ABSTRACT
The views represented by these statements were forcefully expressed by a number of prominent Asian politicians, but they were also put forward by some Asian scholars. They were not held by all politicians and all scholars in the region, to be sure: the opposite standpoint has also been put forcefully by many others, the debate being sufficiently ‘animated’ to occupy the front stage for a number of years. Yet, the notion that ‘Asian values’ were different from, possibly even superior to, ‘Western values’ was not put forward in the late decades of the twentieth century only.1 They were and continue to be the basis of a major debate which belongs to the more general question of the universality of culture, a debate which naturally concerns many other parts of the world besides East and Southeast Asia, as was pointed out in the previous chapter.
