Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought

The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought

Cemil Aydin
Reviewed by By Lucian W. Pye
January/February 2008
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Cemil Aydin
Columbia University Press
2007
368 pp.
9780231137782
$32.50

With great skill, Aydin attacks the notion that anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism in Asia are negative reactions to the liberal values of the West. By comparing Ottoman pan-Islamic and Japanese pan-Asian visions from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II, he is able to show how negative views of the West first took hold. Asian intellectuals made much of the two faces of the West that they were confronted with: effective imperialism, on the one hand, and enlightenment liberalism, on the other. Aydin thus identifies both deep currents in Asian intellectual history and popular views of power and politics. He has a sure grasp of what is fundamental and what is merely of the moment.

Related

Essay, Nov/Dec 2009
Changing North Korea
Andrei Lankov

By exposing them to the truth about their impoverishment and about the prosperity of their South Korean cousins, the United States can encourage North Koreans to change the regime in Pyongyang.

Read
Essay, May/Jun 2004
Afghanistan Unbound
Kathy Gannon

Two and a half years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is once more lapsing into bloody chaos. Although President Hamid Karzai is strong on paper, he is weak in fact. The drug trade is surging, the Taliban are creeping back, and real power rests in the hands of the country's many warlords. Instead of disarming the militias, Washington is using them to hunt the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban. But ordinary Afghans are paying the price.

Read
Essay, Jul 1971
Indochina: Disengaging
General Matthew B. Ridgway

The war in Vietnam has lasted longer than any armed conflict outside our borders in which we have been engaged in the nearly two centuries of our independent existence, and disengagement and complete withdrawal are still a question mark. The conflict has engendered divided opinions, manifested in bitter and potentially dangerous confrontations among our people, and we still are uncertain what it was we sought and why, where we should now proceed, and what courses of action would best serve our national interests.

Read