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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 1 (May 21st, 2000)
Let us reflect a while on the following quotation, taken from a speech in 1982 in Hawaii by the Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki Zenko, aimed at North and Latin American, Japanese, East Asian, Australian and New Zealandian audiences:
Now is the time for us to embark into the Pacific Age on a course set for the 21st century. Our sails billow in the wind, a full tide is running. Steering toward a grand future, and riding the same ship, we are full of courageous spirit. Shall we not join in this great endeavour of the century? Let us build a record of accomplishment for our nations and the Pacific region that will live in the annals of world history. [2]
What kind of time is this? Centuries change, a new age is beginning, sails bulge in the sunny breeze, accomplishments are made, and nations work together in the great endeavour. Almost all of Suzuki's argumentation is devoted to the future; only the great launch of the undertaking is taking place in the present. The past does not exist, or rather, it is irrelevant. What we have here is a grand romantic narrative of the creation of the Pacific Age, or the Asia Pacific Age as it has been called during the 1990s. It is a progressive venture, and at the end of straightforward, linear action there lies a strong, prosperous and united Pacific region, a new economic, political and cultural centre of the world superseding the contemporary centre in the North Atlantic region. [3]
In North Atlantic discussions people are used to naming Suzuki's style of rhetoric 'modern'. The modern world is a fascinating world, if we contemplate it with Marshall Berman's classic words, published in the same year as Suzuki's speech was made:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world... Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology... it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be a part of a universe in which, as Marx said, "all that is solid melts into air". [4]
The modern demands courage. It is not an easy way of life, but nevertheless highly rewarding, because both modern action in itself, and the end of struggle shimmering in the future, continuously reward the courageous champion with psychological satisfaction. This rewarding is needed, because the real road towards future is never easy, containing an endless amount of misfortunes and drawbacks. Notwithstanding, their relative value is not that great compared with the joy of work towards the approaching goal. The most typical mode of narrative of the modern is romance, an optimistic and heroic story of how light wins over darkness, and good wins over evil. A romance depicts a world where a righteous human being in his or her struggle against crushing reality eventually wins, rising to a better plane of existence.[5] Here the Holy Grail awaits for the knight, a beautiful lady's kiss the young hero, or the Pacific Age a Japanese prime minister. Romance is the sole completely linear narrative, which advances forthrightly from the more or less disagreeable present to the blessed future. All other basic modes of narration, comedy, tragedy and satire, bring in cyclical phenomena and lack of clear purpose. Thus the understanding of time within undiluted modernity is purely linear, its eminent dimension is the future, and romance is its mode of narration.
The roots of Asian age-speak are in Europe, in a period when Europeans were living in a different temporal mode than nowadays. [6] The German geographer Carl Ritter was one of the most important proponents of such rhetoric, talking about the arrival of a planetaric, telluric or oceanic age (not very differently from contemporary globalization rhetoric). Nonetheless, while Asian age-speak is directed towards the future, Ritter thought that the telluric age has just dawned:
Europe is the centre of the civilized and cultivated world ... it is the spiritual metropole, the burning point of the planet, the focus, where all beams of light gather and from where they are reflected back anew.[7]
The opposite of the modern used to be the 'traditional', which Europe in Ritter's rhetoric had left behind thanks to its progressive industriousness, and the future pointed shiningly towards more progress. Nowadays 'traditional' as such has, however, already disappeared from world politics, and we cannot be sure whether it has ever existed in the real world. Since Emil Durkheim we have been using a rhetorical figure claiming that 'traditional societies do not exist any more', which implies that they must have existed some time somewhere. [8] Yet we know well how developed the Persian, Indian or Chinese cultural regions have been for two millennia.[9] Southeast Asia has a stronger traditional ambience, because of almost total ignorance of its history, but long before the arrival of Europeans the people 'Below the Winds' were already living in monetized, capitalistic societies, whose way of life greatly resembled those that we experience nowadays in the more well-to-do parts of the world. [10] The 'traditional' in its pure form is a political myth that the modern created as its negation, partly as a moral justification for military conquest. [11]
For instance, exactly a century ago in 1899, President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, one of the early proponents of the Pacific Age, wrote in the following way while urging his countrymen to a life of determined struggle, so that the United States could overcome Europe to become the dominant country in the world:
Every expansion of civilization makes for peace. In other words, every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law, order, and righteousness... the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest... the mighty civilized races... by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.[12]
This could be used a century ago as justification for the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines, expansion of American navy, construction of the Panama Canal, and support to Japan against stagnant European powers, especially Russia. Pacific region was potentially the most abundant place in the world in terms of resources and emerging markets, making American expansion throughout the region a national compulsion.
Nowadays the 'traditional' can no more be used as a world political counter figure to the modern. It cannot be found anywhere as a significant political force, worthy of conquest or opposition. Even in the Indonesian countryside no safe Gemeinschaft can be found for the millions of people displaced from cities and neighbouring countries by the economic collapse since 1997; there exists only a modern, truly capitalistic economic system, which does not give them any safety. [13] Indonesians and other East Asians are now having a genuine modern experience, in the way it was once described by Karl Polanyi regarding Western Europe. [14]
Because counter figures are needed in politics, in temporal dimensions the most natural counter concept for the modern is late-, trans-, re-, or postmodern. All of these terms have different nuances, and ideas that can be subsumed under them are extremely diverse, but their common denomination is that they all place themselves at the end of an era, while the modern places itself at the beginning. Notwithstanding, this opposition normally is not constructed from the point of view of the modern, because what the postmodern materially and spiritually represents is actually the Holy Grail that modern projects strive for, and thus there is no sense in such opposition. The antagonism is constructed from the point of the postmodern, as a qualitative difference with the patterns of thinking and action in the past. Of course postmodern is not a more progressive way of thinking, because the linear idea of progress is alien to the postmodern, but it generally sees itself as a more reflected, more sophisticated way of understanding the world. Postmodern generally treats the modern in a benign way, as a young adult would treat his or her grandmother, who has become a bit senile, and whose stories are from an other world, but who nevertheless is the foremother of the energetic youngster living in the present.
We could perhaps use this viewpoint in analysing Suzuki's rhetoric of the billowing sails. It is truly naive, simple, and forthright. But if we are really benign, we have to give up naming it with an outside name which modern necessarily is, and call it something that corresponds better with the immanent psychology of his argumentation. Suzuki's rhetoric stems from a situation where the purpose is to generate a new actor on the world scene - the Pacific region - and to raise this new actor above the older, established centre of the world. This is not revolution, because the idea is not to destroy the old centre in the North Atlantic with any violent means, but simply to progress past it into a higher international status. This is climbing, and Suzuki's argumentation is that of a climber.
Michael Shapiro has analyzed brilliantly a climber's sense of time in his article "Toward a Politics of Now-Time: Reading Hoop Dreams with Kubrick's Barry Lyndon". [15] Shapiro presents for us two interesting narratives. One of them is the tale of Barry Lyndon, a social climber trying to enter the aristocratic society in eighteenth century England. The other is the story of Arthur Agee and William Gates, who are black basket ball players trying to climb upwards in a white elite university during the 1990s in the United States. Lyndon's rise ends when his knee is crushed in a duel, incapacitating him. The careers of Agee and Gates are likewise cut short by a wounded knee and inability to adjust to an established white elite culture. With refined elegance Shapiro shows us how the energetic upward movement of a climber like Barry Lyndon is clearly displayed against the stationary calmness of the aristocracy. Nevertheless, Shapiro has a methodological problem. Perhaps he should not have studied history from American movies. Without noticing, he has operated with old fashioned essences, rather than with relational concepts. He mixes aristocracy as a concept with traditional European nobility, mistakenly believes that the aristocratic experience is immanently static, and cannot see any aristocratic elements in East Coast white American society. Shapiro has offered us two elegant ways of understanding political time, but he does not locate them properly in age and geography.
What actually is aristocracy? We are used to thinking of it as a concept related with distinctive birth and ancient families, but it can also be understood as a relational political concept, just like the climber is a relational term. Aristocracy became a commonly used political concept only during the eighteenth century with the rising bourgeois Barry Lyndons. Aristocracy became opposed to the term democrats, who were in our sense social climbers trying to achieve a more widely distributed pattern of power and public rights. [16]
Aristocracy becomes a political estate or caste in a static situation, when a certain group of people has possessed power and wealth for so long that the situation begins to seem natural, as part of the inherent structure of the world. From an aristocratic viewpoint there is no need for a qualitative change in the world, because the system as it exists is logically the most perfect possible. There is lots of movement and change in an aristocratic world, namely cyclical changes. Nights turn to days, winters to summers, generations change, highest political leaders are replaced regularly, etc., but the world itself does not change. In this sense it is a timeless system, but not in any sense static.
The fundamental dimension of an aristocratic system is not time, but space. Space determines in one way or another all social relationships. People are divided into classes or estates, and separated from each other both horizontally and vertically. Aristocracy is based on the existence of stable differences between social ranks, occupations, estates, families, religions, ethnic origins, geographic political entities, and in maintaining these differences. Aristocracy, as the long established leading elite of this system, cannot understand any fundamental transformations as rational, because it simply thinks that it itself is the only group of people really capable of ruling. Aristocrats are a special group of people, homo superioris ordinis, who are stronger, braver, more immaculate, more intelligent, more educated, more diligent, more assiduous, more decisive, and more chaste than the common people. As members of an estate they simply have all the personal and social characteristics needed for governing well the whole relevant world. Members of the other estates are thought to be weaker, lazier, greedier, less decisive, less educated, and more attached to indecent behaviour than the aristocracy. [17] A change of power from the aristocracy to the common people would go against the order of the world; it would be possible because the world is cyclical and the ordinary people are untrustworthy, but not permanent.
Because time is not a relevant dimension, stationary existence is not a pertinent description of the aristocratic experience of life. Life is experienced as a leader does it, as an energetic, dynamic, responsible and rewarding existence in handling all the myriad duties and enjoyments that the world throws along one's road. Life of the traditional nobility was brisk adventure, where handling weapons, hunting, duels, warfare, l'amour and other entertainments blended seamlessly with administrative and leading duties. Aristocratic life is busy and joyous life. Leo Tolstoy describes such life exquisitely in his Anna Karenina, written during the 1870s.[18] Even though one's sense of time may not be linear, life as it is experienced can be energetic and fast. These two things belong to different categories.
Although space is the fundamental dimension of the aristocratic mode of existence, time also is relevant. In addition to the present, where dynamic life takes place, the past also is important. Aristocrats are descendants of climbers that were lucky. Every old noble family was established by a renowned ancestor, who had done some great deed, and had been rewarded for it with a title and a piece of land, around which the noble family then had been born. European preoccupation with surnames and family trees began roughly a millennium ago when feudalism became an established political organization. [19] Because aristocracy is a long standing continuum, history is an essential part of aristocratic temporal existence; not necessarily as linear world history, but as a genealogical narrative of descent. The future similarly appears as a process of continuing the lineage in a known, rational and basically unchanging world. But future as a qualitatively different mode of existence does not belong to an aristocratic sense of time. Such a future would be illogical.
Because climber is the counter concept of aristocrat, his sense of time is diametrically opposite. As we saw in the quotation from Suzuki's speech, future is the most relevant part of a climber's sense of time. The climber continuously imagines himself to the place where the aristocrat already is. The present is only a means to construct the imagined future from physical parts into the physical world. A climber's life is serious, determined and calculating toil to reach his destination. Like an aristocrat, also the climber uses his utmost energy in the practical present, and lives a similarly dynamic, although perhaps less playful, life. Neither of them are part of the really subordinated common folk, who have little chance of elevating their lot, being destined to a life of relative resignation. Both the climber and the aristocrat are in a position where they can mould their energy into a meaningful life.
Because aristocrat and climber are relational concepts, there may be situations where the same actor may appear at one moment as an aristocrat, and at another as a climber. An endless number of dimensions can be discerned within a human being, just like an endless number of angels can dance at the point of a needle. Innate and outside understandings may also vary. European immanent intellectual history is a story of the gradual unfolding of the world ruled by the ancient noble families, while the climbers, the bourgeoisie and the workers either fused with the old families or displaced them, becoming the new leaders of their societies. As is well known, the emergence of the type of thinking now called modernism coincided with this rise, so that static social concepts relating to space turned into dynamic concepts relating to time. [20] Journey towards the future, i.e. change, controlling change, keeping in pace with the change, speeding up change, became the major political goal of societies, while space and territory were reduced in importance. Change was always for the better, and happily there was no return to the dark past. Understanding of time became linear, progressive, and modern. In this sense modern European self-understanding is a climber's history. The same can be said of American self-understanding, except that there Europe itself forms part of the dark unwanted past.
Nevertheless, let us remember that aristocracy is here a relational concept, not a specific group of families. Aristocracy appears in all places where relations of wealth and power, and human interactions reflecting them, remain the same for long enough. It is a mental category, which can be applied as well to individuals and civilizations. If Europe is raised up from its immanence, we can see that for roughly two centuries it has been in the political, economic, and cultural centre of the world, first by itself, and during the twentieth century together with North America. The North Atlantic region has for the past century formed the global aristocratic estate, the 'first world' as the French demographer Alfred Sauvy formulated the situation in 1952. [21] This is also the rank where Suzuki and other espousers of Pacific or Asian Pacific ages place the North Atlantic region. In terms of its wealth Japan also can be counted as part of this aristocracy, but in terms of its location in East Asia it is not. The romantic narrative of the rise of a new region has during the 1990s increasingly shifted away from the Pacific to East Asia while American quarrelling with the various countries of the region has increased, and the most vocal espousers of the idea, in addition to the Japanese, have been Malaysian, Korean, or Chinese. There is not even that much need to tell the grand narrative so often any more; expressions like the Japanese Ajia no jidai, or the Chinese 21 shiji, have become well-known code names denoting a bright future, understood by everyone concerned. The sense of a continuously unfolding, inevitable and essentially positive hereafter is very strong. [22]
Am I correct in subsuming postmodern rhetoric under the political category of aristocratic argumentation? At least I have good reasons for doing it. Living physically within a Northern European academic environment, whose intellectual geography concerns mainly the Euro-American region with its history of ideas, but studying there the enfolding East Asian political and economic drama, I am continuously under a feeling of wonderment at the different mentalities required in understanding discussions in both of these fascinating intellectual spheres. Topics, modes of enquiry, intellectual styles, attitude towards the material world, sense of time; everything seems to be different. In postmodern discussions this contemporary Euro-American experience simply is reflected in its purest form.
It is of course impossible to define clearly such an immensely diverse phenomenon as postmodern, but I have solved the problem in the simple nominalist way: postmodern is what is called postmodern. Even if there is no consensus what postmodern is, people are inclined to name certain modes of thinking with the epithet during the 1990s, and this is all I need, postmodern as a feature of the world where I am living. Perhaps I should emphasize that my purpose is not to criticize either postmodern rhetoric or East Asian age-speak, but simply to understand both, and to set them in their respective ages and places.
What is the geography of the postmodern? Two very common geographic names used in literature are 'world' and 'global', but if one starts to look for stricter demarcations, 'western societies', [23] 'western civilization', [24] and 'Western Imperium' [25] turn out to be practical synonyms with the 'world'. Contents of the texts tell a similar story. They move within an immanent Atlantic world. Some writers are aware that also other places exist in the world, usually mixing this with the 'traditional', but unfortunately they have no time for studying it. [26] One writer has been to a Buddhist temple in Korea and seen there at the roof a satellite dish, returning repeatedly to this surprising and mysterious sight throughout his thesis, [27] but most writers are content with remaining within the 'West' as the only relevant world. Correspondingly, hardly any East Asian political economist has, to my knowledge, shown the least indication of being interested in postmodernism. The world and the rest of the world seem to be closing each other out, having nothing relevant to say to each other.
What is postmodern intellectual style like? It is very sophisticated, theoretical, and usually written with genuinely good literary taste. It is self-consciously the climax of an old, refined intellectual heritage. One normally reflects ideas of the great thinkers of the western cultural tradition. One can start from Montaigne or Erasmus, but it is more typical to start from Germany and move from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger. From Germany the intellectual narrative is relocated to France by discussing Foucault and Lyotard, and finally the story is ended in the United States with Bell, Rorty, and Shapiro. In postmodern discussions it is not the custom to use forenames, titles, or biographical details, which implies that these things are presumed to be known to all concerned, i.e. the audience is supposed to be as sophisticated as the writers. Within such a learned environment the surname of an intellectual ancestor suffices.
Academic rhetoric can be neatly divided into two according to the type of argumentation used: you can argue with names, or with things. They both also reflect different constructions of political relationships within the world of knowledge. We often argue with names when we use theoretical or philosophical language. We use the names of respected theoreticians, theories, or philosophical models. Certain philosophical key concepts can also be understood as names, when they clearly are used as codes, and left undefined or unexplicated. Weber, Barthes, nominalism, irony, or deconstruction are typical codes. With such codes we can quickly and effortlessly communicate with an audience that is sufficiently civilized. This kind of argumentation is horizontal and in a sense democratic, because it places the auditor at the same level of sophistication where the retor is. On the other hand, arguing with names if discriminative, because it closes out all those who are not sophisticated enough to move freely within coded discussion. Toward outsiders arguing with names thus appears as a way of exhibiting academic prestige derived from being a member of an old and partly closed tradition. It displays rank, and as such it is characteristically aristocratic language.
Arguing with things means telling concrete examples with so simple language that almost anyone can follow the idea. The purpose of this type of language is wide comprehensibility and communicability. Argumentation is relatively slow and inefficient, because it takes time to tell all the examples and stories. It often appears unsophisticated, because theory and conceptual rigour has been placed in the background, as a way of organizing things presented, rather than in the forefront of argumentation. Arguing with things is open in the sense that it can be used in front of heterogeneous audiences, but it is also quite vertical. Its purpose is to influence, teach those who know less, and perhaps even to guide them. Arguing with things is also more typically climber's argumentation, especially if we think of great numbers of people and not only individuals, because climbers need to create united movements towards a common goal among often unsophisticated people.
Postmodern literature typically argues with names. It even plays with them, naming itself endlessly anew. We have post-, late-, trans-, and remodern, as well as the numerous sister schools of thought, whose relationship with postmodernism is difficult to define, but which nevertheless is quite obvious: postindustrial, poststructural, postcolonial, postfeminist etc. Only a rather sophisticated reader can understand what particular shade of thinking is meant with each name.
New interpretations of old traditions used to be marked with the suffix neo-, like neorealism, neofunctionalism, or neoclassical, which leave the future open for neoneo- developments, but postmodern discussion usually places itself at the climax. As already pointed out, in terms of geography postmodern discussion tends to move from Germany in the east over the Atlantic to the United States, and from Enlightenment to the present time. This movement takes various different forms, but it is made in text after text. [28] Awareness of the past is sharp and always present, while the intellectual deeds of preceding generations are mapped over and over again. To float within this high cultural tradition is pure enjoyment for those who feel at ease with it, and this pleasure is reflected in the high intellectual and aesthetic level that a fair number of postmodern texts reach.
Postmodern sense of time has been studied thoroughly. Most students point to a radical change, where the present becomes the most important temporal dimension. 'Extended present', [29] or 'timeless present'[30] are terms that have been used in describing this phenomenon. Even though the present has become so important, it is not static. It is full of working, playing, studying, doing new things, trying new ways of life, letting aesthetic imagination play with materia. Postmodern life is passionate, dynamic, free and thrilling existence in a materially abundant and relatively protected environment. It resembles the life of a small number of nineteenth century European nobles, but it is attainable for a considerable part of the population in the North Atlantic region nowadays.
Besides the present, the past also is important in postmodern argumentation, but not as history in the traditional sense of the word. It is said that postmodern has ceased to be interested in real history. While denying the meaningfulness of the idea of linear progress, linear history has simultaneously been denied. History appears rather as a plaything, from which you can pick up pieces here and there, and paste them together using aesthetic and parodic principles. Reflexivity, anarchy, allegory, irony and style are said to be more important than actual content. [31] Also this tells us about the cultivated savoir-faire inherent in postmodernism, because you have to know a lot to be able to ironize, parodize and deconstruct aesthetically and properly. Yet, the past intellectual masters themselves are normally treated with due respect, even though one can play with their products. It seems that while postmodern places actual world history in parenthesis, its sense of history has become a genealogical chronicle of preceding intellectual and aesthetic generations.
Future is not an important dimension. Or rather, as an extended present, future appears as a continuum of what is going on right now, but it does not involve qualitative changes in terms of progress. But there can be evolution, again in a genealogical meaning. Most postmodern literature is deeply humane, and moral in a beautiful sense of the word. Just like human beings carry on living in new generations, who hopefully are better than their parents, also our political and economic systems can be cultivated to higher levels of existence. We are living in democratic societies, but our democracy still has deficiencies: let us refine it towards more perfection. We have fairly egalitarian societies, but imperfections still can be found: let us cleanse them away. Our societies are for the most part living in peace, but violent death and mutilation still threaten many of the people living in the world: let us work towards eradicating violence. We have become accustomed to cultural tolerance, but racism, sexism, ageism etc. still are a reality: let us continue getting rid of them all, because we truly have travelled fairly far along that road already. The absolute majority of postmodern literature in philosophy and politics treat these and similar topics, in a similar evolutionary fashion. This is what postmodernism in its finest sense is, cultivation and refinement of the highest traits inherent in the western political and philosophical tradition.
These sentiments bring immediately into mind those of Levin and his fellow members of the nobility in Tolstoy's Russia of the 1870s. These characteristics also resemble unbelievably closely the central tenets of Neo-Confucian philosophy, developed during the Sung (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) periods in China, when the Central Country was economically and intellectually the most advanced place in the world. Neo-Confucianism was the philosophy of the contemporary intellectual elite consisting of state officials, part of the landed gentry, sons of rich merchants, and renowned scholars. Also it saw itself as the endpoint of an old, high intellectual tradition. Its scholars pondered questions of good life on earth, how to make a fine administrative system better for the people, and how to cultivate personalities within their social setting. It was deeply aesthetic, trying to blend philosophy, art and responsible social action as the basic ingredients of a good life. A neo-Confucian intellectual studied hard the classics and contemporary commentators, wrote his own commentaries on them, got acquainted with arts, developing good taste in calligraphy, painting, music and architecture, combining these both in his administrative work and in his personal life into a warm, satisfying, ethical whole. Neo-Confucianism was also a global philosophy in the sense that its teachings were not limited to China, but were in principle applicable in the whole known world. [32] The first Europeans, pushing forward their brutal project of modernity, looked like barbarians in the radiance of this aesthetic-intellectual paradise, and as barbarians they were treated. [33]
Late Neo-Confucian thought during the nineteenth century became pessimistic in its character, as it seemed that the world was slowly crumbling down, while Europeans first pushed Chinese merchandise out of world markets, and later violently penetrated China itself. Similarly, part of postmodern literature treats the future as a pessimistic, melancholy, frightening dimension, something worse than the present: increasing unemployment, increasing violence, deterioration of urban living environments, escalating decay of nature, disintegrating welfare societies, and all kinds of threatening developments throughout the whole world. [34] This argumentation does not try to find out how we could reach the good life, but how we could preserve it. This literature is conservative in its inclinations, and pessimistic in its outlook. Its favourite mode of emplotment is tragedy, not romance.
In 1997 a serious financial crisis hit Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, and in the North Atlantic area people had a tendency to regard the apparent ending of the Asian miracle with a surprising amount of glee. These sentiments sounded morally righteous, similar to the ones that members of British aristocracy might have felt while musing on Barry Lyndon's broken knee. The climber has stopped his advance, and the world has returned back to the normal state of affairs. When contemporary East Asian age-speak paints its rosy narratives of the future, the financial crisis since 1997 in appears only as a temporary setback. Even during the most difficult years there was no substantial change in the romantic way that future was contemplated, even though the present was terrible. [35] This is the way it should be. Because the temporal mode is that of a climber, the more terrible the present is, the more important future becomes as a dimension. At present the situation has again changed. For instance, when Korean President Kim Dae-jung gave a speech at 7 March 2000 at the French National Assembly, he used the following expression:
Now we will march with you for the construction of a prosperous global village in the 21st century amid the full bloom of democracy and human rights.
It was easy for him to say so, because the Korean economy was again in full swing, growing in 1999 by more than ten percent, and Korea had also already payed back all the money borrowed from the IMF in 1997. What difference there is compared with 20 years ago is mainly technological: Kim's speeches are now spread instantly via e-mail to targeted audiences around the world, such as the author of this essay.
The Twenty-first century still lies in the future. As a concept it is different from the change of the Millennium, which happened three months ago. The Millennium is a concept of the North Atlantic. It is senseless as a category of the future, because it is too long; the political and economic processes of the world are so uncertain that few people would be rash enough to announce the establishment of an empire destined to stand for a thousand years. A Millennium is sensible only as a category of the past, because the past is in a sense fixed, even though its interpretations may not be. A Millennium is a category for remembering, for sitting down on an arm chair with history books to contemplate on how we came to be what we now are. Or perhaps rather to look at a historical program from the TV.
Mental preparation for the Millennium was not especially elating. This kind of psychological turning points normally bring into our mind both the ending of something and the beginning of something else, but in the North Atlantic ending seemed to be the prevalent mood, with little interest in exploring what would begin. [36] Kumar also noticed that few enthusiastic slogans of the East Asian type were floating around.[37] In Europe there was mainly the Agenda 2000, which is bureaucratic quarrelling about the administration of European Union finances; not a terribly exciting or romantic narrative. Everywhere the turn of the Millennium was overshadowed by panic of Y2K, which was a narrative par excellence in tragic style of the possible collapse of the world as we know it. At the same time we had a lot of literature remembering the past millennium, how European eventual greatness was built on the enlightened basis of feudal institutions, the great discoveries, [38] and Weberian politics. [39]
When one contemplates the mood of the world three months ago, the New Year appears as a history course combined with fear of the Y2K, but there was one interesting exception. Much of the attention in the internet and mass media was directed at the greeting of the New Year in the United States, the de facto leader of the contemporary world. There celebrations were also quite markedly future oriented, with the United States presented as an actor ready and capable of achieving great things also in the new world. In 21 December 1999 the President and the First Lady, in their public invitation for the whole nation to participate in the three-day celebrations, even used the expression 'America's Millennium'. The text cannot be found in the White House home page any more. Nevertheless, this was an exception, reflecting America's position in the contemporary world. In Europe the festivities were much more subdued, and problems of maintaining the level of welfare were the standard fare in the speeches of national leaders.
Western Europe moved to the new Millennium with its back turned against it. Days and nights are still alternating in Europe, as well as the seasons; holy days follow one after the other as they have done in the familiar annual cycle throughout the past thousand years. In economistic rhetoric five to ten year economic cycles with summer-like periods of satisfactory activity, autumns of decelerating growth, winters of downturns with exploding unemployment and bankruptcy rates, and springs with rising stock prises follow one after an other, accompanied with a constant fear that one of the downturns may lead to a total collapse. People are born, grow up, and make new babies. European sense of time is becoming cyclical, and the 'traditional' that no longer exists somewhere out there, may be much easier for us to understand than we normally realize. Perhaps the 'traditional' is already within ourselves.
Perhaps we should not equate postmodern discussions and the West as close as I have done here, but rightly or wrongly I have considered postmodernism as the highest symbol of North Atlantic intellectual achievements, and as an indicator of what has been happening to our sense of time during the past three decades, after the post- World War II period of progressive reconstruction elapsed. This is not to say that I equate postmodern discussions with, e.g., Samuel Huntington's theses of civilizational ranking, [40] but nevertheless we and Huntington live in the same place and age, and there may be certain similarities. Shapiro's construction of climber's and aristocrat's senses of time, rephrased in terms of contemporary world geography, can perhaps help us understand what is happening to us as parts of the real world encompassing all people living on the globe, and not only the small 'world' of our ordinary North Atlantic discussions.
Perhaps it tells us why we prefer to discuss ourselves in terms of tragedy or irony rather than romance. Why we regard the most successful parts of the rest of the world, in Asia and Latin America, in a moralistic light. We love to point out deficiencies in democracy and human rights out there, demanding that they should be corrected heti, just nu, jetzt, ˆ prsent and right now, forgetting the real world history of the centuries that we ourselves used in building up our still quite imperfect democracies. Why our instinctive reaction to perceived moral deficiencies is immediate economic boycott or military reprisals, rather than unconcerned engagement, which Immanuel Kant, representing his age, conscious of the deficiences of the present but strongly oriented towards a magnificient future, probably would have preferred. Zum Ewigen Frieden is an immensely instructive book for anyone interested in the European moral sense of time of a bygone age. Why do we not show similar moralistic hostility to the poorest HIPCs (Highly Indebted Poor Countries)? Perhaps the reason is that they do not threaten us in any way. Those countries stay at their proper place at the bottom of world ranking, and thus we can reserve our charity and compassion for them. Perhaps we in Western Europe and North America have become aristocrats in a world historical sense, with our industrial wealth and global political position resembling aristocratic estates, our employment regulations corresponding with aristocratic class connections writ for hundreds of millions of people. Our educational systems certainly are built upon aristocratic foundations, and our leisure practices owe much to aristocratic precedents. Perhaps we simply react to rude, unsophisticated, progressive and romantic climbers as aristocrats always have done, in seventeenth century China, eighteenth century Britain, or nineteenth century Russia.