Mapping A New World.(World Affairs; REVIEW)(Book review)

A provocative book on the rise of Asia highlights the need to move beyond old notions of East and West.

How inevitable is the ascendancy of Asia, and how should the West respond? That is the question that Kishore Mahbubani wrestles with in "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East." In the book, he makes an impassioned plea for big changes in what he sees as the West's arrogant and ignorant approach to Asia.

Mahbubani is right to say that the shift in political and economic gravity toward the East is bigger and faster than most Western policymakers grasp. He is on target with his contention that the West too often behaves as if Asian nations want to challenge its market-oriented capitalism, when in fact most want to join that system, albeit with more say in the Group of Eight and the International Monetary Fund. It is also hard to disagree with his concern that recent U.S. foreign policy has been wildly incompetent.

Still, Mahbubani heaps too much scorn on the West without taking Asia to task for its own missteps. He praises China for its enlightened diplomacy in East Asia, for example, but omits any discussion of its chronic neglect of intellectual-property protection, its brutal approach to human rights, its obsession with controlling the media, its mercantilist exchange-rate policy or its coziness with pariah regimes such as Sudan's and Burma's. His proposal to enlarge the U.N. Security Council with Japan and India makes sense, but he stretches the argument too far with his notion that the U.N. General Assembly is a democratic global parliament that could manage many of the world's big problems.

That said, his ideas should be widely debated. Here are a few of the key issues:

In an era of such rapid globalization, how meaningful is it to think in terms of East and West? Mahbubani often conflates the United States and Europe, and implies that countries such as India, China and Japan see the world in similar terms. But surely trade, capital flows, technology transfers, immigration, environmental spillover and cultural transmission have blurred the sharp divide between two distinct halves of the world. A new way of thinking is required. Mahbubani is trying to promote such an approach through his enhanced vision of the ...