Europa: In Europe's struggles, an echo of Asia's past?
By Richard Bernstein International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 2006
TRIER, Germany Here are a few reflections on tourism and the grand sweep of history, on the occasion of a recent visit to the birthplace of Karl Marx in the pretty German town of Trier.
Easily half of the visitors to the handsome three-story Marx family home are Chinese, stopping here on whirlwind European tours. I talked to one group from Manchuria who were in Trier after having visited France and Belgium, and asked if Marx still had a deep significance for them, as citizens of one of the few countries in the world still ruled by something called a Communist Party.
"Nah," said one man, who said he came from Harbin in far northern China. "It's just a stop on the tour." But a woman who seemed to have a bit of the schoolmarm in her took the pilgrimage to the Marx birthplace a bit more seriously, arguing from a text straight out of the Communist Party handbook.
"If Europe had been the same as it is now, there would have been no Marxism," she said. "But there was a big difference in Marx's day between the rich and the poor. And if China in the past was like China is now, we wouldn't have had any need for Marxism either.
"But China was very, very poor," the woman, who didn't give her name, continued. "And if we hadn't had Marxism, we wouldn't be the way we are today."
Well, maybe. Many people, including many Chinese, would argue that Marxism retarded China's development rather than advanced it. Still, the woman surely represents an extremely widespread view among today's Chinese that the country's renewal from centuries of backwardness was due to Mao Zedong and the Communist Party.
In the realm of the grand sweep of history, something like a full circle has been completed. In the 19th century, the imperialist West, led by the British, famously carried out a three-way trade. Opium was sold to China for silver currency, which was used to buy tea in India, which was then shipped to the home country for consumption.
Now a different sort of triangular trade is taking place.
China sells clothes and toys and washing machines to the former imperialist countries, using the money in part to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, but in part also to finance its immense purchases of oil from the Middle East.
If that is history coming full circle, it doesn't stop there. In the 19th century, it was Asia, and especially China, Asia's customary hegemon, that faced a global challenge, in the form of Western material and military superiority. The challenge now comes from Asia, especially China, and it is up to the West to adapt.
One of the basic questions asked by historians of Asia is why Japan responded quickly and effectively to the threat presented by the demonstrable superiority of the West, even as China responded slowly, reluctantly, unwillingly.
The conventional answer has to do with Japan's tradition of cultural borrowing - mostly from China. It was a tradition of a country that always assumed it had something to learn, and it did, so that by 1905, in the Russo- Japanese War, Japan became the first Asian country to defeat a European power, decisively. It retained its traditional imperial system by selectively abandoning some of its traditions.
China, as is well known, possessed so deep and abiding a sense of cultural superiority, so strong a tradition of needing to learn nothing from the outside, that it was unable to adjust. It was so slow to see that it needed more than to learn a few material techniques to survive in the new globalized world that, in the end, its traditional system collapsed entirely.
Is there something in Europe's recent struggles with the challenge of globalization reminiscent of this Sino-Japanese difference? History does not repeat itself in this regard, and yet, the case could be made that France mirrors China these days while Germany and the other European countries more resemble Japan.
In the late 18th century, when the British sent an early mission to China to ask the emperor to open his country to trade, the diplomatic effort fell apart because of China's insistence that the British visitors perform the traditional kowtow when meeting the emperor.
When, in 2006, President Jacques Chirac of France walked out of a European Union meeting rather than listen to a French business lobbyist speak English, his behavior reminded me of the Chinese emperor's, so proudly inflexible to the necessity of an altered self-conception as to threaten his country's very ability to function in a world of equal nation-states.
It is impossible to imagine Chirac's German counterpart - or any other European counterpart - walking out of a meeting because English was the language of communication. One wonders if a kind of French cultural solipsism is at the heart of France's resistance to adapting to a changing world, and whether that solipsism won't leave it behind even in Europe.
After decades of turmoil, China has lost its conviction of cultural superiority, and, for only the second time in its history, it made a foreign import its own. The first time was the adoption of Buddhism from India starting about 2,000 years ago. The second time came in the early 1920s, when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai, coming to power in 1949 and making the basic ideas of a bearded German-Jewish intellectual the official policy of the state.
When they visit Trier, the Chinese tourists, taking pictures of themselves in front of the Marx family home, are acknowledging the importance of that piece of borrowing, and if the schoolmarmish lady is correct, it was a borrowing that was essential for the country's restoration of pride in itself. Or maybe the essential borrowing wasn't Marxism but capitalism, which is also foreign to China's tradition.
In either case, China eventually did learn the lesson of flexibility in a rapidly changing world. The question, now that the challenge comes from the other direction, is whether Europe can do the same.
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Tomorrow: Roger Cohen writes about the United States and China.
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