The West was never the whole world. It’s time to move on

AdvertisementHistoryThis Week in AsiaOpinionThe West was never the whole world. It’s time to move on

As Asia reclaims its roots, the burden of reinvention now falls on the West. Its brief era of supremacy was a historical aberration

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Kishore MahbubaniPublished: 10:00am, 16 May 2026

Western social science has made three metaphysical mistakes.

The first was to assume that its laws and lessons were, like the physical sciences, universally applicable to all societies. Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt captured the prevailing zeitgeist well when he wrote in 1983: “The world’s needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenised.”

That may have been true 40 years ago. It is no longer.

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One indirect consequence of this assumption – that the whole world was converging towards a common set of tastes and aspirations – was that Western universities progressively abandoned area studies. This has left the West ill-equipped to see how profoundly the world has changed since the 1980s.

The second mistake was the belief that Western civilisation’s exceptional success over the past two centuries represented the historical norm. A century ago, many leading Asian minds shared this belief. In 1885, the Meiji-era Japanese reformer Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote that “once the wind of Western civilisation blows to the East, every blade of grass and every tree in the East follow what the Western wind brings”.

AdvertisementHe added that Japan must “leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilised nations of the West”.AdvertisementSelect VoiceSelect Speed0.8x0.9x1.0x1.1x1.2x1.5x1.75x00:0000:001.00x