Thorsten Pattberg

“ To my knowledge, there is no equivalent of such spiritual – seemingly naïve - sense of unity in recent European history.
In contrast, Western societies, after a long history of assertiveness and expansion, so it seems, do not conquer anymore, they converge. While in the analytical-based West today it is inevitably the minuscule individual in multiculturalism (EU, USA, AUS, CDN, NZ) , in the integration-based East it is still the collective nation in numbers (China, Indian, but also Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, and the Middle East) . ”

“ If you put yourself into little things, after a hundred years it gets to you: secular Western societies therefore left it all to the individuals and their individual experiences to decide how to make sense of the world, and what to do with their minuscule lives. ”

“ If there is going to be a ‘world democracy’ today, with each world citizen having exactly one vote, the declining Europeans would have better united with the neighboring Muslim world or else simply become irrelevant - if not to say impotent - in international politics. Anger, awe, fear, and the strange feeling of intimidation are relative new experiences to European intellectuals, but now suggested by the facts. ”

“ Vietnam, with 120,000,000, could be as populous as France and Britain together. On a political level, the Communist Party of China has more members than Germany has population, the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCC) is already (2006) the largest regional grouping in the world (and without US presence [!] ) , not NATO. Jairam Ramesh, former secretary of the Congress party’s economic affairs department of India announced a simple truth: We [India] must examine our brains, if we are not capable to lead one billion people to become the world’s third largest economy! ”

“ Long-term vision and constancy, as we have seen, are intrinsic values of integration-based Eastern societies:
世上本没有路,走的人多了,便也成了路.
As more people are walking all the time, in the same spot, a path appears. ”

“ Some say it is the Northern hemisphere, others say it is the White man’s thing, still others claim it is the First World, the developed world, or just the ‘elite’. Surely, we can find a nobler, if not cynical definition. ”