Asia’s economic and geopolitical rise in the last decade is powering a civilisational consciousness across the world earlier dominated by political and economic ideologies of the post-World War II period. Even Communist China, which had sworn to destroy its own civilisational consciousness during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960-70s, is now recalling and talking about its antiquitous civilisation of thousands of years not only with pride, but also as a guide for the future.

A neo-Confucian China is now being seen as emerging from the ashes of pure Communist ideology. This rising new civilisational consciousness is perceived to have the potential to cause a paradigm shift in the global order and relations. As rising civilisational consciousness of individual nations weakens Western universalism, it is forcing the diffusion of global power and, in turn, this diffusion of power is leading also to a rise in the civilisational consciousness of individual nations.