Globalization and Asian Values

A Thesis

The project–description for the Cultures and Globalization Series made this observation: The values of different ways of life, its authors noted, ‘have risen to consciousness to become the rallying cry of diverse claims to a space in the planetary culture. Before culture was just lived. Now it has become a self–conscious collective project.’

This chapter will ask why this should be so. Using Singapore as a particular case study – and ranging further afield to consider East Asia in general – I ill ask why, at this particular moment in history, when globalization has become a fact of enormous moment, cultures should insist on their uniqueness, and why the theory and practice of culture should become ‘a self–conscious project’. I will argue that that very coincidence – the assertion of cultural uniqueness coinciding with the material fact of globalization – is itself the explanation. Capitalism, hitherto, had been understood to be continuous with a particular, namely Western, culture. That continuity has been broken by globalization. The very fact that capital is transnational renders capital in excess not only of nation but also of culture. The threefold link between the rationality of the Enlightenment, cultural identity and the interests of capital has become a twofold link between rationality and capital, with a purely instrumental notion of culture mediating. The fact that ‘Asian values’, for example, can now signify competitive economic advantage – culture on par, as it were, with a well–trained workforce, an efficient infrastructure and favourable tax structures – as much as it does an assertion of unique identity, is evidence that transnational capital is also potentially trans–cultural. Which means to say, the structures, habits and belief systems transnational capital requires for its functioning are to a remarkable extent quite independent of any particular cultural formation or nation-state.

It is in this context that culture has emerged as a question of enormous moment. The production of cultural differences, including all the potential uglinesses as well as affirmations that such differences involve, is a means of recovering value, including national sovereignty, in a context where the universal as such has become the province of transnational capital. Culture, in other words, has become ‘a self–conscious collectivist project’ because it is the only arena left for the assertion of identity and value. There is a double movement involved in that assertion: (1) a negative refusal of transnational capital as the sole arbiter of value; and (2) a positive affirmation of particular cultures as repositories of value, identity and authority.

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