Winston Churchill once said, with his usual lack of sympathy for this country, that “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator”. Could one say the same thing, more accurately, about Asia — whose “inevitable rise” has become the subject of popular discourse, if not unquestioning faith? Asia is a geographical term, as Churchill would have conceded, but is it a cohesive analytical unit in any practical sense? Are the 50-plus countries of the Asia-Pacific region developing any common sense of purpose, or common goals (let alone common identity) as in the case of, say, Europe? Do they have common political characteristics and structures, or similar economic patterns that would suggest the need for pan-Asian policies? Is there any identifiable Asian “model” — of politics, democracy, economic management, or even (as Mahathir Mohammed and Lee Kuan Yew used to assert) of Asian values?
You can make the obvious point about the region’s rapid economic growth (though even that was not all at the same time, for Japan did it half a century ago, the Tigers two decades later, and India only now), but what else can one say about Asia that is valid from Aden to Osaka? Japan with its stagnant economy, debilitating debt and ageing population is as different from China as Saudi Arabia is from the Philippines. If there is any noticeable commonality, it is between India and China, since both are large, populous and resurgent civilisational entities. But their economic and political systems are different, and more importantly their challenges today are quite different; so are their cultural traits and dominant religious traditions.
The continent does admittedly offer itself as convenient short-hand. The world is less and less dominated by Europe and the United States, and since Asia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s population and a third of global GDP, with faster growth than the other big blocs, it is easy to identify it as the “new” kid on the block. It might also be argued that Europe has a high degree of commonality only because Project Europe is 50 years old, whereas Project Asia is just getting under way. The Asian region is already more knitted together by trade than before, but if there is a Project Asia, what is it? There is the Chiang Mai Initiative of 2000 (a multilateral currency swap), and regular meetings of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec), of Asean as well as of Asean+3 and Asean+6, and the Asian Regional Forum. But what do these really amount to? Pretty little, at the moment.
This is of a piece with that other artificial construct, the Bric quartet. Once again, there is no real commonality, and in this case, not even any geographical continuity. The four Bric countries’ levels of development are vastly different (Russia’s per capita income is five or six times India’s, and Brazil’s is twice China’s, which is more than twice India’s). Brazil and Russia are fundamentally commodity plays, while China and India are both net commodity importers. All you can say is that they command large land areas.
Meanwhile, Asia itself may be uneasy with the implications of its own “rise”! Many Asian countries are plainly nervous about a potentially assertive China, whose story is the most compelling across the continent. The Asean countries would like a counterweight within Asia (India being the obvious but somewhat inadequate candidate), and India itself would prefer to have the US as the dominant power in the region rather than China. So would Japan and South Korea, though there is no love lost between them.