Asian Values: the Argument and the Answer

In one line

The Asian values argument claims that Asian societies prioritise community over individual, order over liberty, duty over right, consensus over confrontation and economic development over political freedom, and each limb is answered by the framework's own texts, by the diversity of Asia itself, and by Asian dissent.

The five limbs

Community over individual. Asian societies are organised around family and community, and a framework built on the individual is alien to them.

Order over liberty. Social stability is the precondition of everything else, and rights that permit disorder are luxuries.

Duty over right. The moral vocabulary of the region is one of obligation to others rather than of entitlement against them.

Consensus over confrontation. Disputes are resolved by accommodation rather than by adversarial claim, so a rights framework built on claiming is culturally inapt.

And development first. A poor society must secure subsistence before political freedom, which is the sequencing argument [Human Rights and Development] answered.

State all five before answering any. An answer that attacks a caricature of the position earns less than one that reconstructs it fairly, and the argument was made by serious people in a specific political context: the rapid growth of several East and Southeast Asian economies in the 1980s and 1990s under governments that were not liberal democracies.

The answers

One: Asia is not one thing

The demographic and political answer, and the strongest. The region contains the largest democracy in the world, several other functioning democracies, one-party States, monarchies, military governments and theocratic elements, alongside Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Sikh, Jain, Shinto and secular traditions.

A claim about the values of a region containing more than half of humanity, in that variety, is not a claim that can be true.

And the argument was pressed principally by a small number of governments, not by the region generally, which is a fact about its authorship rather than an insult to it.

Two: the framework already contains duty and community

Article 29(1) of the Declaration: everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible, and [Drafting the Universal Declaration] records that delegates from several traditions pressed for it.

Article 2(2) of the Declaration on the Right to Development repeats the formula almost word for word.

Articles 23 and 10 protect the family as the natural and fundamental group unit of society.

Article 27 of the Covenant protects the culture of minorities.

And India's article 51A enumerates fundamental duties, which is the constitutional form of article 29(1).

So the individual-versus-community framing misdescribes the framework, which locates the person inside a community whose value it names.