After Such a Year, Humility Is Becoming

Venturing forth on the eve of the millennium to make grand predictions or sweeping declamations about any region or people is a fool’s mission at best. This is especially true of Asia, a region that’s the graveyard of the cliche. Thus, what probably is my favorite quote of this past year, appearing in this column in October, came from Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations, Kishore Mahbubani: “The Asian financial crisis was not necessarily a bad thing . . . There was too much Asian triumphalism. It was good to have our egos deflated and recover what I call our natural humility.”

A healthy measure of natural humility will work well for us all, as many comments in 1999 served to remind. Consider the daunting question of globalization’s impact on Asia. Joseph Stiglitz, then the World Bank’s chief economist, began the year by dissing complacent Western colleagues who would rather point fingers than uncover true underlying causes: “It is easier to blame the Asian countries and their banking systems for the lack of transparency than to question the policies of Western lenders. There is a lot of hypocrisy.” Last month, the controversial Stiglitz announced his resignation.

Also in January, speaking from the podium of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Guillermo Ortiz Martinez, governor of the Bank of Mexico, foretold much of the anti-globalization angst that was to throw the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle into tumult in December: “It is difficult to explain to a Mexican housewife why she has to pay higher interest rates on her housing loan because Russia has defaulted.”

Then this fall, again before the Seattle debacle, another observer underscored what was at stake: “The margin for unsound and inconsistent macroeconomic policies is narrower than ever,” Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said. “There is not the tiniest room for relaxation or complacency.”

Washington, take note: There remains an urgent need for world financial reform. One more Asian-like crisis will rock the world.

This past year generally was one of pessimism about slumping and troubled Japan, once the planet’s model of economic performance and still the world’s second-biggest economy. Yet a lot of my sources had other ideas. In January, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen wholeheartedly rejected the Japan-in-decline hypothesis: “Japan is starting to reach out. It is a very positive sign.”

Half a year later, as the Japanese economy finally began to show signs of recovery, the Keizo Obuchi government got involved in the heartbreaking plight of oppressed East Timor and put an initial $100 million on the international table to help the multinational peacekeeping force there. The Japanese upsurge was attributed to the political endurance of Obuchi, the plain-vanilla prime minister who gets no respect. When I interviewed Obuchi in September, however, this self-effacing man seemed more daunted than triumphant: “It is difficult to run policy when the leader does not have a fixed term of office,” he commented, almost bitterly. The Japan agony is far from over.

Sino-American relations were on a roller-coaster course all year, but few of my sources were prepared to put all the blame on Beijing. In March, when the Cox report on China’s “spying” surfaced and began to whip up an anti-China scare, New York University professor Joanna Waley-Cohen opined: “Westerners who blame 1/8anti-American 3/8 Chinese rhetoric . . . for the lion’s share of the mutual hostility between the People’s Republic and the United States fail to acknowledge the role of the American anti-communist movement, which for years led the United States to treat the People’s Republic as a virtual pariah.” That comment seems as apt now as it did then.

By July, the Cox report was starting to get bad reviews. Jonathan Pollack, the Asian analyst at Rand--no den of mushy pro-Beijing sycophancy--denounced the report as “an unbelievable rush to judgment. There are too many unhedged judgments, too many unexplained statements.”

Kosovo, half the world away, prompted analysts in Asia to sense regional fibrillations. In April, Felix Soh, the veteran foreign editor of the Straits Times of Singapore, reflected that Serbian ethnic cleansing brought “into sharp focus the horrors that could engulf Asia if ethnic and religious strife unleashed by the breakdown of the region’s economic, social and political order is not contained. . . . Considering what a melting pot of ethnicity Indonesia is, we cannot be complacent about the situation there.”

That same month, Australian Prime Minister John Howard told me that Indonesia had to accept that “there should be some act of self-determination, self-expression by the people of 1/8East 3/8 Timor.” Yet could Australia and others in the region handle this potential tragedy without outside help? Would Washington look the other way in Asia, as it often does? Said the prime minister, diplomatically: “I would have to say that in the global reach of American foreign policy, there’s still a little bit of detail deficit in this part of the world.”

It’s almost impossible to find a single source to disagree with Howard’s mild-mannered concern. “Detail deficit”--what a kind way to put this perpetual truth about U.S. foreign policy’s debilitating Eurocentrism, which is a continuing theme of this column.

Even so, have a Happy New Year--and enjoy the millennium.

Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s column runs Wednesdays. He teaches at UCLA. E-mail: tplate@ucla.edu.