ABSTRACT
At around the end of the fi rst decade of the 21st Century, a large number of different theoretical frameworks and ideas are competing for scholarly attention to serve as theoretical backdrops to matters of education, especially Higher Education (HE), and intellectual exchange, in Asia-Europe Asia-Europe Relations. These analytical approaches often overlap and enrich one another. What follows should, therefore, not be seen as a ‘rigid’ categorization. It is meant, rather, to point to the most signifi cant intellectual markers that govern the area of Asia-EU cultural and academic co-operation at the present time. As far as the role of Human Rights in EU-Asia relations is concerned, the conceptual framework presented in its broad outlines in this chapter should be read in conjunction with Chapter 6, especially regarding the phenomena of ‘ideational diffusion’, social-constructivist thought in Asia-EU relations and ‘Human Rights education’. In addition to this, readers are reminded of some of the fundamental historical background of East-West knowledge-transfer referred to in Chapter 1 of this book. In his landmark 1961 essay, William W. Brickman has demonstrated conclusively the role of, for example, early Universities, travel writing, religion, philosophy, translation, libraries, Jesuit missionary enterprise and the later institutions of monasticism as intellectual Transmissionsriemen (‘drive-belts’, ‘conveyor belts’) for cultural exchange and learning, closely linking Asia and Europe (see Chapter 1; and Casson 2001).
