Wessels/ISA2005/p. 7
the peoples and countries of the entire Pacific Basin as they engage in global politics.
Thus, it is a term of wider geographical scope than that which
Time
magazine
popularized some years ago (Aikman 1986), with an analytic focus on aspects of global
politics as I have explained above. This paper is also obviously limited in both length
and substance by the constraints of the format of this I.S.A presentation.
Just to give a hint of the various cultures under discussion, they range from
those found in the Pacific islands and the metropolises of Asia and the Americas, to
those of scientists and scholars, and those of people who engage in fishing and farming
and global business, as well as those among trendy cultural entrepreneurs and
practitioners of traditional arts. Religions include world-encircling Christianity, Islam,
Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as ethnically limited but still extensive Chinese
Taoism and Japanese Shinto, and many other traditional and contemporary groups.
Ethnic borders may largely coincide with political boundaries as in Japan, while they
fluidly cross those boundaries as in much of Southeast Asia, and blur in the case of
multicultural nation-states like Australia, Canada, and the United States.
In the 1980s, economic successes in a number of East Asian countries led to
speculation about the possible sources of their development. Confucianism has been
suggested as an equivalent civilizational or cultural force in East Asia to what Weber
had called the “Protestant ethic” in the West (Kim Il Gon, 1984). How satisfactory this
hypothesis is in explaining such a widespread and long-term process remains open to
question; but Confucianism, folk religions, and the other religions discussed above have
been flourishing as the region has made dramatic strides in development (Berger and
Hsiao, 1988). The vital cultural drive and ethical roots in China, Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore have been powerful forces for a region that has
experienced unprecedented development and integration into the global economy.
Confucian, Buddhist, and Christian regeneration in these countries also benefits from
a regional network of more intense contacts that characterizes globalism more
generally.
On the other side of the Pacific, Latin American countries have known religious
change since the 1960s, but primarily in the Christian traditions of the region. In the
Convention