The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [34]
The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America’s leading scholar-senator, once said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” That gets it just about right. Culture is important, terribly important. But it can change. Cultures are complex. At any given moment, certain attributes are prominent and seem immutable. And then politics and economics shift, and those attributes wane in importance, making space for others. The Arab world was once the center of science and trade. In recent decades, its chief exports have been oil and Islamic fundamentalism. Any cultural argument must be able to explain both periods of success and periods of failure.
Why was Asian commercialism—so prominent now—buried for centuries? A large part of the explanation must lie in the structure of their states. Most countries in Asia had powerful and centralized predatory states that extracted taxes from their subjects without providing much in return. From the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, Asian rulers largely fit the stereotype of the Oriental tyrant. After the Moguls swept into India from the north in the fifteenth century, their rapacious rule consisted of demanding taxes and tributes and building palaces and forts while neglecting infrastructure, communications, trade, and discovery. (The reign of Akbar, 1556 –1605, was a brief exception.) Hindu princes in southern India were not much better. Businessmen had to keep interest rates high in anticipation of frequent and arbitrary taxation by their rulers. No one had much of an incentive to build wealth, since it was likely to be confiscated.
In the Middle East, centralization came much later. When the region was ruled in a relatively lax and decentralized manner under the Ottoman Empire, trade, commerce, and innovation flourished. Goods, ideas, and people from everywhere mingled freely. But in the twentieth century, an effort to create “modern” and powerful nation-states resulted in dictatorships that brought economic and political stagnation. Civic organizations were marginalized. With strong states and weak societies, the Arab world fell behind the rest of the world by almost every measure of progress.
Why was this type of centralized state being limited and constrained in Europe, even as it flourished in much of the non-Western world? Partly because of the Christian church, which was the first major institution that could contest the power of kings. Partly because of Europe’s landed elite, which had an independent base in the countryside and acted as a check on royal absolutism. (The Magna Carta, the first great “bill of rights” of the Western world, was actually a charter of baronial privileges, forced on the king by his nobles.) Partly—and, some would say, ultimately—because of geography.
Europe is broken up by wide rivers, tall mountains, and large valleys. This topography produced many natural borders and encouraged political communities of varying sizes—city-states, duchies, republics, nations, and empires. In 1500, Europe had more than five hundred states, city-states, and principalities. This diversity meant there was constant competition of ideas, people, art, money, and weapons. People who were mistreated or shunned in one place could escape to another and thrive. States that succeeded were copied. Those that failed, died. Over time, this competition helped Europe become highly skilled at both making wealth and making war.10
Asia, by contrast, consists of vast flatlands—the steppes in Russia, the plains in China. Armies can move through these areas quickly and with little opposition. (The Chinese had to build the Great Wall because they could not rely on any natural