Against the Asian Century

Abstract

Discourse surrounding a supposed “Asian Century” has gained much prominence in recent decades, especially as Asian nations and peoples have become wealthier and more militarily and politically powerful. However, the fundamental precepts of any “Asian Century,” as a heuristic device, are non-Asian and antithetical to how Asia has been lived in the past and continues to be lived in the present. By “Asia,” I do not mean an integrated, pan-Asianist whole so much as a place where western European ideologies do not have the same organizing power as in those ideologies’ homeland. In particular, the idea of an “Asian Century” is Hegelian, which is a philosophy alien to most of Asia. In this paper, I interrogate the Hegelian bases of the notion of globally-alternating “centuries” and suggest, in closing, that survey work on Asian values may be a way to disrupt the totalizing discourse of any “Asian Century.”