The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [38]
Since Peter the Great, there has been a long, distinguished list of non-Westerners who have sought to bring the ideas of the West to their countries. Some have been as radical as Peter. Perhaps the most famous of them was Kemal Atatürk, who took over the collapsing Ottoman state in 1922 and declared that Turkey had to abandon its past and embrace European culture to “catch up” with the West. He created a secular republic, romanized the Turkish script, abolished the veil and the fez, and dismantled all the religious underpinnings of the Ottoman caliphate. Earlier, in Japan in 1885, the great theorist of the Meiji Reformation, Yukichi Fukuzawa, wrote a famous essay, “Leaving Asia,” in which he argued that Japan needed to turn its back on Asia, particularly China and Korea, and “cast its lot with the civilized countries of the West.” Many Chinese reformers made similar arguments. Sun Yat-sen bluntly acknowledged Europe’s superior status and the need to copy it to get ahead.
Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, believed that ending his country’s “backwardness” required borrowing politically and economically from the West. Having been educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he had the outlook of a Western liberal: he once privately described himself as “the last Englishman to rule India.” Nehru’s contemporaries around the world were similarly steeped in Western thought. Postcolonial leaders tried to free themselves from the West politically but still wanted the Western path to modernity. Even the fiercely anti-Western Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt wore tailored suits and read voraciously in European history. His sources for policy ideas were invariably British, French, and American scholars and writers. His favorite movie was Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
We sometimes recall these leaders’ fiery anti-Western rhetoric and Marxist orientation and think of them as having rejected the West. In fact, they were simply borrowing from the radical traditions of the West. Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin were all Western intellectuals. Even today, when people in Asia or Africa criticize the West, they are often using arguments that were developed in London, Paris, or New York. Osama bin Laden’s critique of America in a September 2007 video tape—which included references to Noam Chomsky, inequality, the mortgage crisis, and global warming—could have been penned by a left-wing academic at Berkeley. In Joseph Conrad’s Youth, the narrator recalls his first encounter with “the East”: “And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. . . . The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmentionable adjectives—in English.”
Non-Western leaders who admired the West have been most impressed by its superiority at producing wealth and winning wars. After its defeat at the hand of European forces in Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire decided that it had to learn from the ways of its adversaries. It bought weapons from Europe and, after realizing that it needed more than machines, started importing organizational skills, techniques, and modes of thought and behavior. By the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern commanders were organizing their troops into Western-style armies, with the same platoons and battalions, the same colonels and generals.13 Militaries around the world converged to a single Western model. Today, whether in China, Indonesia, or Nigeria, a country’s armed forces are largely standardized around a nineteenth-century Western template.
Men like Roy, Fukuzawa, and Nehru were not making an argument about intrinsic cultural superiority. They were not Uncle Toms. In Roy’s letter, he repeatedly compared Indian science in his day to European science before Francis Bacon. It was history, not genetics, that mattered. Sun Yat-sen was intimately familiar with the glories