In Japan, the Silk Road has been held up as an alternative form of globalization. Japan was, after all, on the terminus of the Silk Road and the nation experienced its greatest cosmopolitan flowering during the Nara period, when the Silk Road was in its heyday. In contrast to the modern "melting pot" of pluralistic societies we see today, people during Silk Road times are described as having interacted with each other from standpoints of their own unique city-cultures. I think it was UNESCO’s Eiji Hattori who really gave this Japanese idea form when he created his draft for UNESCO’s Silk Road Project, which saw a wonderful number of research projects and publications from 1988-1997 (22). With two doctorates (one from Kyoto University and the other from the Sorbonne), Hattori has an impressive academic background. And yet, rather than entering academia, he chose instead to join UNESCO at their Paris headquarters, where he served for 21 years as a director of the cultural events section—and the Silk Roads project really was his crowning glory.
Put forward as an alternative to the "Globalization as Americanization" model, his project positioned the “Silk Road” in opposition to something he called “Empire” (or “pax”); so that:
Pax/Empire versus Silk Road
Monopoly Two-Way Trade/International Relays
Monologue/Propaganda Dialogue
National Cities/International
Robbery Mutual Profit/Equal Partnership/
Co-Dependence
Hattori's main point is that during Silk Road times, dialogues between cultures were two-way. That is, it was not a power relationship dominated by one side talking/dictating/taking/imposing but rather held up a model for a more two-way dialogue based on trade; one in which trade was an international accomplishment achieved by people from many nations working for mutual benefits cooperatively; not done by one nation alone.
Hattori suggested that no one economic system or historical perspective reigned supreme above all the rest during the Tang dynasty. People interacted with each other from the framework of their own various local city-cultures. This is the famous cosmopolitanism of the Tang. When you consider that what was arguably the greatest of all empires of the time, the Tang actually built mosques and churches in their capital city to welcome the many traders who came from afar-- well, it cannot help but impress. A mosque already stood in “Canton” during the Prophet's lifetime. Flourishing and highly cosmopolitan cities connected the dots along these ancient trade routes, from Nara to Chang’an to Baghdad, Aleppo, and Constantinople.
This is a theme much held up in Japan. Two years ago, I was working on a translation of an interview with one of Japan's greatest living composers—who now sadly is deceased. Like Yo Yo Ma, Miki Minoru is best known for his work on Silk Road music. When asked why he held up the Silk Road as a symbol of mutual cooperation and peaceful coexistence, Miki had this to say:
The Silk Road was a uniquely peaceful trade route. Connecting Rome with Chang’an, it was a route that served to promote peaceful exchanges and mutual cooperation between Eastern and Western places. It is interesting that while in Asia the Silk Road holds great interest and dreams, in the west it seems to be mainly of interest to archaeologists. As a person who fundamentally rejects the current uninteresting state of affairs whereby as the world Westernizes we are seeing more and more of a mono-culture, what I can do in my own projects is to choose artists whose own sense of identity is not that of “international”
Japan, with its vibrant peace and ecology movements, has taken up these reflections of the Silk Road like perhaps no other people. Having lived the past two decades through its self-proclaimed “Silk Road boom,” I have been so impressed by both the approach of Silk Road history scholars (like those at Ryukoku University) as well as the surprisingly long term enthusiasm of the general public for what was a time of cosmopolitan civism. Obviously, no one is really talking about how things actually may have been during the heyday of the Silk Road; for indeed, we have also seen the Silk Road used as a slogan for aggressive multinational corporations wanting to get a piece of the energy pie in that part of that world as well. But, in Japan-- at least-- the Silk Road has been overwhelmingly taken up as a symbol of mutual cooperation and co-flourishing which is viewed ultimately as a symbol for anti-"globalization" and world peace.
Miki, in his interview said that while there will always be imbalances of power between different peoples over the stretch of time, when that imbalance of power tilts too far in one direction that it is this overwhelming dominance of one group over another that has shown itself to have tremendous power in generating the kind of hate that leads to violence. It was his belief that it is only through harmonious exchanges and collaborative efforts between people that genuine peace can be established. But how is this possible without stepping back and looking at things on a more local level?
This is not to say that universalism is categorically problematic, but rather it is a question of balance and degree. Hannah Arendt looked at universalism as being behind much of the political pathologies of her time and felt that being derived from abstract reasoning, which stands apart from the world, the universalist thinking aims to create blueprints for how we think the world “ought” to be; and that this becomes a political project that aims to manipulate how the world is to change it to how one thinks it should be. In that way, she urged people to be engaged with the world as it is—and it seems that in order to do that one must start with the local and the particular.
I am a great fan of the writing of William Dalrymple. In 2009, he had another great article in The Guardian about the future of travel writing. One paragraph in particular caught my attention:
"It's no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly travelled, and relied for information on policy documents and the reports of journalists sitting interviewing middle-class contacts in capital cities. A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute"
Reading this I thought that nothing much has changed since the last Administration either and that US policy remains in the hands of a cabal of monoglots and cultural provincials. As Eiji Hattori said in a 2004 UNESCO speech, “Civilizations never clash. Ignorance does clash”. Therefore we may say that true internationalism should be a kind of dialogue, whereby one is open to the world from the rootedness of one’s own culture. One approaches the rich sources of other traditions from one’s own worldview, but without any intention and effort to impose one’s cultural presumptions. In other words, a healthy respect for the particular keeps one grounded and respectful of other local diversities.
This is why I think it is so important to give cities a voice—to recognize them as gardens which bear the flowers and fruit of their own unique cultural sensibilities and values; so that even in the world’s largest and most complex urban metropolis, we find at its very roots a somehow transience, sudden transformations and unthinkable disaster; something that has flowered into the great social achievements of optimism and resilience that define the spirit of Tokyo .
From Paper given at Spirit of Cities Conference in 2012, Shanghai.