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Thanks for the paper, which I found helpful. However, I do not think that you have drawn your net wide enough. To my historian's eye, Asia today has much in common with Europe a hundred years ago. There is nationalism and what you called 'foreign policy adolescence', there are weak institutions between nations and a mixture of weak internal structures and overly-strong but obsolete ones. India, for example, has a strongly consensus seeking policy apparatus - which is good, so far as it goes - but an inability to reach a clean decision on almost anything for which there is not decades of precedence. At the same time, it has engrained habits of thought about its neighbours - and, in particular, about Pakistan - which are simply out of date and starkly unhelpful. Religious thought and nationalism on both sides of that border has lead to policies which, at best, divert huge amounts of resource from more critical needs, and which has created a threat to stability which is, to the eye of any dispassionate observer, both without grounds and aimed to no useful end. There is, therefore, scope for irrationality in the region, and as powers increasingly abut on each other's interest - through economic rivalry, for example - so this scope could extend itself.
I recall one of your (Oliver Sparrow's) marathon talks at Chatham House, perhaps in 1998, where you discussed the differing role of warfare as between primary producers and economies which are fuelled by the service economy. The former could have aspirations to capture wealth fields or mines, whilst the latter could only lose through conflict. You said that we should not assume that what is now true of the service economies is also true of the states whose economies are based on primary production, light manufacture and other assets which can be captured or coerced.
I recall that you remarks were made in the context of the Middle East, where scarce resource in the form of water, and primary production in the shape of hydrocarbons could most certainly be captured by an aggressor. Asia will not go to war to capture rice fields - one would assume - but it is straightforward to see how a hegemonist could aim to project power over a region useful for light manufacture and other activities in which a degree of coercion is feasible. This would not be a rational stance, of course, for one could achieve the same thing through economic power and self-interest. However, 'foreign policy adolescents' are not noted for their rationality: Japan went to war with the US for reasons which now appear ludicrous, and any reading of Japan's internal politics in the period 1920-42 shows a sequence of silly mistakes founded on aspirations to imperial grandeur, on shrill nationalism and underlying economic malfunction. Continental China's assertion of rights over Taiwan-China has a not-dissimilar tone to it.
I believe that there is a case to be made for political-military instability in Asia. Such a world would be a natural extension to the case in which the rich nations closed off their links with what they saw as an irresponsible, economically unstable or otherwise threatening China. You have sketched in the shape of this trend. Nationalism and poor performance make an enemy of Japan; poor governance is seen to cause anything from currency instability to epidemics; China (or other Asian nations) are guilty of the extensive theft and re-selling to OECD markets of intellectual property. It is straightforward to add to the list: for example, the aggressive targeting of foreign markets for non-economic reasons, and the coercion by China of other manufacturing regions to go 'through' it as an intermediary.
Most people who have written about an Asian "down side" of this sort are taken to a closed region, trading chiefly with itself, at odds with the wealthy world: the bamboo curtain model. I do not see this as credible. Internal markets are not big enough, and energy and other needs are too large, for the formation of a sensible economic block. The style of the world economy does not fall easily into natural blocks like this.
My suggestion is, therefore, that a down-side case could be made for a region in which civil and military instability are both present. Asia is not segregated as a block, or an array of blocks. However, aspects of what outsiders could do with it would certainly be turned off, at least for practical purposes. Outsourcing would either be impossible, or handled on a much more bilateral, state-guaranteed manner. For example, technology that could be transferred would be even more circumscribed that today, and supply chains would need audit and certification in respect of many things - political and ethical considerations, hygiene and safety, intellectual property - which are now largely ignored. No country of firm would bet its future on the continued stability of any such arrangement. Globalisation - in the sense of doing things anywhere, constrained only by cost, quality and timeliness - would be a thing of the past, an oddity of history to which people have vague aspirations to return.
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