you have Mahbubani's basic theme topped by a delicious souffle of ideological persuasion, historical and philosophical argument and evidence of the moral degeneration of the West, the whole held up by constantly being provocative.

"The West needs a wake-up call. In the search for the solution to the world's problems, the West is a large part of the problem," he told Business Standard in the context of his latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

Mahbubani says multilateral institutions are responsible in part for the West having such a blinkered and self-absorbed view of itself and its interests. He cites the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as institutions presiding over the fortunes of 3.5 billion Asians, but is always headed by an American or a European.

Why? There are hundreds of such irritants in Mahbubani's world. Why should British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, he wonders, defend George Bush and the torture committed at Guantanamo? When America is threatened, they behave no differently from other societies: they are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties.

He speaks passionately about the West's double standards in the promotion of human rights and democracy "" in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, values can take primacy only because no major western interests are at stake, but not in Saudi Arabia. Too many interests are involved.

But the East, about which Mahbubani is so approving, also suffers similar infirmities. What would he recommend for Asian societies dominated by nepotism, ruled by regencies all around, weighed down by oppressive institutions like family and innately unequal caste divisions?

He says the world should be a meritocracy: WTO, World Bank and IMF should be led by the most competent people not through geographical rotation. Take the G-7, he says with splendid scorn. Have you ever heard of a more useless body? And yet, they all take themselves so seriously and spend millions of dollars doing so.

Yes, family is a problem, he admits. "I can speak with personal experience," he says of the duties and responsibilities that eastern families tend to smother an individual with. Hence a meritocracy would be the best way to end nepotism, a negative eastern value.

Some of the most successful institutions "" he counts Harvard, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and the Communist Party of China among them "" reward merit and only merit.

But in India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia families get the first chance and families rule. If there were meritocracy, he says, the people would get the advantages of honesty and progress because these are the values that a meritocracy most successfully engenders.

But didn't Gallup do a poll a few years ago where the people of Singapore adjudged themselves as being the lowest on a global scale of happiness? So if a meritocracy is the way to go, Singapore is probably not the best example to cite. He laughs.

Singaporeans are always griping, he says. He commends a new study cited by the International Herald Tribune that points to the linkage between wealth and happiness. "Prosperous citizens expect a lot more" he says.

The Financial Times called him one of Singapore government's statesmen-provocateurs, "those who relish international spotlight and revel in their own notoriety" "" the prototype being Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore's outspoken founding father. Precocious would be another description.