Asia, not Brexit, is Europe’s biggest challenge

For historians, a pleasing symmetry between past and present is now unfolding. Go back a century and a half, or so, and the Empress Tzu Hsi – the last Empress of China- sat with her advisers wondering how to cope with the Western “barbarians” crowding in around her empire.

Come forward to the turbulent  present and we have the European leaders gather in huddled conclave, wondering what to do about ever-growing Chinese intrusion.

With Tzu Hsi it was East confronting advancing West. Now it is the other way round. But the issues are eerily similar.

Should the alien intruders be welcomed or kept out? How do we best cooperate with them? Can we hope to match their superior technology? Should they be ceded some special sites and ports? If the people want their goods, can higher authority stop them? And is it far too late to do anything anyway?

The question is not one for leisurely discussion about the future. The newcomers are now at the gates, and have been for some time. A good first step might be for European leaders to recognise what has been obvious for decades, that Asia — not just China — is now becoming the dominant force in shaping the new world, its economy, its security and its life patterns.

Asia, defined roughly as running from the Pacific to the Red Sea, now houses two thirds of the world’s people, some of the largest high tech corporations and banks, most of the world’s foreign exchange reserves, the largest armies (except for the USA), almost all the new giant cities, with infrastructure unmatched by anything in the West, the most advanced technology in some areas (not all), the fastest growth and some of the best education and highest degrees of motivation on the planet.

All this comes with Asia’s  own models of political governance, which are beginning to undermine the certainties and absolutes of Western political philosophy, and even public confidence in the previously assumed superiority of Western democratic systems. Of what lies beneath, in the shadowy world of intelligence, cyber technology, fake and real, meddling and hacking, we have only the dimmest idea.

Of the estimated growth of $30 trillion in middle class consumption between now and 2030, says the Asian Development Bank, a mere $1 trillion will come from Western economies, the rest from the booming East and  South.

Chinese software has wormed its way into Western mobile and operational networks, with security chiefs at sixes and sevens as to whether somehow to ban Huawei from dominating the next 5G generation. China is deep into the UK civil nuclear rebuild and into everything in the UK from water supply to football clubs.

But, to repeat, the impact comes not just from China. India, with 560 million internet subscribers (and some of the best computer brains) is racing into a digitalised future. Indonesia is moving even faster. India has the largest digital ID programme in the world (Aadhaar), signing up 1.2 billion people and 870 million bank accounts. Bangladesh, another Western “ignored” economy, is now growing at one of the fastest global rates and  rapidly becoming fully digitalised.

Barely commented on is the way in which large areas of the world, previously considered in the Western sphere of influence. are turning decisively eastwards in their political and economic stances and linking up with the emerging Asian system. The Gulf states, Turkey, the Maghreb, large parts of East and West Africa, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, south-east Asia and India, with its Look East, Act East policy, all come to mind.

But perhaps it needs a symbolic and visible event to jerk European  governmental mindsets into what is really happening, and into the need for major shifts in strategic policies and aims.

Last week Xi Xinping arrived in Rome to sign up to extensive infrastructure “ties” (meaning direct Chinese finance  and management), in areas ranging from ports, roads, railways and bridges to civil aviation and energy, with the Italian Government. China already commands  a large section of Greece’s main port of Piraeus, and is already in discussion with Visegrad countries in Central Europe for railway development – to Budapest and Warsaw. These are the latest advancing tentacles of the China’s multi-line Belt and Road programme linking up the new Eurasia.

But may be that it takes Rome, where the European Community itself began, to bring home vividly enough to blinkered  Western bureaucracies and foreign policy establishments how the world has changed, how we have entered a new cycle in the history of international affairs and how nations must re-position themselves accordingly and work with new power centres.

In Brexit-obsessed Whitehall, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office clings grimly to the US Special Relationship as the bedrock of  all economic and security policy in the hope that the Trump effect will pass. But in the words of Parag Khanna (acclaimed author of a new book, The Future is Asian), this is like “driving forward while looking in the rear view mirror”.

America remains by far the biggest and most dynamic world economy, but its politics are turning inwards and its unipolar moment has gone. Willingly or unwillingly, it is now part of a  world of new networks, where power has to be shared and handled in entirely new ways — something only half grasped by the US foreign policy galère.

Easternisation – about which I wrote a heralding and warning Demos pamphlet twenty-four years ago — has now arrived and truly confronts us.  A new agility at all levels, and a higher wisdom in Western government circles, will be needed to handle it, cope with it and make the best of it – one hopes with rather more success than the poor Empress Tzu Hsi in her doomed attempt to avoid  the decades of humiliation, misery and violence which lay ahead for China and its peoples.