BALANCE of CULTURE

Rising Issues of Our Pivot to Asia

China's latest national defense paper, published today, has some fascinating notes on "some country" that has "strengthened its Asia-Pacific military alliances, expanded its military presence in the region, and frequently makes the situation more tense." 

While the paper's significance is mostly symbolic (such publishings are rarely read by the country's military higher-ups), most strategists would probably agree that the overall message dances around the United States and the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia." This Asia pivot, or "rebalancing of Asia," was actually established by the Obama administration a couple of years ago but for some reason seems to be all over the media lately--even more than when it was introduced. 

Despite the specific label, the pivot does not mean that the administration is turning away from our nation's other pressing engagements in the Middle East. However, the one thing it does indicate is our government's prioritization for future growth and sustainability. As we clean up and extricate ourselves from our volatile ME commitments, the Asia Pacific region's concerns and opportunities are becoming harder to dismiss or contain. While the Asia pivot isn't an exact synonym for the popular "Asian century = 21st century" concept, it is most definitely related.

I recently attended a meeting on Asian security where a US government official stated, "The most pressing issues of our time, such as climate change, will be won or lost in Asia." China is ready to assert more influence in the region--which is understandable because the region is literally its own backyard--while the US aims to at least maintain its historical regional interests while carefully balancing out China's ambitions. It is clear that both the US and China are ready to actively engage in these global concerns--let's hope that both countries' future policies are based on mutual gain and diplomacy instead of hegemonic, zero-sum approaches in the Asia Pacific. 

Traditional Culture Control Over Females

Today marks International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). It's hard to believe that such a barbaric practice still exists today in our world, but the tradition remains widely practiced in regions--mainly Africa and the Middle East--where gender inequality remains high. 

Thankfully, progress continues. According to UNICEF Egypt, 91% of females aged 15-49 have undergone FGM procedures in that country--but Egypt's Population National Council will hold a press conference tomorrow "to discuss means of countering the practice." And Uganda has recently joined Kenya in its efforts to eradicate FGM, stating that "unless the two countries worked together, the practice would not be wiped out."

But FGM isn't confined to the countries where the ritual originates anymore. With globalization comes diaspora, and many females that live in Western nations are still potentially at risk--as unfathomable as this sounds. According to a recent survey conducted in Ireland, immigrant families are still often under pressure to inflict FGM on their daughters. For these girls, the context is completely different yet the lack of knowledge on the dangers of the practice remain ignorantly high. 

The culture must shift in order to provide circumstances that do not consider this a "normal" action. There are zero benefits to this crude and outdated practice. It is simply a way to control women and maintain their status as mere property throughout the world. 

Diplomacy's Evolution Isn't Death

NYT op-ed columnist Roger Cohen boldly started off this week with a thought-provoking piece titled "Diplomacy is Dead." Personally, I'm always wary of statements that declare a concept or trend is "dead"--not only because such aggressive sentiments obviously serve as link bait in our media's online era, but also because they often seem to reflect a preference for protecting some kind of established and rigid way of viewing things that are nevertheless evolving. Why can't things evolve before journalists rush to proclaim some sort of "death"?

While his argument was compelling and very well-articulated, I felt that it centered on the circumstances of the past in order to judge the efficacy of diplomacy today. I'm interested in history's realpolitik just as much as the next IR nerd, and I would never dismiss the diplomatic feats that were accomplished in the 20th century and earlier. But it's 2013 now and global conditions are starkly different, changing at much faster rates than fifty years ago thanks to current information proliferation and growing social liberalization.

The US may have "lost its dominant position of power without any other nation rising to take its place," leading us to live in a "nobody's world," but this sounds a bit extreme and even alarmist. The mere notion of a world that must adhere to a Cold War-type of power rubric is strange to hear today--isn't our current world full of rapid power diffusion, with so much economic and political interdependence between states that diplomacy undeniably becomes even more important than ever? It seems to me that the diplomacy of yesterday is part of what cultivated a considerable chunk of the globalization we witness now--and with globalization comes change.

Change does not necessarily imply that anything has died. What it does imply is that diplomacy is no longer simply the exclusive top-down concept it once was, where elusive state officials were the only individuals with critical access to influence abroad. Although social media's role has had its share of skeptics and detractors, even in the wake of the Arab Spring, these new tools are crucial for both world leaders and "pie-in-the-sky citizen-diplomats." The connectivity we now enjoy with social media is possible only from years of technological progress. If today's online "noise" and "blathering" are somehow considered legitimate impediments to diplomacy today, then our approach to engaging with the world--not just world leaders--urgently needs more sophistication. 

China and India Use Buddhism For Regional Influence

As China and India continue to escalate their separate efforts in exerting influence around South Asia by funding tangible infrastructure--roads, ports, dams, and even an airport in Nepal--the two potential superpowers also are using a "softer" approach to shape perceptions: Buddhism. Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka are three key states in the region that all have deep cultural ties to Buddhism and thus are being courted by various "carrots" from both India and China. Some of these carrots include displays of ancient Buddhist relics, funding religious sites, and the sponsorships of international Buddhist conferences. 

Not surprisingly one of these Buddhist conferences, India's Global Buddhist Congregation, became a thorny issue for Beijing in 2011. The reason? The congregation ended up casting the Dalai Lama as Buddhism's global leader, in a sense solidifying India's agency over the Buddhist tradition while indirectly criticizing China's policies on Tibet.

Beijing's response: they actually delayed a scheduled meeting with Indian officials on Sino-Indian border negotiations. This is just one example of how soft power is in no way confined to abstract intangibles such as culture.

Niall Ferguson wrote an interesting piece on power back in 2003 where he states, "But the trouble with soft power is that it's, well, soft." Unfortunately this is true only when soft power is regulated exclusively to the realm of cultural and commercial goods, such as Michael Jackson and Big Macs. Today, soft power can directly and indirectly influence things once considered the domain of hard power, such as regional containment--one only has to look at China's "strategic encirclement" of improving relations (whether it's through direct foreign investment or Confucius Institutes) with most of India's neighbors to see this. 

al Jazeera's New Role in Global News

One of the meatier developments in the media over the holidays was the announcement of news network al Jazeera purchasing Al Gore's Current TV in order to enter mainstream American households. While plenty has been discussed on how ironic the $500 million sale is, most commentary thus far has centered around the spectacle of the transaction (Gore is estimated to gross approximately $70 million).

While the financials are definitely eye-opening to how this sort of business can muscle itself around despite the inherently divergent politics of the involved parties, hardly anybody is pointing out how al Jazeera may not be the straightforward news network it purports itself to be besides CFR's Elliot Abrams. 

In his blog post, Abrams brings up a simple test: Is al-Jazeera capable of candid reporting on Qatari affairs? Unfortunately, the answer ends up as  no--a questionable conclusion since the network is well known as property of the oil-rich Qatari royal family.

Despite this, al Jazeera is still one of my favorite news outlets. I often find it to be a rich resource for events outside the radar of, say, the ubiquitous New York Times. But unlike the UK's BBC, Germany's Deutsche Welle, FRANCE 24, or Voice of America, al Jazeera's direct funding connection to the government of Qatar (via Sheik Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani) is not overtly disclosed in its fine print. So the question is, will people care if al Jazeera doesn't objectively report on Qatari events while on their television sets?

With Time Warner dropping Current shortly after the sale, we'll have to wait and see how the rest of this story continues.

North Korea's First Skate Park

North Korea's first skate park just opened in Pyongyang--makes me wonder if this is another step in the country's gradual catch-up game with the rest of the contemporary world. 

This could be a positive sign, as skateboarding is obviously an American concept. (Traditionally, anything American or Western was condemned in North Korea.) But with the young Kim Jong Un in power, maybe certain aspects of outside culture are slowly being accepted within their borders. 

The Media's Desperate Pivot to Pervy

As part of the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia," President Obama is officially the first sitting US president to visit Myanmar, formerly known as the Burma. 

While most analysts realize this trip is an initial diplomatic push towards more democratic and economic reforms in this key region, the folks behind Drudge Report decided to frame it as some kind of pervy debacle, according to their photos above. Quite a stretch.   

Not only does this misinform the public on the most base and classless level (the sexualization of Asian women is getting seriously old at this point), it completely undermines Aung San Suu Kyi's incredible political struggle for human rights in a seemingly impossible situation. There she is now, an influential party figure after years of political imprisonment in her own country. But Drudge only "sees" one thing. 

To be fair, other sites have jumped on this theme as well, also going into detail about the president's "playful" and "flirty" meeting with Thailand PM Yungluck Shinawatra.

But all you have to do is keep reading, and you'll see Secretary Clinton doing the very same things. It's called being a friendly and polite diplomatic guest, but some "journalists" would clearly rather focus on their own disturbing racial fantasies. 

Chinese v American Conservatism

With China's highly-anticipated power transition now installed, some skeptics might wonder if the country has somehow fulfilled the "bad guy" role that was referenced several times during our recent presidential debates. Xi Jinping as new general secretary is easily an overall net-win for the Communist Party's conservative bloc, as observers expect him to favor traditional social control in lieu of any short-term progressive political or economic reforms. 

Unsurprisingly, the link between the conservative faction and dominant state-owned enterprises--a growing issue in China--is not terribly divergent from our own big-party politics in the US.

But the powerful conservatives in China seem to have a greater awareness of their socio-political context than America's GOP, expecting that the liberalization of the Chinese system is "inevitable." 

If I had been told 10 years ago that China's conservative faction would have a more open-minded perspective about the changing world than the Republican party, I'm not sure if I would have believed you. But after seeing rural white America react with such vitriol the last few years to its own diverse people and beliefs...I not only believe it--I know it. 

[Top photo: leaders in Beijing agreeing. Bottom photo: white power advocates.] 

Military Invasions Leading to Cultural Influence

Stuart Laycock started researching for his new book after his 11-year old son asked him a very simple question: How many countries has Britain invaded overall?

Britain's history is much better documented than most countries, and for obvious reasons--at the end of Laycock's two-year research cycle, he concluded that all but a mere 22 nations in the world had at one point experienced some kind of British invasion. Again, that means every single country in the world except for 22. That's just stunning.

To be entirely accurate, Laycock actually suspects that some of the untouched 22 (such as Mongolia) could have been invaded by Brits at some point but the lack of hard evidence restricted him from including such cases. 

The next country to top the list of most world invasions is France, which shouldn't surprise anybody who can remember their high school history classes. 

And the connection to today? Notice how these countries have extremely active and well-funded cultural organizations that work as ambassadors for their people instead of their governments. Britain has the British Council, France has Alliance Française, and I'll also throw in Germany's Goethe Institut.

None of these organizations are embedded within their government structure, as that would be adding unwanted baggage to an already difficult task. Sometimes the role of people and culture is to try to balance out their government's mistakes as well as to ensure the distinction between citizens and states. 

Definitely on my reading list now: All the Countries We've Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To

Australia Commits to an "Asian Century"

Is this kind of bold educational initiative the result of having a female leader in power? It's still early in the process, but Australia is clearly preparing for an "Asian century." PM Julia Gillard has committed to 25 ambitious goals over the next 13 years for her nation to integrate with the "unstoppable" and "staggering" growth of their regional neighbors. 

All schools in Australia will partner with schools throughout Asia, giving every Aussie student an opportunity to learn one of four "priority" Asian languages (Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Indonesian). By the time students graduate high school, they'll be expected to have a solid foundational understanding of Asia, similarly to how most Western educations have up until now focused primarily on a European-centric knowledge base. 

Thousands of scholarships for Asian students will be offered, a useful exchange for all of the new diplomatic posts that will be established. In addition, one-third of company higher-ups and senior civil workers will be required to have a "deep knowledge" of Asia. Gillard sounds really serious about this Asia-centric approach. 

This is a profoundly progressive way of broadening public student education--so cutting-edge that I wonder if we should attribute such innovation to the fact that the country's PM is a woman. Either way, I predict Australia's image and influence will enjoy a considerable boost as it attaches its values with an Asian perspective. 

(Meanwhile in the US, many are still debating if our schools should teach creationism or evolution.)