cultures of the state, but of knowledge, as it was felt by Muslim thinkers like him that Western (theological and secular) knowledge encroached upon Islamic knowledge.
I noticed the second appearance in 2008, the same year that this Companion was published, this time from Singapore and in the secular vein. The proponent was a former ambassador of Singapore to the United Nations in the 1990s, Kishore Mahbubani, and by the time he published the book, he was Director of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in the National University of Singapore. His argument focused on the spheres of political and economic cultures. His book is titled The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East and Chapter 4 is titled “De-Westernization and the Return of History.”5 The wording was an obvious reference to the celebrated “end of history” underscoring the road to the future now that the Soviet Union was out of the way. But the chapter argues a more substantial point: the non-European histories that the Westernization of the planet destituted are now returning. While Al-Attas formulated it in the sphere of culture, Mahbubani targeted the spheres of political and economic activity. Although the leading case supporting the argument was China, in the background was the legacy of the “four Asian tigers” (Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) that in previous years reached surprising levels of political economic growth. During the same period, across the Pacific Ocean, “Latin” America was struggling to overcome the legacies of neo-liberal political and economic cultures. Why was this the case?
II
The previous short narrative of the meaning of de-Westernization is helpful to understand the “de-Westernizing turn” of the economic and political cultures in “Latin” America as well as understanding the difficulties in “Latin” America to argue the return of history, as is the case of de-Westernization in Asia. But first I would like to say more about the cultures of political and economic de-Westernization. The Chinese so-called massive “Road and Belt Initiative” (BRI) is not an economic and political initiative based on liberal and neo-liberal political and economic cultures. On the contrary, the project delinks from a Western liberal and neo-liberal frame and is grounded on the philosophical “return of history,” meaning ancient Chinese history and thoughts (Confucius, Mencius, Laozi), integrating Mao Zedong’s legacies. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” refer to the blending of both incorporated into a larger cosmological and philosophical frame: the return of a civilization that rests upon 3000 years of memories and praxes of living or Chinese civilization. Peimin Ni has outlined in detail the philosophical perspective of the Belt and Road Initiative.6
A caveat before going forward. Often, addressing these issues, I have been questioned by the audience calling to my attention that Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, and the history of Chinese civilization is used by the state to legitimize its politics. My answer is always, yes, you are right, in the same way that Western states use Plato and Aristotle to legitimize democracy and state politics. I am not saying that the rise of China’s culture of politics and economics and its culture in general is good. I am just saying that it is, whether we like it or not. What it means is that China is capitalist but not neo-liberal. It is precisely their lack of obedience to neo-liberal principles that makes possible the reconstitution of their political and economic cultures appropriating the nation-state model and capitalist economy and basing them on different grounds and principles: their own language, memories, and praxes of living.
This kind of return to history is not as clear cut in “Latin” America as in mainland China and, in more complex ways, in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong and Taiwan were no doubt effective in their economic growth, although the return to history was tied up to British legacies in Hong Kong and to the history of China since the late 1940s in the case of Taiwan. The current configuration of Taiwan was set up by the conflict between Mao Zedong’s socialism and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalism. The latter exiled himself to Taiwan, forming his own nationalist government. Although today both Taiwan and Hong Kong are under the rule of mainland China, they are both ruled by actors of non-European descent. The difficulties in “Latin” America to argue and to act on the return to historical philosophy is that all nation-states are ruled by actors of European descent. I am not talking about blood but about upbringing and education, of the cosmo-vivencia rather than cosmo-vision embedded in the modern European languages that are the national languages (and literatures and cultures) of all existing nation-states.
The return of the history of Peninsular colonialism is not a desirable project for the present moving towards the future. Furthermore, the return of the history of ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes would imply subsuming them into the legacies of liberalism, neo-liberalism, and Marxism (all manifestations of Western cosmology). The limits and problems of cultural “Indigenismo,” which impinged upon the spheres of economic and political cultures, are not desirable either (see Chapter 23). Equally problematic would be to make the same move vis-à-vis the current resurgence of Afro-diasporic cultures in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and the Insular Caribbean. The difficulties here are that there are three cosmologies (Western, African, and First Nations) entangled in a historical power differential (see Chapters 13 and 32). “Latin” America so far mutates between the struggles to end dependency to Westernization and the complacencies of submitting to it. In the first case, there is no need for the return of history. History has been there from the moment of independence from Spain and Portugal to turn toward France and England first and to the US later. In the second case, the problem is the lack of grounds on which to claim the return of history. Perhaps one way out would be to engage seriously with the teaching of Rodolfo Kusch in his relentless search for América Profunda (1962), accepting that deep America is the compound of three diverse demographic languages and cultures, including political and economic cultures: Pueblos Originarios, African Diaspora, and European Diaspora. The task is not an easy one because the return of history cannot be claimed only by actors from the European Diaspora.
After these clarifications, let’s return to the argument that the so-called turn to the left was indeed a turn towards de-Westernization minus the difficulty of the return of history. Why? It was first de-Westernization and not decoloniality, because none of the nation-states involved questioned the political and economic foundations of the nation-state. The confrontation with the West was propelled by a rhetoric of antiimperialism that was foremost a confrontation with the United States, for obvious and justifiable reasons. However, Westernization is a systemic rather than a conjunctural phenomenon in which the nation-state is an institution deeply ingrained in the structure and functioning of the colonial matrix of power, which I addressed in the previous Preamble. “Socialismo comunitario” which was announced during the former Evo Morales-Álvaro García Linera presidency could not have been sustained in the same way that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was and is. In the case of Bolivia, the return of history was blocked by the prevalence of the European model of the nation-state patterned on Marxism rather than on neo-liberalism as it was the previous state under Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada that preceded Evo Morales. The opening in the Constitution to the plurinational state, instead of one nation/one state, was a good opportunity to engage in a serious return of history in which all parties involved could participate. But that did not happen, and this is perhaps one of the reasons that propelled the judicial coup in November 2019 when a significant number of Indigenous in Bolivia did not support the state that claimed to support them. In spite of the local differences of all the nation-states engaging in the turn to de-Westernization (although this word was not in their rhetoric that underscored “left” and “socialism”), the failure of the turn to the left and the rise of the return of the right was largely due to the difficulties, if not the impossibility at this point, of the return to history in a subcontinent formed by the cohabitation of Latin America, Abya Yala and La Gran Comarca. Abya Yala is the territory inhabited by the majority of the Indigenous populations according to their own name for the territory. The Great Shire is the territoriality
