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The Difference Culture Makes |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Alan J. Levine |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1993 |
| Size: 4,998 Words, 31,570 Characters |
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THE PACIFIC CENTURY
Frank Gibney
New York: Scribners, 1992
596 pp., $40.00
In 1941 the Time-Life magnate, Henry Luce, an ardent advocate of U.S. involvement in Asia, suggested that World War II would mark the start of an American century. There would be a vast expansion of U.S. power and influence of all sorts throughout the world, he said, and this would be a good thing. Frank Gibney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute of Santa Barbara and a well-known expert on both Asia and the former communist countries of Europe, was once a Time-Life employee. Although no unreserved admirer of his old boss, he insists that, although the term American Century was often twisted and unjustly maligned as chauvinistic, Luce was right in his day.
But that day is now long past. We now face a Pacific Century. The destiny of the world, and particularly the United States, will increasingly be determined in the lands encircling the Pacific Ocean, and especially in the densely populated and rapidly advancing countries of East and Southeast (Pacific) Asia. Unfortunately, as Gibney notes, Americans remain cultural and traditionally remote from the very peoples with whom we share a future. Americans have been more interested in Europe and the Middle East than in what used to be called the "Far" East.
Although he does not explore this point, in some ways the relative lack of interest in Asia in recent decades is a new trend and may not be entirely rational. Partly, perhaps, it is a reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War, which dragged on long enough to sicken even the most hardened. Yet it is also true that, as Edwin Reischauer once observed, the United States and Japan happen to be neighbors--the "world's most distant neighbors," to be sure, but neighbors nevertheless. And disinterest in Japan and other Asian competitors recalls how Americans in the 1930s, instead of studying the growing Japanese threat, stuck their heads in the sand and ridiculed the Japanese. Our involvement across the Pacific is actually a good deal older than our connection with the Middle East. American ships traded, whaled, and explored in that great ocean from the beginning of the republic, but involvement in the Middle East dates mainly from World War II: Oil, the Soviet threat, and the Arab-Israeli conflict drew the United States into the area.
Gibney grumbles, once or twice, that Americans have remained Eurocentric in orientation, but the truth seems to be that this view is a bit anachronistic and that the study of non-European areas is politically quite fashionable. Unfortunately, again for political reasons, interest has tended to focus on precisely those areas that are least important from the point of view of U.S. foreign relations and economic affairs, for example, Africa. Perhaps even that interest is not genuine. The currently fashionable shibboleth of multiculturalism seems to mean focusing attention not on the reality of other cultures but simulacra of them, trimmed and altered to suit certain political purposes. In any case, there is little interest in the great cultures of Asia.
Moreover, Cold War ...
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...orged ahead, changing fundamentally, we continue to circle round and round the same problems of crime, ethnic conflict, poverty, and educational decay that were visible in the 1960s. Our competitors, in Europe as well as Asia, seem to have finally learned that ideology and violence do not pay--thinking and pragmatism do. Let us hope that we do not have to relearn those things the hard way. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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