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_____________ _____________ _____________ _____________ LIBERTY OUTSIDE THE WEST
Why Liberty Outside the West?
The theme of my talk is Liberty Outside the West. Why “liberty outside the West”? Answer: for personal and public reasons.
Start with the personal. I am Eurasian, the issue of a Sri Lankan-Muslim father and a British-Welsh mother. I grew up in two homelands and have lived in continental Europe. Over the past decade I have gravitated back to Asia, working and travelling in China, India and southeast Asia. Now I am about to leave Europe and move to Asia. Singapore will be my base camp. I have witnessed an awakening continent whose peoples are vertical, up-and-doing, grasping new-found economic freedom with both hands. I want a ringside seat at this great twenty-first century drama and watch the story unfold. My base camp, Singapore, faces east and west at the main “choke point” of Asian maritime trade. It is where “liberty outside the West” got a massive boost with its founding by that intrepid, autodidactic, polymath colonialist Stamford Raffles in 1819. His vision was of a “vast emporium”, fully open to trade and to migrants in search of work and enterprise. He was probably the first to realise, in concrete form, Adam Smith’s vision in The Wealth of Nations.
Now for reasons to do with public affairs. We hear so much about the Rise of the Rest – non-Western emerging markets, led by China and the other BRICS. This is supposed to be their century – especially an Asian century or a Pacific century. The centre of global political and economic gravity is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific. At the heart of this shift is an Asian Drama – not the one described by Gunnar Myrdal in the 1960s. He portrayed a continent trapped in unequal exchange with the West, and mired in myriad market failures that precluded escape from poverty and progress to prosperity. The conclusion Myrdal and other development experts drew was that only massive infusions of Western aid, Soviet-style planning and import-substituting protection could overcome market failures and kick-start industrialisation, growth and development. In a cultural echo from the same period, V.S. Naipaul dismissed India as a “broken, wounded continent”, full of “walking skeletons”. Karl Marx, Max Weber and others wrote off China and India, given their seemingly hidebound, progress-shy traditions.