4.6: The West and the Rest?

If there is a hierarchy of needs, its structure is not universal, and consequently, we would expect the different nations and culturally-defined regions of the world to define their human security needs in different ways, congruent with the ways in which their hierarchies of needs are constructed. However, this raises two important issues. First, there is the question of ‘Asian values’ – the argument that security and community are more valuable in an Asian context than freedom and democracy, and that this justifies policies and activities that would be considered unjustifiable in the West. Second, the fact that different nations and regions of the world have different human security needs does not in itself mean that they have different human security paradigms.

Asian Values

‘Asian values’ reflects a model of consciousness that is linked to the growing authoritarianism that characterises the second decade of the 21^st century. Examination of the Asian values debate is more important than ever, with this model actively being exported to China from Singapore. Paradoxically, ideas of dominance spread from this small state to a larger one in a reversal of the normal process by which ideas are diffused (Ortman & Thompson, 2016, p. 40). It remains controversial, and the debate surrounding it is polarized. Surain Subramaniam (2000) traces the concept back to the 1970s, and summarises the “cultural relativist” position associated with the “Singapore school” that “liberal democratic values and Asian culture are fundamentally incompatible” (2000, p. 20).

Asian values were earlier seen as conflicting with modernization, but in the early 1970s the concept came to connote a commitment to modernization that would avoid the fads of Western cultural and economic life. After the end of the Cold War, however, proponents of Asian values contrasted them with Western triumphalism and the threat, real or imagined, of a new Western imperialism. Those proponents interpreted Fukuyama’s (1993) ‘end of history’ and Huntington’s (1996) ‘clash of civilizations’ theses as intellectualizations of this new triumphalism/imperialism, and, consequently, the concept of ‘Asian values’ was framed in opposition to them. The emergence of China as a global power through its Belt and Road Initiative that began in 2013, and China’s increasing geopolitical influence has also fuelled interest in a model that offers an alternative to Western liberal democratic worldviews.

While the concept was sometimes stated in a confrontational way – that Asian values were superior to Western values – its application was more pragmatic, based on a view that, simply put: “Asian values are superior to western liberal values in confronting the challenges facing Singapore” (Subramaniam, 2000, p. 22; original emphasis). While the Singaporean argument was made in other countries, it was not always made in the same way. In an intervention that may surprise readers of The End of History, Fukuyama points out:

Lee Kuan Yew [of Singapore] has attracted considerable attention by arguing that Confucianism supports a certain kind of political authoritarianism. Lee Teng-hui [of Taiwan] has called on his Confucian scholars to prove just the opposite – that there are, in fact, precedents for democracy in Confucian thought. Strategies like this are adopted in all cultural systems. Christianity can be and has been made to support slavery and hierarchy and authoritarianism as well as the abolition of slavery and the promotion of democracy and equal rights. (1997, p. 148)

So ultimately it is the content of allegedly Asian values that is of significance, not their basis, nor their motivation. Furthermore, the notion that ‘Asian values’ are applicable to the whole of Asia is at least as questionable as the notion that liberal democracy is applicable to the whole world. According to Subramaniam:

Asian values as conceived by the Singapore school are ostensibly Confucian values. However, some are also consistent with Weber’s Protestant work ethic. Others defy strict categorization. The inventory of Asian values as conceived by the Singapore school consists mainly of the following: respect for authority, strong families, reverence for education, hard work, frugality, teamwork, and a balance between the individual’s interests and those of society. (p. 24)

It is tempting to criticise the concept of Asian values on the grounds that ‘they really mean’ something else, and that they are a front for self-interested tyranny. However, the more productive criticism is a response to the actual claim of the proponents of Asian values, namely that they are appropriate to the modernization challenges facing Asian societies and economies. Amartya Sen’s reading of the empirical evidence leads him to the conclusion that: “On balance, the hypothesis that there is no relation between freedom and prosperity in either direction is hard to reject” (1997, pp. 33-34). He also argues that authoritarian government has an inflexibility that makes it unresponsive to disasters and other unforeseen circumstances, and that “the political incentives provided by democratic governance acquire great practical value” (1997, p. 34).

Sen argues that the concept of Asian values is an unrealistically homogenous one, when viewed against the enormous diversity of Asian cultures. He also points out that there are Western systems of thought that place an emphasis on order and harmony, as opposed to freedom and dissent. Furthermore, Asian traditions such as Buddhism place an emphasis on individual freedom as a necessary component of the search for truth and enlightenment, and he provides an extensive description of how such an emphasis has been given political application over the centuries.

Sen (1997, p. 40) rejects the concept of Asian values as “not especially Asian.” Subramaniam (2000, pp. 30-31) concludes that the “cultural relativist” position and the contrasting “universalist” one—that “the liberal democratic path has universal applicability”—are both only half right. For him: “The debate has become a missed opportunity to:

• Examine the plurality of cultures and values in Asia
• Seek common ground among the many Asian cultures and values
• Work out areas of consensus between the proponents of liberal democratic values and the proponents of Asian values” (2000, p. 31).

Such a search for common ground is likely to be more conducive to global human security than attempts to delineate another West versus Asia ‘clash of civilizations.’ Another consideration is that the diversity of Asian critiques of Asian values demonstrates the rich and extensive range of human values further challenging the Asia versus the West dichotomy. Critics also argue Asian values marginalises the perspectives of India, the world’s largest democracy and historically a major force within Asian cultural history. Indeed, India’s founding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru advocated support for universal concepts of democracy because of its opposition to colonialism, the values of socialism as well as an understanding of a humanist liberal tradition (Varshney, 2015, p. 923).

Human Security Paradigms

Hofstede (1984) claims that ‘Third World social scientists’ have frequently been educated in the West, and are therefore imbued with ethnocentric Western approaches which masquerade as science, and that it therefore requires exceptional personal courage and independence of thought to break from, or even problematize, these approaches. Perhaps he underestimates the contributions of thinkers from outside the Western metropoles. It is clear that without their contributions, the study of human security would be far behind where it is now.

The contributions of Muhammad Yunus and Amartya Sen are especially notable. Both have won Nobel Prizes, and have contributed to academic discourses and practices of human security. Yunus’ development of microcredit has had a practical impact, and he has contributed significantly to the theory of social business (e.g. Yunus, 2010); in both spheres his work has contributed to human security by improving the economic security (freedom from want) of some of the poorest people in the world. In Sen’s case, not only has he contributed directly to the field of human security as an academic, but he has also contributed to United Nations discourses of human security, human rights, and development. Yet we have to ask whether or not Hofstede’s claim about ‘Third World social scientists’ is right in the cases of Yunus and Sen: do they both have essentially Western minds in Asian bodies, or is there an appreciable ‘Bangladeshiness’ or ‘Indianness’ to their work that needs to be appreciated?

Yunus’s impetus came from observing the lives of the rural poor in Bangladesh, and his model was not initially conceptualised as more than a local response to local circumstances. Yet, it has been applied not only in the developing world, but also to situations of poverty in the United States, continental Europe, Scotland, and Japan, among others (Yunus, 2010, vii-xxiv, pp. 160-162). Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy show that Sen’s central contributions to the social sciences were made in response to the development needs of the South Asian subcontinent:

Sen’s theoretical revolution, in the technical language of “functionings” and “capabilities”, was in tandem with the practical dictates of Mahbub ul-Haq, the Pakistani planner associated with the foundation of the UNDP Human Development Approach, who posed a simple statement that the purpose of all public policies is to increase people’s choices. In his “Development as Freedom,” Sen elaborated on why and how freedom is at the same time the main goal and the main means to achieve development. (2007, p. 20)

Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy locate their own perspective within an experience of the developing world and its relations with the West:

the collaboration brought together one Iranian woman who had been educated in American universities and had worked in the UN before moving to teaching, and an Indian woman steeped in the tradition of activism that, fortunately, does not escape the faith of intellectuals in India. (2007, p. 5)

Using the language of ‘the South’ and ‘the North’ (broadly equivalent to the ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ counties of the world), Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy point to:

the collective experience … of mistrust … with concepts that came from international organizations, which to the South, were often seen as institutions led by powerful Northern nations. Whether it was democracy, human rights and now human security, the discourses smacked of power in the construction of the terms. (2007, p. 4)

This does seem like an appreciably Southern paradigm, which elucidates the ‘Northernness’ of some others. This is especially apparent when they discuss the notion of humanitarian intervention, a particular use of the concept of human security in international politics which has extended the just war theory to one that legitimises war when it is prosecuted for reasons, or pretexts, of human security (2007, p. 196ff). The lack of intervention in Rwanda in 1994, and the actual intervention in Kosovo in 1999, have both been debated extensively. The Rwandan case has been used to justify subsequent interventions in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya, for example, although Chomsky (1999, p. 81) has argued that the intervention in Kosovo “greatly accelerated slaughter and dispossession.” Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy observe that “incidents of selective humanitarian intervention have made much of the South, especially Civil Society, cynical of the concept to the extent of rejecting it” (2007, p. 198). They cite Walden Bello (2006) as an example:

most of us, at least most of us in the global South, recoil at Washington’s use of the humanitarian logic to invade Iraq. Most of us would say that even as we condemn any regime’s violations of human rights, systematic violation of those rights does not constitute grounds for the violation of national sovereignty through invasion or destabilization. Getting rid of a repressive regime or a dictator is the responsibility of the citizens of a country.

This is at least suggestive of a distinctively Southern human security paradigm. The existence of such a paradigm would be significant in that it allows its proponents to criticise the tendency of some in the South to reject human security in its entirety as a tool of Western neo-imperialism. Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy say that “the advent of human security should be seen, instead, as the triumph of the South to put development concerns into global security discussions” (2007, p. 35), because “a human security approach for the South would allow it to shed international light on the concerns of underdevelopment and individual dignity at a time when state-based interests are increasingly being used in the global war against terrorism” (2007, p. 35). And for Mahbub ul-Haq (1998, p. 5), human security paradigms create the potential for a “new partnership between the North and the South based on justice not on charity; on an equitable sharing of global market opportunities, not on aid; on two-way compacts, not one-way transfers; on mutual cooperation, not on unilateral conditionality or confrontation.”