Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia’s New Geopolitics by Michael Wesley
This slim volume is a sort of primer in contemporary Asian geopolitics. While much if not not most of the material and analysis in Restless Continent might be gleaned from daily papers and such journals as Foreign Policy and the Diplomat, as well as the more specific volumes on various aspects of the issue, Michael Wesley’s new book succeeds admirably in providing a clear overview in a single text. It has several things going for it: it doesn’t waste the reader’s time, being fewer than 200 efficient, well-argued pages. The author, furthermore, is Australian with no immediately obvious policy axe to grind; this book, unlike some others, helpfully exists somewhat outside the minutiae and assumptions of the US-specific policy debate.
At the core of Restless Continent is a discussion of “primacy” in Asia and, in particular, its history and current dynamics. Wesley argues that
the outcome of the current struggle for primacy will depend as much on Asia’s own internal dynamics as it will on what the United States chooses to do.
The rest of book explores these dynamics from various perspectives including economics and commerce, the military, geography and culture which he then groups into “two opposed dynamics of rivalry and [economic] interdependence.”
The book’s strength lies not so much in the arguments and material itself—which readers may well have seen before—but rather in Wesley’s cutting to the chase; there is little extraneous or tangential content. Wesley, furthermore, identifies areas of continuity and change and rather than predicting a future, instead provides a few different possible trajectories. One of the most interesting—if not necessarily desirable—of these is
... disarticulation, whereby Europe, America and Asia’s great powers compete to build zones of influence and deference around their borders and with regions and countries of importance ... In between would be stretched an increasingly threadbare tissue of global rules and institutions.
It is not hard to find examples of developments that could be seen in this light.
Wesley interestingly refers to imperialism as a sort of “first-mover” internationalism, an option which
no longer exists for Asia’s late-mover industrialisers... As they emerge into the international economy, Asia’s economies have found themselves in a phenomenally crowded global marketplace... A global economy that is so insistent about gaining access to every corner of emerging Asian economies seems implacably unsympathetic to their own internationalising imperatives...
with the result that:
For most people who think about international affairs in these societies, the way the world works appears to be very unfair. When they look at today’s world, they see an oligopoly: a set of institutions, properties and understandings designed to preserve the privileges of the Western elite that originated them.
The author evidently has some sympathy with this point of view.
He also makes the point that much of Asia’s current inter-state rivalry is of relatively recent vintage. Japan’s incursions into mainland Asia would have been unheard of in previous centuries, for example, as would have been the more recent anti-Chinese agitation in Korea.
The shock of the first Sino-Japanese war was so much greater because it was so unexpected. East Asia had experienced almost three centuries of of tranquility and prosperity after the signing of a peace treaty between Korea and Japan in 1609.
One reason for the change, he says, beyond Western imperialism per se, has been the post-colonial Asian adoption of Western notions of sovereignty by entities that, for example, may “not have existed as unified political units before the age of colonialism.” One consequence of the resulting need for a constructed legitimacy is that
Across Asia, national histories are never allowed to recede. They are regularly invoked as talismans of national pride and authenticity.
“This is not new,” Wesley notes.
Nor, he might have added, is it restricted to Asia. The book’s streamlined style does have a few drawbacks, one being that some arguments and assertions, while not necessarily unreasonable, can be on occasion seem uncomfortably broad. “Hierarchy”, says Wesley for example, “forms the essential structure of all Asian societies”, yet it exists in other societies as well and “Asia” itself is hardly monolithic.
But Wesley nevertheless manages to pack a lot of sense into these few pages. Restless Continent provides a useful—and efficient—template for getting to grips with the complexity of the interrelated issues of contemporary Asian geopolitics.