EURASIA: THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS
Homo sapiens first ventured into Eurasia from Africa over 75,000 years ago. Humans then spread
out gradually far and wide over the land mass - so successfully that their traces are to be found
from tens of thousands of years ago both to the far west and to the far east, in Europe, in South
Asia and in China. They survived there when other human relatives - notably the Neanderthals with
whom they overlapped (and interbred) for at least twenty thousand years - went extinct.
Humans have done well in Eurasia. From early on, they made their presence felt. They hunted the
mammoths and may have contributed to their extinction. From the ice ages onwards, they left their
their stencilled handprints and their figurative and abstract art on the walls of caves from one end
of the landmass to the other - in places as far apart as France and Indonesia. They built
monuments, whose purposes we can in some cases only guess at, and which have dotted the
landmass for at least the last six thousand years. They learnt how to produce workable metal. They
domesticated animals - dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, poultry, and the all important horses. They
domesticated wheat and rice. They moved gradually from hunting to pasturing their flocks, to
growing their crops, and to founding cities. Small hunting groups evolved into nomadic pastoralists,
into settled farmers and into urban trading societies. All these ways of existence overlapped, even
into modern times.
By the turn of the common era, Eurasia - which represented 36(41)% of the world's landmass was home to a substantial majority of all the world's human beings. No one had travelled from one
end of the landmass to the other. But many of them knew at least something about other Eurasian
societies they never saw. The Romans and the Chinese knew of each other's existence - and the
insatiable Roman appetite for silk was a major impetus for an emerging east-west trade over very
long distances - a trade which was named for the silk but which also came to include precious
gems, copper, spices, chemicals, glass, saddles, horses - and weapons.
Closer encounters were all too often violent: witness above all the centuries of wars between
Greeks and Persians, both before and well into the Christian Era (a contest which in a sense
mutated later on into the great struggle between Christendom and Islam). It is one of the oldest
cultural fault lines in all of human history. The epic stories - told to us mainly from the Greek side,
from Homer, Aeschylus and Herodotus onwards - are however only part of a broader pattern
recurring throughout Eurasia. One clan, or tribe, or nation, would move or expand, at the expense
of less energetic, less well endowed, less well organised neighbours. Over the millennia, empires
and civilisations have waxed and waned, most leaving traces visible only to archaeologists and
philologists - but with a few leaving deep imprints even on modern cultures, as we shall see.
Some reached degrees of sophistication that are extraordinary given their antiquity: thus, for
example, the Harappans left their remarkable city outlines in the Indus Valley and treasures
including an exquisite bronze statuette of a dancing girl from four thousand years ago - but an
indecipherable script and tantalisingly little evidence of how they developed and why they went into
decline. Over the centuries, others - some nomadic, some settled - came and went, rose and
declined, were decimated or just absorbed by the next group whose star was rising. The Scythians
in the area north of the Black Sea; the Kushans to the west of Tibet; various Indian kingdoms; the
Huns; the Alans; the Khwaresmians; the Kharakhanids; the Ghaznavids; the Seljuk Turks; the
Bulgars; the Vikings; the Xiongnu; the Xixia; the Vikings. It can all seem like a continuous swirl.
Cities and states sometimes lived and let live, and sometimes went to war. Nomads sometimes
traded with and sometimes raided the settled communities: they were an age old scourge of China,
Iran, Russia and Europe. But above all there were the Mongols, whose incredible and terrifying
explosion across the landmass brought them nearer than anyone else before (or since) to ruling
Eurasia from sea to shining sea.
For much of history, all this turmoil had very little to do with ideas. Expansionary powers expanded
because they were good at it, because they had leaders with vaulting ambition, because economic
pressures pushed them and/or because there was wealth to be had - the Greeks under Alexander,
for example, as well as the Mongols - and perhaps also because of a Nietzschean will to power or
a Darwinian sense that they had to (this was surely the main impetus behind the growth of
Republican Rome through its existential struggle with Carthage). There is something elemental
about all this: the drive to feed and reproduce, to dominate territory and to control the group is after
all widespread in the animal kingdom too.
The first empire with any sort of idea or programme underlying its expansion was arguably Persia.
The new idea that conquest could be a civilising duty - or at least that it would confer civilising
benefits on the conquered - might be said to be the legacy of Cyrus and Darius (the former being
famously accoladed as the Lord's anointed by a tiny people with their own rather special sense of
calling). At its height, the Persian empire was at least three times larger than present day Iran; and
its rulers described themselves as Kings of kings, were followers of the world's oldest theism and
constructed the world's first bureaucracy and planned communications system to run their empire.
Others would follow. Ashoka took his Indian Buddhist philosophy of just rule deep into Central Asia.
The apogee of the Roman idea came, ironically, after the death of republicanism: it was surely the
point when the Emperor Caracalla granted full Roman citizenship to all free men of the empire in
AD 212 (this Roman idea is effectively a harbinger of what became the concept of Christendom
and provided the potential basis for a European identity). Then came Islam - the most spectacular
explosion created by a new idea in all of history, not only up to that point but for over a thousand
years thereafter (until a very different explosion at one end of the Eurasian landmass in 1789 - of
which more later). Islam reached the Pyrenees and the gates of China within its first century; its
control and transformation of the lands central to Eurasian communications ensured the
emergence of the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan and creative culture the world had yet known.
The cross fertilisation of ideas - Chinese, Indian, European, Persian - that took place under this
Islamic aegis made it one of the greatest times for the human spirit in all history. Then there is
China itself: though not the world's oldest continuous civilisation, China is certainly the world's
oldest continuous identity, founded on the bedrock of a holistic cosmological and terrestrial view
which saw its emperor as having the mandate to rule all under heaven. Lastly, when Europe was in
the ascendant, Charles V ruled over domains which covered much of Europe as well as huge
swathes of a new world and stretched all the way round to Manila. His motto was 'plus ultra'. His
faith and commitment to his role as Holy Roman Emperor was deep and personal.
But in all these cases, what was potentially a universalising self-understanding ran out of steam,
either because they ran into adversaries who brought them to a halt or just because sheer
extension became unmanageable. Even the fearsome Mongols reached a high water mark: they
were stopped in the end from totally overwhelming Islam by the Egyptian Mamluks at Ain Jalut in
1260; they turned back from central Europe, daunted perhaps by the unfamiliar and uncongenial
forests that blocked their progress further westward; and a 'divine wind' protected Japan from
Kublai Khan's invasion force in 1281.
But not just the Mongols. Others too found their limits, tested them and went no further. Alexander
turned back at the Indus. Ashoka's domain didn't long survive him. Islam found its high water
marks to the west and to the east within three decades of each other, at Poitiers and at Talas.
China sought to extend its tributary relationships around the Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth
century, before retreating to the mainland. And Charles V retired to his monastery, exhausted by
the burden of his mission.
Since then, others have sought dominant positions in various regions of Eurasia - notably the
Turks, who built an empire on the ruins of Byzantium; the British, whose trade drew them into
empire in India; the Russians, who moved into Siberia and into the vacuum left by the Mongols in
the centre, and then into the eastern European vacuum created by the collapse of Austria and the
defeat of Nazi Germany; the Japanese, who emerged from more than two centuries of isolation to
erupt into Eastern Asia just at the time when the Qing dynasty was losing the Mandate of Heaven;
and lastly the Americans - the first non-Eurasian power to play a role (and a decisive one) in the
landmass, at both ends of it, in the wake of the Second World War.
Over the millennia since Homo sapiens first came there, the human spirit in Eurasia has developed
immeasurably. All the great cultures of the world originate from there. Connections have been
established and broadened, knowledge of our context and of each other has deepened, life
experience everywhere has become enormously more complex and more sophisticated. Apart
from a small number of epic journeys by mediaeval travellers - Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta
- few saw much of the landmass before modern times. Now we can cross it in fifteen hours.
Railway maps of Eurasia over the last hundred years and as projected over the next few decades
show extraordinarily rapid proliferation. China's inelegantly and inaccurately named One Belt One
Road strategy will see massive amounts of capital being mobilised for investment in new
infrastructure which will further enhance the connectivity of the whole land mass.
Yet what has emerged is not a community of the species or any kind of single or shared polity.
Rather, all the jostling has produced - on a continent-wide scale - a balance amongst a handful of
dominant powers, each with its own identity rooted in its own history and self-understanding. By
the dawn of the new millennium it was becoming clear which these dominant powers were: China
and India, the two behemoths; Russia, straddling both Asia and Europe, and ill at ease with all its
neighbours; Iran, with its central position geographically but its problematic relationships within the
Islamic world as well as with the West; Turkey, would-be European but also would-be standard
bearer for a pan-Turkic consciousness; Europe, prosperous but struggling to achieve cohesion and
unsure of what it stands for; and Japan, with its uniquely corporate social psychology, more
impenetrably different than any other major society on earth. In some of these cases their selfunderstanding includes at least the vestiges of a universalising purpose. In all cases it has a
regional centre of gravity and presumes at least a regional sphere of influence.
In other words, growing connectivity and interaction have not - or at least not yet - produced a
common identity. At the dawn of the new millennium, this looks increasingly like what became
known in the context of European history as the Westphalian order. Cultures differ, identities differ,
governance systems, even values can differ: but in the absence of any universal idea backed by a
power able to compel it on peoples, the default option of human affairs is 'cujus regio, ejus religio'.
Europe arrived at this position in 1648 by exhaustion. Eurasia in the twenty first century seems to
be arriving at it through mutual recognition of realities (even if this is still contested on one basis by
parts of the Islamic world and on another by the post Enlightenment Western establishment - both
points we shall return to).
But such a balance is not stable. Henry Kissinger has noted that a Westphalian system has no
direction of travel. It depends on what he calls legitimacy - which boils down to mutual trust and
acceptance of the status quo. It also depends on balance - that is, on there being no member of
the dominant group of powers which is expansionist and too powerful to be constrained effectively
by the others. The European system was always fragile and was repeatedly threatened during the
eighteenth century, before being blown apart by the explosion, like a virus in an organism, of a new
idea - the French Revolution. At a stroke, this destroyed the old basis of trust and the old balance.
The resulting convulsions brought the Russians onto the European stage for the first time, before a
new balance was established at the Congress of Vienna - only to be thrown into play again by the
unification of Germany.
But it was not only the balance of the European system that was shaken in the nineteenth century
and then destroyed in the twentieth. It had lost the old basis of its legitimacy too - and this was the
root cause of the huge tragedy which unfolded. Legitimacy in 1648 depended on economic
exhaustion but also on a growing weariness with the old narratives of religious dogmatics. But as
noted, this was not a direction of travel. The newly emerging idea of the time was one which did
have a direction - or rather several. This was the European enlightenment - unique in Eurasia and
destined to be a challenge to every Eurasian culture and polity. In the context of the new Europe
struggling to be born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it meant that legitimacy could not at least, not for long - be that of an interconnected courtly elite of the kind who put together the
Metternichian settlement. 1848 may have been a year of failed revolutions - but the voice of the
demos was beginning to be heard, and intellectual seeds sown even before the elemental violence
of the French Revolution began to blossom into beliefs and identities which would eventually
destroy such a socially limited legitimacy. New beasts were slouching to Bethlehem.
All this is a reminder that there is nothing inherently stable about today's Westphalian Eurasia. The
European settlement was brought down in the first decades of the twentieth century by ethnic and
cultural nationalism (everywhere), borderless ideas (notably, communism) and a rogue state
(Serbia). At that stage, the rest of Eurasia was largely a playground in which European rivalries
were fought out. Now Asia is resurgent, the Middle East is in turmoil, whilst Europe has exhausted
its passions and is preoccupied with its internal cohesion and its identity. So now it is different: the
new stage is a Eurasian one. But all the elements which made for the European tragedy are still
there, visible on that Eurasian stage. There is at least one rogue state - possibly two or three - with
nuclear pretensions. Borderless ideas thrive like germs in the atmosphere; not all the same ones,
but just as destabilising. And cultural nationalism is taking on a new lease of life in all the major
Eurasian powers.
All these three points are worth dwelling on.
Rogue states are not new (Serbia played this part in pre-First World War Europe). They matter
because their rulers typically pay little attention to the welfare or the human rights of their
inhabitants. They matter to others when they believe they can act internationally with impunity either because they deny legitimacy to the international order and/or because they believe they
have a protector in one of the major powers. If they have nuclear pretensions, they are potentially
very dangerous. North Korea fits this bill perfectly. The risk of nuclearisation of the Korean
peninsula, of consequential Japanese nuclearisation, and of wider confrontation involving some or
all of China, Japan, Russia and America - is non-negligible. The parallels with the pre-First World
War Balkans are uncanny and uncomfortable.
Second, a Westphalian balance will always find it difficult to cope with borderless ideas. The last
century has known three powerful - and therefore borderless - ideas. All three have sought to give
direction and impetus to human spiritual, cultural, social and economic development. All three have
had a deep impact contemporary Eurasian affairs. One is now a spent force, but the other two are
not.
Communism with its Marxist/Leninist intellectual apparatus was the forced life experience of over a
third of the entire Eurasian population. Its legacy is profound: Russia, China, Central Asia and East
Europe will never be the same again. Although there is barely a single true-believing communist
anywhere, the Communist Party in China still claims the mandate of heaven. But that mandate no
longer has the universalising thrust either of the ancient imperial claim to rule over all under
heaven or of the communist vision of a new order for the workers of the world. That mandate of the
Chinese Communist Party is in fact evidence of something else, to which we will return.
The other two borderless ideas which are in the Eurasian atmosphere are very different. Islamism
is one. It has impacted all the major Eurasian cultures except one (Japan). Theocratic and
conservative, both socially and intellectually, it dreams of a new caliphate - though hardly of life
under the actual caliphates of Damascus, Baghdad and Cordoba, which saw the efflorescence of
the greatest glories of Islam - when its learning and sophistication were the wonder of the world.
But the struggle for the soul of Islam is real. This is sometimes portrayed as if the struggles of the
European Renaissance and Reformations were being transposed to a new era and onto a new
world stage. This precedent is of limited value, however - except in one respect, perhaps, in that it
reminds us that such transitions within a religious culture can be violent and long drawn out.
And the other borderless idea? It is, of course, the liberal democratic order which found its most
dedicated and powerful protagonist in the US, and which triumphed in the end in Europe, as well
as taking root in several other Eurasian powers (and increasingly in Africa and Latin America). But
this liberal democratic order has troubles of its own. In the immediate aftermath of 1989, it came to
be understood that it was not only a political order but was closely dovetailed with a liberal
approach to economic development and management - and that it would take the world by storm in
the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet empire. This was, notoriously, to be the end of history.
This confidence was badly shaken by the financial and economic crisis in the first decade of this
century. Moreover, it has been challenged at the philosophical level - especially by Asians, and on
several different grounds. For one thing, it had showed itself to be based on a fundamental fallacy that markets were essentially self-regulating. Generally throughout the world, many felt a revulsion
at the inequality which seemed to be its inevitable concomitant, and bridled at the materialist
implication that the value of everything is reflected in its price. For another thing, the evidence was
that liberal economics and pluralism did not automatically lead to democratic politics: China, in
particular, gave the lie to this easy implication. And more profoundly, the transactional individualism
which lay at its heart sat uncomfortably with a more holistic Asian (especially East Asian)
understanding of the roles and obligations of human beings.
This points to an uncomfortable possibility: that there may be cultural differences deep enough to
put in question whether there are universal ideas or values at all. And this in turn reminds us of
something else: the cultural nationalism that is indeed sweeping across Eurasia in our time.
China's Communist Party is in fact a motherland party, and no one can mistake the assertive
patriotism on the streets and in the social media of modern China. Iran never forgets its glorious
past; whether it is the legacy of Darius or of Shah Abbas, that past is alive in the present - this nonArabic speaking Shiite citadel was never just another Muslim country, either before or after 1979.
Russia's Putin is consciously playing the role of czar and seeking to base the modern Russian
identity on older but still recognisable foundations laid by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great
(and Stalin?). Meanwhile, Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India - for all their obvious differences are embarked on strikingly similar projects. They both aim to dismantle the secularising principles
on which their states were founded. Erdogan wants to take Turkey back to its Islamic and Ottoman
roots: Modi wants India to celebrate its ancient Hindu identity. The one is taking on Kemal Ataturk:
the other is taking on Jawarlahal Nehru. Finally, and not least - in view of its economic weight and
technological sophistication - Japan is stirring: for the Abe government, Abenomics has always
been a means to the professed end of regaining full blown sovereignty - which means, in particular,
repealing Article 9 of its postwar constitution. And events in the Korean Peninsula may just be the
trigger. Japan is a special case: if China is the oldest identity in the world, then Japan is the most
self-contained. But for seventy years it has played the role of teenager under parental control: and
this chafes, more than others recognise.
And what of Europe? Europe is rare amongst Eurasian cultures in nurturing universalising claims.
It no longer sees itself in imperial mode, of course. It has never fully recovered from the disasters it
inflicted on itself; it is older, chastened and determined to learn the lessons of its own terrible past.
The last thing it wants to do is to slide back into the nationalist nightmare. But it is profoundly
unsettled about its identity: does it have a shared identity at all? If so, is it based on principles
worked through painstakingly from the eighteenth century onwards: a commitment to rationalism,
democracy, individual rights and responsibilities, the rule of law, social compassion, and so forth?
And if so, then are those principles not universal? But those principles are in fact subject to
increasing challenge - not just from Asian voices, but even from within Europe itself: populists raise
the spectre of mass Muslim immigration from Europe's chaotic hinterland and call for protection of
Europe's identity; and even more cerebral critics raise the question whether Europe can ever be
true to its identity if it consistently refuses to recognise its past as Christendom and if it insists on
deifying the Enlightenment. As a result, it is perhaps not surprising that Europe seems to lack
either confidence or courage in its convictions; and it certainly lacks the cohesion to promote its
worldview effectively and energetically.
All of which points to a stasis which could last a long time amongst the increasingly connected - yet
perhaps also increasingly divergent - identities of Eurasia. And if this were all there is to be said
about the next hundred years, it would not augur well. As noted, the Westphalian parallel is not a
reassuring one. What might still be hoped for - and worked for - would be painstaking consensus
on matters of shared interest - on the environment and climate change, on scarce natural
resources, on international terrorism, on nuclear non-proliferation, and so forth. And these are not
trivial gains, of course. But this would nevertheless suggest that at least for the foreseeable future for the next century, let's say - we would have reached some limit to the human spiritual journey.
But in fact, I want to argue, there will be no enduring Westphalian stasis. There is in fact a direction
of travel, even if the journey ahead is long, just as the journey so far has been. There will be
roadblocks and wrong turnings, just as there have always been. But the direction cannot be
reversed, and it will not be possible to settle where we are. The reason this is true is something
the Europeans do seem to have stumbled on, perhaps alone amongst the Eurasian cultures.
The individual has been important in perhaps all human cultures. We have little idea of the selfawareness of individuals in the communities who painted the walls of Eurasian caves forty
millennia ago. And for most of history, the vast majority of humans have left no record of their
feelings. But human beings have never seen themselves just as soldier ants. Even in the most
structured hierarchies, where slaves had no rights and women had few, humans have always been
individual selves. They have had names, they have places in the order of things, they know about
their mortality - and indeed through most of history humans have prepared for the afterlife.
As a result, the metaphysics of all Eurasian cultures have explored the place of the human soul or
spirit in the scheme of things. There are two major dimensions of difference: first, and perhaps
most fundamentally, between those metaphysics (largely Indian in origin) which presume
transmigration of the soul and those which do not (including Confucianism, all the Abrahamic faiths
and indeed all mainstream modern European thought); and secondly, between those which see the
human soul as a self with a degree of autonomy - as an initiating ego - and those (most
prominently Buddhism) which see consciousness as reducible to a bundle of sense impressions,
such that the self is basically illusory. But for all the differences, the metaphysical interest in the
human soul has been pervasive.
Yet metaphysical musing about the soul is not the same as the exploration of the actual living self.
Art has always explored humanity, of course - in all its life, its loves, its losses, its hurts, its
transience. The creativity this has called forth is to be found all through Eurasian culture and down
the ages from very early times. There are many differences in specific contexts and perspective, of
course (indeed, perspective itself differs even in representational art - as between Chinese and
European art, for example). But some of the greatest achievements of Eurasian creativity have a
strange universality and timelessness about them. A Tang Dynasty poet writing about his grief at
the grave of his three year old daughter - or the Lady Murasaki writing her closely observed
narrative of the lives and loves of the Heian court in the Tale of Genji - or Cao Xueqin's equally
poignant Dream of Red Mansions from a Qing dynasty Chinese context - or Hafez and his
effervescent love of life and living; or Rabindranath Tagore's moving tragedy of a girl who absorbs,
and is then destroyed by, an identity given to her by others (which Satyajit Ray made into one of
his greatest films, Devi); or Austen, Fontane or Chekhov...All of these deal with human experience
in a way that reminds us perhaps of what we all share because we are all descended from those
same human ancestors of forty thousand years ago. And I could of course extend this list a long
way,
But what has been unusual about European thought is its extensive exploration, not just of the
metaphysics of the soul, but of the experience of the self. Beginning with Augustine, a thread is
woven - part analytical, but part experiential - and indeed very personal in some cases - by such
widely different figures as Luther, Locke, Kant, the great Romantics, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger
and Foucault. The result has been an increasingly nuanced understanding of the self as part
conscious and part subconscious, dependent on memory, on language, on context - as well as on
an inalienable core of mysterious autonomy.
(Some modern thought has sought to dissolve this last element through a sort of
neurophysiological reductionism - thus echoing distantly the Buddhist path of renunciation. But this
is no more convincing in a postmodernist context than it is consistent with actual Buddhist
experience in all its many Indic, Chinese and Japanese manifestations. Few believe - or at least,
few live as if they believed - that such a centre-less self could be an adequate account of human
experience, even if purist Buddhist theory sets it as an objective. But not surprisingly, the most
sophisticated intellectual counterpoint to this mainstream understanding of the self was that of the
strongly Buddhist influenced Japanese Kyoto School - whose main protagonists sought to
understand being by means of the radical denial of the self, who were explicitly interested in the
'empty and free' mysticism of Meister Ekhard or the 'free spirit' of Nietzsche and who saw
themselves as in direct dialogue with Heidegger.)
This European journey into the self is historically distinctive. Confucian culture - the bedrock of
Chinese philosophy - is pragmatically uninterested in the phenomenology of the self. It is greatly
interested in setting the individual in the wider family, social and cosmic context; so it has much to
say about the purposes and obligations of life in the different roles humans find themselves born
into - but not much about the mystery of being as such. In European terms, it is much more akin to
Aristotle than to Plato (indeed the parallels between Confucius and Aristotle on the nature and
purpose of human life are striking). Indian philosophy is, by contrast, profoundly metaphysical, and
oscillates between a fascination with the limitless variety of being and a search for the one-ness
that infuses all being. This generates endless discussion about the nature of the soul; but at neither
pole is the actual experience of the individual self a central interest. Islamic thought in its medieval
heyday borrowed strongly from both Plato and Aristotle (a synthesis which was famously then
influential in medieval Christian thought); it was interested in the theological standing of the soul for which Plato was more helpful than Aristotle - and in the roles and obligations of life (which it
saw as usefully underpinned by the teleology of Aristotle). But it was rather less interested in the
experience of the conscious self as such.
What were the origins of this European fascination with the self? The answer lies probably in its
Christian heritage, especially in the enormous influence of Augustine - but to explore this fully
would take us too far for the present purpose. The question for now is: why is this relevant to the
future of Eurasia? For two reasons. First, a phenomenology which can never avoid the inalienable
sovereignty of the self at its core (however it has tried, especially in recent times) has obvious
implications for ethics and politics - as, for example, both Locke and Kant were perfectly aware. It
is what lies at the root of the borderless idea of liberal democracy we discussed earlier and which
was encapsulated in the great watchword of the American Founding Fathers: life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. And this is in turn a reminder that despite all the doubts about - and
philosophical challenges to - the liberal democratic consensus during the last ten years or so, we
are dealing with a view of human identity which was not just the invention of Rousseau or Adam
Smith, but which is deeply rooted in the nature of the self.
But secondly, and much more fundamentally, the whole thrust of that exploration of the self which
the Europeans pioneered is precisely that it is a (continuing) journey of discovery, both individually
and collectively. And it is a journey without return, because what we have learnt cannot be
unlearned. The individual cannot - leaving aside the pathology of dementia - become less selfaware (even if there can be plenty of resistance to becoming more self-aware). The journey can be
painful; but as long as we keep on going, it is always fruitful. Collectively, we are on a journey too.
We recognise much more about the complexity of the self - and therefore of our identities - than
ever before. We understand more clearly now that our experience of self is contextually historically and culturally - influenced; and we understand the role of the subconscious in our
conscious decisions and behaviour. But we also know that there is an irreducible, inalienable
centre which is just human, individual and autonomous.
Moreover, the journey of growing self-knowledge - of growing knowledge about the self - is one
which not only enables the individual to flourish but will necessarily mean that whole cultures will
be taken on this journey and will change. And the essentials for spiritually healthy growth on this
journey are true not just for individuals, but for societies, for cultures, for nations - for any form of
shared human identity, in fact. And we know what they are: coming to terms with our pasts; taking
responsibility for what we are and do; looking for the human in the other; and always looking to
learn. All this is essential to grow as individuals - and as cultures too. In no case is the journey
over: in no case have we arrived. In many cases, the state - or the demos - may seek to control or
impede the journey. And in fact, such controlling or blocking behaviour is widespread, as we know
all too well. But resistance - even as determined as that of North Korea for the last six decades will not in the end succeed. Yet the fate of 23 million people is an extreme reminder of a more
general truth: that the journey of exploration of the self is not finished yet - neither for each one of
us, nor for each wider identity we are part of, nor for humanity as a whole. It is this which makes
me say there is a direction of travel over the next century in the Eurasia which is home to all the
world's great cultures. This is not Westphalia - not necessarily, at least. Not in the end.