Happy birthday!

Tuesday Thomas, Sudhanshu and I attended the partial birthday conference for Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and partial launch of the new Asian Dynamics Initiative. I already mentioned in a earlier post that we were going so I'll skip the overall agenda here. The conference was opened by Lykke Friis from University of Copenhagen and a substitute for Per Stig Møller, a guy from the Danish Foreign Ministry.

The real essence of the conference were the four key note speakers, three of them professors from United States and one from Oslo, but not native. Two of them were Indian and the two others American.

The first one talked about the subject of an Asian Culture. It is typically conceived that people from a named space share a culture which allows us to ignore difference of class, ethnicity and gender. This often leads to very large spaces that have severe difference such as Asia. That Europe are separated from Asia at Caucasus, Transcaucasia and Turkey is common understood but are borders really that fixed? Western Asian culture differs a lot from Eastern Asia and so on. What I got out of the lecture was that cultures are difficult to define and encapsulate and you have to work with a very dynamic understanding of cultures and their borders.

Next topic was much more concise. The speaker questioned China and its potential for peaceful rising and proclaimed them as a fragile superpower. Fragile because of their domestic challenges and their way of handling crises. The speaker was a former member of Bill Clinton's state department from 1997 to 2000 and raised various examples of China's fragile situation. Very interesting but in my opinion a protective pro-American attitude and single-sided. She didn't bring in her own country and mentioned at the end that her Chinese friends didn't perceive China as a Superpower at all.

My hypothesis while discussing with Thomas during the break was that all Superpowers are fragile. History also seems to prove this. Funny enough America constitutes themselves as a superpower but refuse their own fragility. Just look at their financial crisis now. Other "superpowers" such as Russia and India also have their challenges. So bottom line is that China of course has it challenges too, especially domestically. They have their own agenda which other nations and superpowers feels threaten by but so do other superpowers, if we really have to use that word. I won't go into a discussion about human and animal rights and so on, but simply state that superpowers are fragile and to cope with that they form their own agenda which others might not like and that can create tension in a global environment as we see with China today.

After the break, the third speaker funnily came with some of the same arguments that Thomas and I had discussed during the break. So we were not alone in our understanding obviously. He continued discussing if India would become a Superpower some day. From the beginning of India's history as an independent nation it has been regarded as an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy because of the extreme diversity in the country. But so far they have proven otherwise. It has been one of the fastest growing democracies and some expect India to be a rising power of the twenty first century but others questions that because of the extreme diversity.

The fourth and last lecture and speaker was a professor from MIT talking about ownership and entrepreneurship in regards to nationality/nationalism. I did not really agree with her understanding so won't spent time on describing it here.

It was fun to participate in an international conference and especially lecture two and three gave some interesting insight and considerations. Not necessarily in regards to our master thesis but in general.