Asianism as Many Altogether: Cosmopolitanism and the Asian Political Imaginary

In this article, I seek to understand the pre-European diversity of Asia as a recoverable ideal for a new Asianism, one that takes cosmopolitanism, plurality, and the concrete presence of the Other seriously, as modes of ‘reimperializing’ Asia based on Asian traditions of moral and cultural imagination. This pre-European diversity, rooted in the relational, inter-communal, and unfolding identity of the human person, is a new way of seeing Asia as ‘one’—the one, dynamic self, unbounded by nationalist or ideological constraints, on which a re-formation of social and political arrangements can and must be predicated.