Asia, under one umbrella

The ACD’s more realistic objective is to integrate the various existing regional blocs like SAARC, ASEAN, Gulf Cooperation Council and others

The combined gross domestic product of China and India alone was more than half that of the entire world for many centuries up to 1820. Now, at last, Asia is making a brave attempt to recover from decades of colonial exploitation and despoliation to recapture that past. The Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD), whose first summit was held in Kuwait in October 2012, is one such effort. Another, if more modest, effort, is the first Manipal Dialogue of 11 foreign and eight Indian scholars that Gateway House organised at Manipal University on November 17-19 to discuss the theme “Asia, Uninterrupted.”

A word about the organisers may be apposite. Gateway House, which also calls itself the Indian Council on Global Relations, is a new foreign policy think tank in Mumbai. It chose Mumbai because it’s India’s most international city with links to the outside world, home to corporate, financial, media and artistic and technological pioneers, and at the heart of global activity from technology to terrorism, energy to the environment. The purpose is to “engage India’s leading corporations and individuals in debate and scholarship on India’s foreign policy and the nation’s role in global affairs.” This latest entrant in the Indian world of think tanks calls itself “membership-based, independent, nonpartisan and not-for-profit.” The Manipal Dialogue was its first international conference.

The aim is not to create an Asian variant of the European Union. The ACD’s more realistic objective is to integrate the various existing regional blocs like the Gulf Cooperation Council, Association of South Asian Regional Cooperation, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Association of South-east Asian Nations. The purpose, as it emerged at Kuwait, is to promote interdependence on such issues of shared importance as poverty reduction, improvement of the quality of life and strengthening the Asian market in order to promote peaceful co-existence.

The foreign delegates at Manipal came from lands as far apart as Syria and Bangladesh and societies as different as the Philippines and Turkey. Some like the Chinese and Taiwanese or, for that matter, Indian and Pakistani, representatives also reflected linkages that defy political identity. The real novelty lay in the theme “Asia, Uninterrupted” that this diverse group grappled with. Being writers and scholars, with a sprinkling of retired diplomats, the Manipal delegates, foreign or Indian, couldn’t boast of the executive authority to push through any institutional changes. That makes their task in some ways more important and, also in many ways, more difficult. For they have to create the public opinion that will enable – perhaps compel would be more appropriate -- governments that are usually shy of departing from the status quo to take bold new initiatives towards the future.

That includes emphasising commonalities, shaping public opinion, showing how shared institutions can bridge differences, and recommending action to political leaders. These are formidable responsibilities in a continent that covers 30 per cent of the globe’s surface and accounts for 60 per cent of its population. Most are young with no historical memory. Globalisation for them is synonymous with Americanisation. They are products (victims, if you like) of the US-based infotainment industry. Many Asians are also illiterate or semi-literate, and they are more excusably without knowledge of the rich past when the Silk Road was the world’s highway, when Arab merchants, Chinese sailors, Buddhist monks and Christian Palestinian missionaries traversed the continent. Asia had a proud sense of belonging then. Revered European authorities like Georges Coedes, the French orientalist author of The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, and A.L. Basham of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, whose The Wonder That Was India should be compulsory reading for all Indian students, confirm that Indian merchants and mariners helped to civilise South-east Asia to which the Ramayana referred as Suvarnabhumi. Remains of the Indic-inspired Srivijaya and Majapahit empires can still be seen.

Referring to the past, Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Boston-based Sri Lanka Tamil art historian, wrote, “The further we go back in history, the nearer we come to a common cultural type; the further we advance, the greater the differentiation.” But though colonial rule made us more aware of ourselves as Asians, it also aggravated some internal differences and led to economic stagnation. As a result, Asians retreated into small principalities with few civilisational links with each other. Europe, on the other hand, nursed memories of the federal legacy of the Holy Roman, Austro-Hungarian and Napoleonic and other empires. Europe could also claim religious homogeneity, for it was a Christian domain after Spain’s Moorish kingdoms were vanquished and the Ottomans’ faith confined more or less to tiny Muslim Albania. Finally, while Europe was not uniformly prosperous, the Industrial Revolution ensured there were no pockets of abject poverty as in Asia. It also closed yawning gulfs between industrial and agricultural (even pre-agricultural) societies.

The Manipal Dialogue stressed the importance of education, of rewriting history in objective terms, encouraging a panAsian vision, improving connectivity, sponsoring cultural exchanges and creating the framework for what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once called “an arc of prosperity and cooperation stretching across Asia.” Economic integration is seen as the solvent for many internal and external irritants in a rapidly transforming and geopolitically unstable environment. South Asia can make a start by more seriously pursuing the Nalanda University Project, completing and expanding the road and rail networks that the British initiated (Lord Dalhousie thought of trains running up to Lhasa!), reviving the textile economy, and creating Asia-wide banking and financial institutions that can be a viable alternative to the constricting, expensive, and established Western-dominated financial architecture. There is scope for using the tools of new technologies to implement imaginative plans to restore traditional Asian crafts and skills in an environmentally sustainable creative economy as much to preserve our heritage and create jobs at home as to generate export revenue.

All this demands peace and stability. Many Westerners now identify Asia with flashpoints where a spark could ignite war, and nuclear war at that. Taiwan, Kashmir and Palestine are some of the discontents most often mentioned. It’s forgotten that France and Germany went repeatedly to war over Alsace Lorraine, or that the dispute over Schleswig Holstein kindled the fires of another European conflict. If all Asian countries achieve more or less a uniform level of education, Taiwan, Kashmir and Palestine may also one day be reduced to distant memories. That kind of education presupposes economic growth. That alone will dispel the ignorance and banish the fears that now separate one religion from another and one country from another. Fear and ignorance are the most powerful enemies of the smooth flow of “Asia, Uninterrupted”.

The European Union isn’t the ultimate model for this new Asia. A looser and more flexible association would more authentically represent Asia’s diversity and the concept of what might be called unity with Asian characteristics.