Pankaj Mishra, Flickr/Palestine Festival of Literature 2008. Some rights reserved.William Eichler: You recently wrote in the Guardian, adopting a phrase used by two editors of the Economist, that the 'western model' is broken. Could you explain what you mean by the 'western model'?
Pankaj Mishra: It's shorthand for certain assumptions, certain expectations that elites in western Europe, and in the United States since the early twentieth century, have used to define the evolution of their powerful nation-states. They try to apply these so-called lessons from their own history to the rest of the world, including places that they themselves have dominated. I'm speaking here specifically of western Europe, of Britain and France, where a particular teleology, which intellectuals, thinkers and statesmen in these countries have observed in their own history, is then applied to other countries in other parts of the world. The basic assumption is that these societies can also progress, and arrive at western-style liberal capitalism and democracy, using the same techniques and going through the same stages that we have gone through.
It's very much a model that is dependent upon certain provincial historical generalisations, certain historical assumptions, that are applied to the rest of the world. These assumptions, though, are derived really from the history of a tiny part of the world: western Europe and the US. It has had many incarnations, as I said in the Guardian piece, from the Economist arguing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards about the importance of free trade to Henry Luce talking about the American century and then W.W. Rostow advocating modernization theory down to the Washington Consensus. Since the Cold War, there has been a renewed stress on, and an ideological certainty about, some of these notions that what worked well for a small part of the world can also work well for everyone else.
