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The following brief article is a cross posting from H-Asia.
Power and Pedagogy in the Pacific Century
Dear H-ASIAers,
In late August 1995 there was a brief thread which started with a
discussion on the relationship between the 'economic boom' in India and
South Asian studies, and then spread to a more general discussion of Asian
Studies and the East Asian Miracle and quickly died thereafter. I
contributed a couple, or three, postings to that debate and as a result was
subsequently asked by editors of the Australian Historical Association
Bulletin to write a short article which clarified and systematized my
argument on Asian Studies as a site of globalization and elite integration.
Without, I hope, taking self-promotion beyond current acceptable limits in
an era of academic entrepreneurship, I thought the list might be interested
in the said article.
Mark Berger, Murdoch University.
______________
Australian Historical Association Bulletin n. 81 December 1995
Power and Pedagogy in the Pacific Century:
Post-Cold War Capitalism and the 'New' Political Economy of Asian Studies
Mark T. Berger
Development Studies and Asian Studies
School of Humanities Murdoch University
The growth and transforation of Asian studies in North America and
Australia has been intimately connected to the vicissitudes of national and
international political economy. For many years after World War II the
North American history and social science professions generally, and Asian
Studies more particularly, operated against the backdrop of the overarching
geo-political concerns of the United States and its allies. The Cold War
relationship followed a different path in Australia, but Asian Studies in
the Antipodes was also profoundly marked by the North American agenda and
the complementary and antagonistic relationships that emerged between
policy-makers and academics in this period. While geo-political concerns
continue to provide direct stimulation for some types of research and
teaching, and an indirect framework for others, the growing importance of
geo-economics and the trend towards globalization in the Asia-Pacific is
now central to the reorientation of Asian Studies. The anticipated dawning
of a prosperous new Pacific Century has dramatically altered the overall
trajectory of Asian Studies in Australia and beyond.
By the 1980s, with the deepening and spread of industrialization in East
Asia and the waning of the Cold War, the disciplinary high ground in the
study of Northeast nd Southeast Asia was increasingly occupied by
economists and political economists. They joined, rather than displaced,
the more security-minded policy intellectuals, and given the growing
disorder of the post-Cold War era, combined with the steady increase in
defense spending in East Asia, there is every indication that geo-political
considerations will continue to shape Asian studies in profound ways. At
the same time, there has been a clear privileging of geo-economics in
Australia and North America. And the growing importance of geo-economics,
combined with financial pressure from government that teaching and research
on Asia pay its own way, has narrowed and shifted the overall emphasis of
Asian Studies. For example, the East-West Centre (established by the US
government in 1960 at the University of Hawaii, which currently gets
almost 75 percent of its funding from the federal government may well find
Washington's annual contribution dropping by at least half, and a worst
case scenario envisions a complete cut off of federal funds. Even if the
government only reduces its commitment to the East-West Centre by half,
there will be a dramatic reduction in staff and a shift in research
orientation connected in part to the growth of funding links to governments
and corporate sponsors based in Asia. For example, earlier this year South
Korean-based Pohang Iron and Steel Co. agreed to make an annual $1.5
million contribution o the East-West Centre (Wong, 1995).
The post-Cold War shift in Asian studies is also driven in a related
fashion by the concerns and interests of students themselves. In Australia,
the end of the Cold War and the drive to integrate with Asia, along with
the rowing importance of 'export-education' has changed the outlook and
composition of the tertiary student population. A significant number of
students coming into Asian Studies, from within Australia or as overseas
students (mainly from Asia want to study 'Asia' primarily as an adjunct to
a degree in Commerce, Economics, Business Studies, Tourism Studies, or
Legal Studies. If students do not already have an Asian language they are
now studying Asian languages for pragmatic reasons. Furthermore the
expectations these students bring to the study of Asian history/politics
and social and cultural change raises new problems. In my own courses on
history/political economy and socio-cultural change in Northeast and
Southeast Asia, in which the emphasis is on critical reading, writing and
thinking, there is resistance from a growing number of students (both
Australian passport holders and overseas students) who come into the course
from Commerce, Economics, Law and Business Studies as well as from outside
the humanities and social sciences more generally. These students are
relatively unprepared for the course, and more importantly are unwilling to
shift from an 'information-oriented' approach to higher education to a
'critical-thinking' approach. At the same time, students whose goals at
university are less 'pragmatic' and more oriented towards
'critical-thinking' appear to be avoiding the study of Asian languages
specifically and the study of 'Asia' ore generally (Fitzgerald, 1995, p.
56). The more intellectually ambitious students can be seen to be shying
away from Asian Studies, in the Antipodes at least, in favor of other
areas of study. They are apparently put off by the opportunism which is
sweeping Asian Studies. With the end of the Cold War, Asian studies is
becoming, more than ever, a focus of elite integration and a nexus for the
reproduction and recruitment of members of a broad group of 'managers'
around the Asia-Pacific.
The globalization of Asian Studies is occurring against the backdrop of a
much wider process of elite integration and the hollowing out of 'national'
economies in Australia, North America and beyond. Globalization is
generating high rates of unemployment in many parts of the world
particularly for those young people who for whatever reason do not make it
to college or university. The growth in the regularly invoked gap between
rich and poor has been a characteristic o socio-economic and
politico-cultural change in North America and Australia for many years.
Australia's deeply rooted egalitarianism and an array of institutional
arrangements aimed at protecting wages, working conditions and welfare
rights, continue to act as a brake to the unqualified pursuit of an
Anglo-American economic and social policy agenda. Nevertheless, the growing
gulf between the rich and the poor is clearly captured by statistics which
indicate that between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s the household
incomes in the richest 5 percent of the country's neighborhoods grew by
over 20 percent while there was at least a 20 percent drop in household
incomes in those Australian neighborhoods at the bottom of the scale
(Wynhausen, 1995). To put it another way it has been calculated that
between 1971 and 1992 the percentage of the Australian population which
relied on welfare benefits as their primary income went from 10 percent to
27.5 percent. Furthermore, because as many as 10 percent of Australian
households survive on incomes which are below what would be received if
they were collecting welfare benefits, between 30 and 40 percent of the
population are living on incomes equivalent to, or below, welfare. At the
same time, the tax cuts of the past few years have flowed to high income
earners with no clear indication that this has resulted in the kind of
spending and investment which creates jobs (Steketee, 1994). Overall it
would appear that late twentieth century Australia is being integrated with
Asia, by an outward-oriented elite which is inclined towards emulating
economic policies associated with the United States and Britain.
Nevertheless the US and Britain still stand out, more than Australia, for
the unwillingness of their transnationalized elites to make any sustained
effort to address he socio-economic imbalances and fragmentation which are
a particular characteristic of globalization (Galbraith, 1992, Lasch, 1995,
Lind, 1995). Significantly annual wages in the US for people without high
chool education have declined by almost 25 percent since 1973, while there
was a 17 percent drop for high school graduates, but a 5.2 percent rise for
college graduates. Even more dramatic is the claim that one percent of the
wealthiest households in the US have 40 percent of the 'national' wealth,
while in Britain the top one percent controls 18 percent of the 'national'
wealth (Cohen, 1995). At the same time, in South Korea and Taiwan, and even
Japan, dramatic income rises have in many cases created new inequities and
the relatively egalitarian character of the social order in South Korea and
Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s has been steadily eroded. (Horsman and
Marshall, pp. 98-100). While many o the countries of the Asia-Pacific have
produce and continue to produce spectacular economic growth rates the
social and environmental costs are also spectacular. According to the World
Bank the total number of people living in poverty in Asia, the world's most
dynamic economic zone, will only drop from the 805 million which it
recorded for 1985 to 435 million by the beginning of the twenty-first
century (Mittelman, 1994 pp. 439-441). It should be emphasized that the
World Bank defines anyone receiving more than 2,150 calories a day as
living above the poverty line. For a significant percentage of the
population of the Asia-Pacific the prosperous new post-Cold War era remains
illusory. At the same time, the attention given to critical engagement with
the shortcomings and costs of dynamic and uneven development in the
Asia-Pacific is shrinking as Asian Studies finds its place in the 'new'
political economy of post-Cold War capitalism. The overall focus of Asian
Studies in Australia, and elsewhere, is now on the celebration and
management of the Pacific Century.
References
Richard Cohen, "Capitalism Brings Rich Pickings" The Guardian Weekly (30
April 1995).
John Fitzgerald, "Asian Studies and the National Interest" Quadrant vol.
34. nos. 1-2. (1995).
John K. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (London: Sinclair-Stevenson,
1992).
Matthew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation-State: Citizens,
Tribalism and the New World Disorder (London: Harper Collins, 1994).
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth
American Revolution [New York: Free Press, 1995].
James H. Mittelman, "The Globalization Challenge: Surviving at the Margins"
Third World Quarterly: Journal of Emerging Areas vol. 15. no. 3. (1994).
Mike Steketee, "Keating's 1000 Days" The Weekend Australian (17-18
September 1994).
Jesse Wong "U.S. Think Tank Is In Danger Of Shrinkage" Wall Street Journal
(22 September 1995).
Elisabeth Wynhausen, "The Working Rich: Our New Elite" The Weekend
Australian (23-24 September 1995).
_________________________________________________________________
e-mail m_berger@central.murdoch.edu.au
DR. MARK T. BERGER
Chair of Development Studies/Lecturer in Asian Studies
SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
MURDOCH UNIVERSITY
MURDOCH WA 6150 AUSTRALIA
fax # 09 360 6367 main phone # 09 360 2482 office # 09 360 2951
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