Asian success. Now the success collapsed. One should not forget about the other half. I think the next century, no matter what philosophy or economy is pursued, we should aim for much more balance. We should be more concerned with the pattern than the rates. Otherwise we just become concerned about the quantitative aspect of development, growth rates, growth patterns. I think we should be more concerned with growth pattern in the future. There should be something in between. There is what the Chinese call "state capitalism", "para-capitalism", whatever that is. Somehow you cannot leave the market alone. Somehow there are elements of civil society, rules in place. Whether rules should be written by internationalism or regionalism is one matter, but we should at least draw our own rules. Make sure those, Professor Kissinger calls, reckless marketeers, lenders, borrowers don't ruin our society. I am very sad to see under so-called capitalism, liberalization, globalization, the economic crisis has turned out to be a political crisis again in Asia.
I agree with what Professor Kissinger said in Bangkok on the 8th of February. He said, don't turn the Asian economic crisis into another round of political crisis. Then the whole world would be very sorry for that.
｡?IOKIBE
People started to cope with the crisis at a national level, at a regional level and at a global level. This is a big theme to discuss.
｡?NANDY
I don't think human beings are capable of concocting systems or ideas that are perfect. Ultimately every system is imperfect and every system has its cost. Development has its costs. State capitalism has its costs; the socialist system had its costs. I am afraid, globalization also has its costs. One young social activist has claimed that globalization reduces every person to only three rolls in this world: consumer, voter and tourist. The activist may or may not be right. But if he is right, l do not think human beings can be restrained to this three roles. They will scream and that scream will always use the language of culture, whether we like it or not. If we don't know how to handle culture in a healthy fashion, we shall have to reconcile ourselves to the emergence of pathological self-expressions of cultures, in ethnic chauvinism or fundamentalism, as we have already seen in some parts of the world.
It is easy to talk the language of sectarian values. But I do not think General Suharto represents Indonesian values. Generals and values rarely go together, but that's a different story. Nor do I think that Mahathir Mohammad represents Asian values. We have to give back the Asian citizens the right to articulate Asian values. That is another form of empowerment.
Only a year ago, in an American court, a case has been filed by Jeremy Riffkin, the futurist, and Vandal Shiva, the environmentalist, against a patent given to a well known traditional herb called neem (margosa). Now at least a billion people belonging to at least 15 countries have been using neem, probably for the last 2000 years. Many Buddhist and Hindu religious texts mention neem. But Indian peasants who grew and used neem did not know that they had to take out a patent for some derivatives or alkaloids of the plant. Even within the market economy, cultural rights and people's rights may clash with individual rights. And this raises another kind of question of empowerment.
Finally, there are different ways of writing the story or, if you like to call it so, the history or the narrative of our times.
I implied that culture may be a way of writing the story of our times in a way which is, to some extent, independent of both the nation states system and global political economy.
We might need this narrative in the coming years. If not us, at least the next generation will require an alternative narrative to go back and reconstruct the past and devise better social systems, better political economics, and better visions of a desirable society.
｡?LEE
I would like to answer Dr. Tanaka's basic question. Some said it is better to hand over the right to determine the culture or value to citizens but in that case, what are citizens?
Humans wear a lot of different hats. They are citizens, the nation, voters and consumers.
For example, last year, we discussed in Korea what we should do about importing Japanese culture, we argued that it was not good to import the Japanese sense of value, or many other things incidental to culture. We concluded that the national government should regulate such import, which is our present stance, There are many problems, there are many things attached to Japanese culture which are not suitable to the Korean society. For example, Japanese game software has the indication of, "Ninna Japanese Government". In such a case should the Korean government regulate it? I argued that this kind of thing must not be regulated by the government through duties or customs regulations. It should be regulated by the network of citizens' groups or consumers, groups functionally when they enter the Korean society, It
