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Asian v. European Values

By Professor Tommy Koh,
Executive Director, Asia-Europe Foundation

(This speech was delivered at the Second Informal Asia-Europe Meetingon Human Rights, Beijing, 27-29 June 1999 and reprinted in the Asian Mass Communcations Bulletin)

I must begin with a big caveat. The caveat is that there is no consensus among Asian intellectuals and scholars on whether there is such a thing as 'Asian values'. Some Asians believe that there are good values and bad values but no such things as Asian values. Those who hold this view therefore believe that values are universal in character. Some other Asians believe that because Asia is so big and heterogeneous there is no set of values which are shared by all Asians. Those who hold this view may, however, contend that some countries in Asia, for example, the Confucianist societies, do share a common set of values. I belong to the third school. I believe that in spite of its heterogeneity, Asians who live in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, do share certain personal and societal values. I believe there is such a thing as Asian values just as there are American values and ideals, and European values and ideals.

Reasons for Western Opposition to Asian Values
I have been puzzled by the fact that many American and European intellectuals have reacted so negatively to Asian values. For example, the former Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, devoted a chapter in his book, East and West, to debunking Asian values. Asians do not react negatively when Americans talk about their belief in American values and ideals and Europeans in theirs. Why does the West react in such a negative way when Asians profess their belief in Asian values? I think there are three possible reasons.

First, I believe that the West has not yet come to accept Asia as an equal. The West has dominated Asia for the major part of the past two hundred years. Most people in the West, including its intellectuals, still regard Asia and Asians as inferior. One Western intellectual contended, in an op-ed essay in the International Herald Tribune, that East Asia does not represent any positive values. This old mindset has not changed.

Second, I suspect that the West cannot accept the concept of Asian values because the latter could pose a challenge to Western intellectual hegemony. The truth is that we still live in a world which is economically, culturally, intellectually and morally dominated by the West. Of all the regions of the non-Western world, only East Asia has the potential to achieve parity with the West. By 1995, the ten major economies of East Asia were, collectively, as large as the United States (25% of the world economy) and only slightly smaller than the European Union (29%). East Asia is also the home of some of the world's oldest and richest civilizations. Therefore, East Asia has the potential to challenge the Western domination in the economic, cultural, intellectual and moral spheres, in the 21st Century.

Third, some of East Asia's political leaders have given Asian values a bad name by seeking to justify their abuses of power and the inequities of their societies in the name of Asian values. For example, corruption, collusion and nepotism should be condemned by all Asians. They have nothing to do with Asian values. To put it more accurately, they have everything to do with bad Asian values but nothing to do with good Asian values. This leads me to my point that it is essential to distinguish between good Asian values and bad Asian values. Not all Asian values are good values just as not all Western values are good values. There are good Asian values and bad Asian values, just as there are good Western values and bad Western values.

Defining Asian Values
Very little empirical work has been done to ascertain what personal and societal values East Asians hold in common. One of the few researchers who have tried to do so is an American, David Hitchcock, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. In 1994, he interviewed over 100 persons in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo. The persons interviewed were think-thank experts, officials, business men and women, journalists, cultural and religious leaders. What were the principal conclusions of Hitchcock's survey?

Hitchcock found a surprising degree of congruence between the personal and societal values of Northeast Asians and Southeast Asians. On personal values, Asians from the two sub-regions gave equal emphasis to the importance of hard work, respect for learning, honesty, self-reliance, self-discipline and the fulfilment of obligations. On societal values, the respondents agreed on the importance of orderly society, harmony, respect for authority, official accountability and consensus.

Differences Between Asian and American Values
Hitchcock's study, entitled Asian Values and the United States, How Much Conflict?, was intended to ascertain the differences between Asian and American values. I know of no comparable study of the differences between Asian and European values. I will, however, assume that European values are closer to American values than they are to Asian values. On that assumption, let us see what were the differenceswhich Hitchcock found between Asian and American values.

On personal values, Asians emphasized the importance of respect for learning, honesty and self-discipline, whereas Americans emphasized achieving success in life, personal achievement and helping others.

On societal values, there were three differences. First, 71% of the Asians compared to 11% of the Americans emphasized the importance of orderly society. Second, 82% of the Americans compared to 32% of the Asians emphasized the importance of personal freedom. Third, 78% of the Americans compared to 29% of the Asians emphasized the importance of individual rights.

Hitchcock's survey findings confirm my impression that there are significant differences between the personal and societal values of Asians and Americans. To recapitulate, Asians emphasize the importance of orderly society whereas Americans emphasize the importance of personal freedom and individual rights. Asians emphasize the importance of respect for learning and self-discipline whereas Americans emphasize the importance of success, personal achievement and helping others. Given the above differences, it is therefore not surprising that East Asia and the West do not always hold identical views on human rights.

Asian and European Perspectives on Human Rights
In November 1998, the Asia-Europe Foundation co-organized a colloquium on Human Rights and Human Responsibilities, with the German newspaper, Die Zeit, in Hamburg. The colloquium agreed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has helped to make the world a more humane place. However, there were two disagreements between some Asian and European participants at the colloquium.

The first disagreement was over whether, given the diversity of the world in which we live, we could agree that different places should be allowed to progress at different paces' towards the achievement of the universal standards.

The second disagreement was on whether, in judging the human rights situation of a country, one should take into account its history and context. Let us take China as an example. Should we judge China by the standards of, for example, contemporary Sweden or should China be judged in the context of the dramatic progress it has made since the beginning of the Deng era? A former US Ambassador to China, J. Stapleton-Roy, had written that no government in human history has done so much for so many people in such a short time as the Government of China.

The Three Flaws
At the Hamburg colloquium, we agreed that our record of achievements in the field of human rights, over the past 50 years, contained at least three flaws.

First, we acknowledged that we are all guilty of double standards. We tend to criticise states with which we have little or no national interests and which are not in a position to retaliate against us. There is an inescapable tension faced by all governments in reconciling their commitment to principles and the interests of the state.

Second, the development of the international human rights law, during the past 50 years, has been driven by a dominant West. The views, concerns and interests of the non-Western world are often ignored or inadequately considered. A case in point is the current campaign by Europe to impose its opposition to capital punishment on the rest of the world as a new universal norm. Is it right for Europe to do so when the facts are that there are 118 countries which retain capital punishment in their laws as against 67 which have legally abolished the death penalty?

Third, because of its ignorance of the conditions in some developing countries, the good intentions of the West sometimes do more harm than good. Let me give you an example. Last October, I co-chaired a colloquium on labour relations at The Hague, in the Netherlands. A representative of an European non-governmental organization told us that it had succeeded in closing down a factory in Bangladesh which employed child labour. Later, it found to its horror that because of the poverty of the families, some of the girls had been forced into prostitution. The moral of the story is that in order to wipe out child labour we need a positive agenda of poverty alleviation as well as an agenda of targeting the evil people who exploit children.

Because of globalization, information technology and human mobility, we are truly the citizens of one world. We must therefore evolve a global consensus on what is good and evil and what is right and wrong. Asians and Europeans can make important contributions towards the evolution of such a consensus. In our dialogue, we should be diligent in seeking understanding and be slow to judge. We should treat each other with mutual respect. With such an attitude, I am confident that we will succeed in increasing our points of convergence and reducing our points of divergence. And, when we disagree, we should agree to disagree agreeably. [The End]