ABSTRACT
The combination of the political circumstance of its dissolution with the economic circumstance of the rise of the whole East Asian region lends further force to the process of historical reconsideration. Early in the 1990s, the five-hundredth anniversary of the voyages of Columbus and the discovery of the New World was celebrated, marking the beginning of European hegemony in Asia, a period that, quite clearly, is over. The contemporary debate seeks a resolution to a separation from Asia that, in this view, is as ingrained as is the phenomenon of European world hegemony. From the 1970s, the pattern of economic growth and prosperity long evident in Japan spread throughout the constellation of east and southeast Asian countries, making the character of the historic shift more pronounced. In historic terms, the span of two generations saw the collapse of a 400-year-old system of European colonial dominance in Asia and the Pacific, followed by a brief period of exclusive US hegemony.
