The Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA

"Strange Bedfellows: Samuel Huntington and the Advocates of Asian Values"

by

Mr. Janadas Devan
Leader Writer and Special Correspondent
The Straits Times

Discussants:

Mr. Jacob Heilbrunn
Senior Editor
New Republic

Mr. Susumu Awanohara
Independent Journalist

Wednesday, September 22, 1999
6:00 to 8:00 PM

at

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Choate Room, First Floor
1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC

For information on this event please contact Seminar Program
at 202 296-6695 or at seminar@spfusa.org

The "Asian Voices: Promoting Dialogue between the US and Asia"
Seminar Program is supported by a grant from
The Sasakawa Peace Foundation

About This Seminar

The forces of globalization--science, technology, markets, communication--are demolishing borders and integrating cultures to an astonishing degree. Why, then, is there a process of re-ethnicization and greater priority given to cultural identity in much of the world? Those who once spoke of modernizing their cultures now speak of Sinifying modernity and Hinduizing it or Islamizing it. In East Asia, some politicians have discovered "Asian Values", a system of beliefs and practices which they insist require distinctly different political and social organizations from those which prevail in the West. And in the West, Samuel Huntington, an American and thus a beneficiary of the most developed "globalized" economy in the world, has theorized that a "Clash of Civilization" is inevitable, and that the US should formulate its foreign and economic policy accordingly. This talk will address this question: given the real economic, technological and financial confluences of globalization, why is there now an insistence on cultural differences, differences so insistent that they may well result in clashes?

About the Panelists

Main Speaker

Mr. Janadas Devan is currently a leader writer and special correspondent for The Straits Times, Singapore's leading English-language newspaper. He received his education in Singapore, where he studied Economics, Statistics, and English Literature and Literary Theory in the United States at Cornell University. He has taught at various universities in Singapore and the United States, most recently at Brown University. His publications include various papers on culture and politics published in academic journals as well as articles in newspapers and magazines. He is presently working on a book, Model Nation: An Anatomy of a Rational State, a study of how the "founding" narratives of history in the post-colonial state shape the social and political contours of the state.

Discussants

Mr. Jacob Heilbrunn is Senior Editor at the New Republic. He was educated at Oberlin College and Georgetown University. He was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Berlin in 1994 and a Japan Society Fellow in Tokyo in 1998.

Bilingual, bicultural journalist and financial researcher, Mr. Susumu Awanohara is an independent journalist and an expert on US-Asia relations. He has more than twenty years of experience with the Far Eastern Economic Review and nearly 10 years in Washington with a wide network among government, think-tank and professional circles.

About the Seminar Program

The "Asian Voices: Promoting Dialogue between the US and Asia" Seminar Program seeks to provide a forum for Asian voices to be heard within the Washington community-voices on a wide range of regional and global topics. The Seminar Program, however, will not be restricted solely to Asia-Pacific issues, or US-Japan relations, but will focus on the broader global questions that confront both parts of the world.

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