Martin Jacques
EAST AND WEST by Chris Patten (Macmillan)
This is a book in at least three parts. In fact, it often feels more like a collection of essays than a coherent ensemble. But a common polemical thread runs through the book: it might have been entitled Patten’s Revenge. During his spell in Hong Kong, he took a lot of stick and he has clearly relished the opportunity of stating his position at length.
You can appreciate Chris Patten’s fierce argument in favour of pushing through with democratic reform and the rest, but the big old questions refuse to go away: was Britain right to appoint a politician rather than a career diplomat for the handover period; and by the time Patten assumed office, wasn’t there relatively little he could and should have done?
Patten, of course, is right about the need to democratise Hong Kong, but the British case, rightly or wrongly, has always been tainted by hypocrisy: under British rule democracy was unnecessary, under the Chinese it became essential.
One of the most powerful chapters of the book is his polemic against “Asian values”. Here Patten has most of the right on his side. It is true that, for the most part, this argument has been used by politicians such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad as a justification for authoritarian rule.
But by dispatching Asian values to the boundary with some aplomb, Patten also dismisses the notion that there are any significant cultural differences between East and West. For Patten, the concept of culture barely seems to exist, and the word rarely appears in the book.
He argues repeatedly that the similarities between East and West are far more important than the differences. The result is that Patten confuses his political argument – on which he is right – with the specifics of these societies, born of histories that are very different from Britain’s (and often from each other).
The danger – in extremis – of failing to recognise the importance of enduring cultural differences, and assuming the universalism of Western solutions, is apparent in Russia. The idea that an instant application of a Western free market/liberal democracy model would solve the country’s ills has come apocalyptically unstuck.
The Asian crisis also bears on this argument. Like most Western commentators until recently, Patten argues that the causes of the crisis are Asian, pure and simple. It is now clear that the global system itself (primarily a piece of Western architecture) must also bear a large part of the culpability in creating huge capricious flows of capital which, under certain circumstances, have the potential to capsize virtually any economy, however well-managed.
One of the pleasant surprises of the book is that Patten writes with style, panache and not a little wit. He brings even to the most turgid of subjects a sense of energy and vitality.
But one is left with the impression that as governor of Hong Kong he remained peculiarly remote from the rest of East Asia. This is most evident in his discussion of China, which remains thin gruel and for the most part rehearses familiar positions. One can sympathise with Patten for the calumny that the Chinese government heaped on his head, but he has allowed his anger and disappointment to get the better of a cool, dispassionate analysis.