The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [43]
Look more closely at the hegemony of English. While many more people are speaking English, the greatest growth on television, radio, and the Internet is in local languages. In India, people thought that opening up the airwaves would lead to a boom in private, all-news channels in English, the language most of the experts speak. But the bigger boom—growing at three to four times the pace—has been in programs in local languages. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Marathi are all doing well in this globalized world. Mandarin is proliferating mightily on the web. Spanish is gaining ground in many countries, including the United States. In the first stage of globalization, everyone watched CNN. In the second stage, it was joined by the BBC and Sky News. Now every country is producing its own version of CNN—from Al Jazeera and Al Arabia to New Delhi’s NDTV and Aaj Tak.
These news channels are part of a powerful trend—the growth of new narratives. When I was growing up in India, current affairs, particularly global current affairs, were defined through a Western lens. You saw the world through the eyes of the BBC and Voice of America. You understood it through Time, Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, and (in the old days) the Times of London. Today, there are many more channels of news that, more crucially, represent many quite different perspectives on the world. If you watch Al Jazeera, you will, of course, get a view of the Arab-Israeli conflict unlike any in the West. But it is not just Al Jazeera. If you watch an Indian network, you will get a very different view of Iran’s nuclear quest. Where you sit affects how you see the world.
Will these differences make “the rest” behave differently in business, government, or foreign policy? That’s a complicated matter. In the world of business, the bottom line is the bottom line. But how people get there varies enormously, even within the West. The structure of economic activity in Italy is quite different from that in Britain. The American economy looks very distinct from the French economy. Japanese business practices differ from Chinese or Indian business practices. And these differences will multiply.
The same is in some ways true of foreign policy. There are some underlying realities. Basic issues of security and influencing the immediate neighborhood are crucial components of a national security policy. But beyond that, there can be real divergence, though these may or may not relate to culture. Take human rights, an issue on which non-Western countries in general and China and India in particular are likely to have very different outlooks from those of the United States. There are a couple of basic reasons for this. First, they see themselves as developing countries and, therefore, too poor to be concerned with issues of global order, particularly those that involve enforcing standards and rights abroad. Second, they are not Protestant, proselytizing powers and thus will be less eager to spread universal values across the globe. Neither Hinduism nor Confucianism believes in universal commandments or the need to spread the faith. So for both practical and cultural reasons, both countries are unlikely to view human rights issues as central to their foreign policy.
Of course, no civilization develops in a hermetic box. Even when it comes to religion and a basic worldview, countries have mixed-up backgrounds, with local elements overlaid with outside influences. India, for example, is a Hindu country that was ruled for four hundred years by Muslim dynasties, and then by a Protestant power. China did not experience direct outside