Asian cultures never responded to the European encroachment passively, even though many Asian nationalists of earlier generations felt that that was exactly what their cultures had done.(4) While that sentiment is not absent today among Asia's ruling élite and young Asians charged with nationalist fervour, it is now pretty obvious that Asian civilisations, whatever else they may or may not have done, have certainly not been passive spectators of their own humiliation and subjugation. They coped with the West in diverse ways--sometimes aggressively resisting its intrusiveness, sometimes trying to neutralise it by giving it indigenous meanings, sometimes even incorporating the West as an insulated module within their traditional cultural selves.(5)
However, all Asian cultures have gradually found out during the last two hundred years that--unlike the European Christendom or the traditional West--the modern West finds it difficult to coexist with other cultures. It may have a well-developed language of coexistence and tolerance and well-honed tools for conversing with other civilisations. It may even have the cognitive riches to study, understand or decode the non-West. But, culturally, it has an exceeding poor capacity to live with strangers. It has to try to either overwhelm or proselytise them. Is this a trait derived from the urban-industrial vision and global capitalism which, not satiated even after winning over every major country in the world, have to penetrate the smallest of villages and the most private areas of our personal lives? [...]
