By Zheng Wang
Recent years have seen various Asian leaders use historical analogies to describe current events. This is dangerous.
July 25 marks the 120th anniversary of the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), or the War of Jiawu in Chinese. Three days later comes the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. With these anniversaries, a huge wave of historical comparisons are being thrown all over the place.
History has long played an important role in the contemporary affairs of the Asia-Pacific region. However, in recent years we have witnessed history being invoked much more frequently and explicitly by various actors. Do these historical analogies and “lessons from history” really provide us with useful guidance for current issues?
To answer this question, we need first to know why people rely on historical analogies. In his book Analogies at War, Yuen Foong Khong argues that leaders use historical analogies to perform specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to political decision making. A historical analogy signifies an inference based on the notion that if two or more events separated in time are similar in one respect, then they may also be similar in others. In other words, because event A resembles event B in having characteristic X, and knowing that A also has characteristic Y, it can be inferred that B also has characteristic Y; in logical shorthand, AX:BX::AY:BY. These historical analogies often form the basis of foreign policy and political propaganda.
According to Khong, humans have “limited computational capacities.” Consequently, human beings have to rely on some sort of simplifying mechanism to cope with and process the massive amount of information they encounter in their daily lives. Historical analogies serve as one such cognitive shortcut to help people make sense of complex issues. They help resolve conflicting information in ways that are consistent with the expectations of the analogy.
Read the full story at The Diplomat