Ran across an excerpt on NPR.org on the book “The New Asian Hemisphere” by Kishore Mahbubani that goes into how Asia has been rising economically in turns starting with Japan, then the Asian Tigers, and now China and India which has been dramatically reducing the number of people living in poverty.

Yet, Mahbubani notes that with the rise of Asia, the West is becoming more and more worried of instability and outside threats exactly from the West’s push for other nations to reach Western levels of modernity. Why the fear? Mahbubani believes that:

[The West] is keenly aware that if this trend continues, a great day of reckoning must come. As the spirit of democratization gathers strength and more and more human beings take charge of their own destinies, they will increasingly question the undemocratic world order they live in.

That undemocratic world? The post-World War II structure of the United Nations and the UN Security Council. We have already seen a restructure before and attempts to expand the Security Council in recent years, but to little success.

McCain’s idea of a union of democracies is more enticing to me personally than trying to restructure a post-World War II international order that so far refuses to adjust to new power statuses. Seeing nations that have violated human rights on the Human Rights Council even after the UN tried to adjust to today’s world a sad reality of how stuck in the past the UN is.

That said, a union of democracies does creates more problems by excluding other nations and removes a rather stable international system that has helped to dampen wars from spreading. More than likely, a new international system will not come about until either one of the two (non-disastrous) situations happen: a world filled completely with democracies (with a push for a single democratic union possibly like the EU) or space colonization (where people are no longer concerned about national identity due to the huge distances of space).

In any case, this will be a book worthwhile to buy and read for me.