Sunanda K Datta-Ray: It's the economy, stupid!

WHERE MONEY TALKS

With politics following prosperity, the global order is headed for a marked shift.

When he trumped the "west vs rest" debate by saying the rest was already in the west "" meaning all those Chinese and Indians living in Europe and America "" Stanford's Confucian scholar Tu Weiming did not imagine that the west might one day also want to be swallowed by the rest. That seems a possibility now that the European Union is clamouring to follow France in acceding to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, which underpins the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

If Europe joins Asia, it will overturn the Orwellian scenario of a triangular struggle for power among Eurasia, Oceania and Eastasia. But first, where does Europe end and Asia begin? What, for that matter, constitutes Asia which Pranab Mukherjee famously compared to Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark when the authors of the Asia-Europe talks excluded India?

These conundrums conceal profound shifts in perception. Time was when western historians from Herodotus onwards saw geography as politics and claimed that the Graeco-Persian wars pitted Asian despotism against European democracy. That's what gave Samuel Huntington his notion of the clash of civilisations. Now that politics follows prosperity and 'India Shining' is emphatically Asia, Europe also seeks to clamber aboard the bandwagon with higher growth rates.

Pragmatism can be clothed with the argument that Asia is only another imagined community. Benedict Anderson, the sociologist who coined that phrase, dismissed Asia as a figment of the west's imagination. "People in western countries believe in the massive existence of 'Asians,' but very few people in 'Asia' share this curious idea," he wrote, echoing Leopold Amery, Churchill's Secretary of State for India, telling the Commons, "there is no such thing really as an Asiatic." This followed the ploy that there was no such thing as an Indian. If India did not exist, the question of its independence could not arise.

"European" was an even more questionable definition. At home, the British exultantly kept Europe at bay (Remember the "Channel frozen, Continent isolated!" headline?) but throughout their empire, they claimed to be Europeans. "The whole ideology was the solidarity of the European race against the inferior people of Asia," according to K M Panikkar. "In theory the meanest European was a Sahib, while even Tagores and Hu Shihs (leader of China's liberal New Culture movement) were only natives."

Hence the European clubs, associations and chambers of commerce. Even (white) Americans were welcome to benches and lavatories marked "Europeans Only". Malayan Civil Service candidates had to be of "pure European birth on both sides". No wonder Nirad C Chaudhuri said Asia and Europe existed in "irreconcilable antagonism". The policy's triumph lay in persuading some Asians to swallow western propaganda hook, line and sinker and not only see themselves as painted by the west (the bane of Orientalism, Edward Said might have said), but also to vest Europe with superior virtues. Meiji Japan identified bummei kaika (civilisation and enlightenment) with westernisation. To be itto koku (a first-rate power), it had to get out of Asia.

But if Japan succeeded in that aspiration, its sinking of Russia's entire fleet at Tushima in 1905 cannot have been Asia's resounding victory over Europe. Compounding confusion, Russia itself clings to Asian pretensions. Straddling both continents, it upstaged the US by wangling invitations to Afro-Asian events. So notwithstanding Meiji pretensions, did one Asian power defeat another at Tushima? Or were Russia and Japan both western?

Similarly with Turkey. We regard the traditional seat of Islam's caliphs as quintessentially Asian and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as Europe's first defeat at Asia's hands. But the Turks much prefer Tsar Nicholas I's description of the Ottoman as the "sick man of Europe."

Such yearnings rob Asia of gleaming victories like Constantinople and Tushima, leaving Europeans to feast on Persia's defeat at Salamis and Christendom's triumph over the Ottomans at Lepanto. Spaniards still celebrate the fall of Granada when the last Moorish king surrendered. And Cambridge historians call Alexander of Macedonia the East India Company's precursor.

Leaving aside self-serving sophistry, the Asian values debate established that major cultural characteristics do divide Europe from Asia. Nor can significant perceptional differences within Asia all be blamed on British colonialism which chopped Asia into the Near East, Middle East and Far East, depending on distance from London. Central Asia is distinct from south Asia; west and east Asia are different worlds altogether. Commanding Asia's crossroads, southeast Asia reflects the fusion of India and China. Yet, a Singapore newspaper's recent headline: "Iran wants to build ties with Asia, says Ahmadinejad" was a reminder that modern Iran doesn't yet pass the Asian means test even if westerners regarded ancient Persia as Asia's champion.

This is the new reality of what might be called Chopsticks Asia or ASEAN which must accept the EU's application before Eurasia emerges. That would still leave America, presumably the Oceania of George Orwell's fantasy. But, then, what would be real-life Eastasia, the third of the Orwellian powers? The war of the worlds will have to be reconfigured in light of the economic yardstick which is replacing politics.