Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
After the Second World War, Europe ‘finally achieved peacefully what the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve through violence’,115 yet by the end of the 20th century Western Europe could already see its dominance in world affairs begin to fade. Despite coming together in 1957 under the banner of the European Economic Community and under a common currency four decades or so later, Europe has been less and less able to compete with the dynamic growth witnessed in other parts of the world, specifically in China, which some would say is regaining the place it formerly occupied in the world. The centre of gravity of world power seems to be slowly shifting from the West back to the East.
The growth in the economies of Asia was the success story for much of the 1990s. In fact, this decade saw such growth in the economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan that they were named the ‘Asian Tigers’. Growth then moved to China and to other countries in Asia.
While many of the Asian countries became more capitalist and democratic with the growth of their economies, China managed to successfully introduce a mixture of capitalism and authoritarianism that saw its economy become the fastest growing economy in the world. Indeed low Chinese labour costs kept the cost of living down in the rest of the world and were largely responsible for what growth there was in the economies of the West.
Yet China was, and remains, an autocratic state, and continued to pay scant regard to human rights, an attitude that was clearly demonstrated by the massacre of hundreds of democratic protesters on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. When attempts were made by Western governments to link trade with an increase in the country’s attitude towards human rights, China responded angrily, claiming that human rights monitoring violated its state sovereignty. Ashamedly sacrificing human rights considerations for economic interest, Western governments rapidly capitulated. Economic power was becoming increasingly important.