The Songs of Asia

I have more than a little sympathy for a somewhat lazy idea that the bulk of the money and wealth in this world have always been based historically in civilisations around the Indian Ocean and in Asia generally. The sources of wealth, of course, are not fungible and nor are they immutable and ideal. New wealth can be discovered, and new things generated.

Something seems to have happened three hundred or so years ago, however. Europe went to Asia with superior technologies and universalist ideas, and a history of immigrant mixing, expansive and aggressive warfare and the wealth of the Americas and Africa at its disposal. In a real sense, it dispropriated Asia; that's how a fragment of the Hapsburg monarchy and the Napoleonic wars like Belgium could become the eighth richest country in the world.

Now, there is a tremendous temptation to accept the typically grand and sweeping observation that Napoleon could have made that power and money are sweeping back. I've drawn attention in posts below to how the politics and energy questions of the late oil age are in part questions of who pumps and moves central Asian oil, and where the pipelines go. They are in part too whether India can establish, through means of its Navy or an energy grid, the supplies necessary for the continued expansion of its protectionist model.

However, I am also taken with the way in which Asia attracts westerners (including at times myself) to impose narratives from events that we have forgotten on things. Let me explain a little of the thoughts that have arisen over the weekend, which arose from a conversation about sixth-century Goguryeo, one of the greatest Korean kingdoms.

I think westerners have forgotten neither the crusades nor our enduring image of Byzantium. I think that we simply refuse to remember the details. So, the idea that Rome fell at some point in the fifth or sixth century, and that Gibbon's broad narrative should drive our fears of decline in our modern states and particularly the United States, is quite profound. I also think that we forget that Rome in the west was essentially privatised to immigrant armies and we forget how brutal its methods were.

We move on from that to think that the New Rome--which always called itself Roman, not Byzantine--was some decaying, corrupt, ludicrous confusion and not a state that lasted two and a half times again as long as the western Roman Empire and that endured things that broke the original Rome not once but many times. We tend to confuse Byzantium with Turkey or Persia, and whenever we look east, we think of weak or limited states that are inevitably subject to western invasion. We impose this model on Asia, added to enlightenment universalism about our values.

But a chat at the weekend disabused me of these heuristic notions. Over a game of monopoly (which I won), a Korean friend and I discussed Goguryeo, or rather, she introduced me to it. We started off talking about North Korea--she is from the Republic--and about how the west tends to view things.

One thing that struck me was how Easterners were racially conscious; that is, the civic nationalisms of the modern era apart, people traced themselves, their families, and their ethnicities back thousands of years. I know Italians can do that on a parochial level, but the warm truth in the west is that we are all admixtures of groups and peoples over the centuries.

In fact, I suspect one reason racialism was a product of the enlightenment's desire to systematise was that no large western nation can be described as ethnically coherent, and quite a few small ones can't either (including Ireland and Israel), but some politicians and philosophers have historically wanted to pretend different.

What also struck me about the tale of Goguryeo is how the idea of a large and formidable Korea is a wellspring for the modern Northern state, for the Chinese mixture of domination and fear, and for the idea on both sides of the border in the peninsula that Korea, whatever the glaring faults of the north, should be left alone to integrate.

We have our myths of the past that give credence to present struggles, of course--one can almost hear the Battle of Britain music every time a Briton loses fifty quid on the horses or gets into trouble with the gas bill. But Goguryeo seems to underlie perceptions more than some lingering memory of Romanitas does here. Maybe it's like religion, which underpins the debate between 'secular' market liberals and collectivists here. It probably isn't.

I keep thinking about western analogies to try and desperately understand, like European Union Empire builders grasping at Charlemagne for some safe way if understanding what they are thinking. I can't though. I never thought of Korea as a small Europe, with a strong memory of multiple kingdoms and dukedoms and a capacity to trace them in the modern world before this weekend; I do now.

Perhaps that explains the Korean fascination with baroque France that seems to manifest in the Japanese anime most popular there, and films like Untold Scandal; a fascination with Richelieu's attempt to build a nation out of diverse dukedoms on the basis of ethnic contiguity. Perhaps Korea's ongoing fascination with Catholicism, evangelical protestantism, and stalinism have something to do with it.

That French project, of course, ran right into the buffers with the revolution, but who ever thought that historians of Louis XIV and Kim Il Sung would ever have had anything to say to each other? That said, I recall the joke that there was something oriental about the Dieudonne that did the rounds in France.

Who knows? I'm still new to the issue, and still thinking it through. As ever, if my one demented reader in the maximum security pancake house wants to write in with any information of their own, I'd be grateful.

There follows what may appear to be a completely bizarre link to Bara Wa Utsukushiku Chiru. It will, no doubt, be explicable to at least one of my readers. It has become a part of my mealtimes at the weekend, after all.