“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” is among Rudyard Kipling’s most quoted lines. Less remembered is the reversal two lines later: “there is neither East nor West” when equals meet. Civilisations need not imitate one another or live in sealed compartments. They can borrow selectively and build institutions suited to their histories.
Syed Sardar Ali has done public debate a service in his recent article in Dawn. He rightly insists that stabilisation cannot substitute for transformation. Pakistan’s low productivity, narrow industrial base and dependence on debt, imports and remittances demand more than incremental repair. One parts company with the route he appears to propose: a society remade from above and political differences subordinated until prosperity arrives. Pakistan’s experience warns against repetition.
Western industrialisation raised productivity and, over time, life expectancy. Describing its ascent simply as humanity’s ‘great escape’, however, leaves half the balance sheet blank. Kenneth Pomeranz identified accessible coal and Europe’s access to New World resources as critical advantages.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson found that Atlantic trade and colonialism accounted for much of Western Europe’s rise between 1500 and 1850. Sven Beckert’s history of cotton joins machinery and wage labour to imperial expansion and slavery. A route built partly on empire, cheap carbon and costs imposed on other peoples cannot serve as a universal manual.
The West of 2026 is also not the West of 1914. According to the International Monetary Fund’s April 2026 data, advanced economies now account for about 39 percent of world output at purchasing-power parity, against 61 percent for emerging and developing economies. This is relative decline, not collapse: the West retains formidable capital, research and institutions.
It nevertheless exposes the error of treating its history as humanity’s final destination. Financialisation, weakened labour and ecological stress have made the old mass-consumption model brittle. Pakistan should learn from Western science, constitutionalism and social protection without importing its hierarchies and debt dependence.
Sardar Ali’s principal examples are actually Eastern, but they do not establish a single authoritarian path. Japan had been industrialising since the Meiji Restoration. A World Bank study attributes its postwar success partly to capabilities accumulated over the preceding 80 years; labour rights and land reform broadened growth.
South Korea combined land redistribution and education with export discipline. It also received United States aid averaging 8.1 percent of gross domestic product and financing 69 percent of imports during 1953-62.
China distributed land, then extinguished private holdings through communes. The World Bank’s account records the resulting collapse in incentives and famine; the rural take-off followed decollectivisation and the household responsibility system after 1978.
Political repression accompanied these histories, but accompaniment is not causation. Their common economic threads were productive-asset redistribution, learning, capable administration, exports and performance demands on supported firms.
A major study covering 175 countries found that democratisation raises gross domestic product per person by about 20 percent in the long run through investment, schooling, health and reform. Democracy can be badly governed and some autocracies can grow. The evidence gives no warrant for treating silenced citizens as a development input. It removes correction when officials or favoured conglomerates fail.
The claim that Pakistan’s early gains were simply lost from the 1970s is difficult to sustain. The celebrated model had produced its own crisis earlier. Mahbub ul Haq later recorded that, despite respectable growth in the 1960s, unemployment increased, industrial real wages fell by one-third and the per capita income gap between East and West Pakistan nearly doubled.
His 22-families disclosure exposed official concentration of wealth. Economic disparity and political exclusion helped produce the rupture of 1971. This was not sound modernisation later interrupted; its design carried the seeds of failure.
Near-double-digit growth for decades is not an economic threshold for a better life. With population having grown at 2.55 percent annually between the last two censuses, sustained real growth of 7 percent would yield roughly 4.3pc per person and double average income in about 16 years.
The harder questions are who receives it, whether real wages rise and whether dignified work is created without exhausting land and water. Mahbub ul Haq’s human-development approach, now carried by the United Nations Development Programme, treats income as a means to enlarge capabilities and freedom, not the final measure of progress.
Pakistan certainly needs industry. The industrialisation of this century cannot be a museum copy of the 1960s factory state. Automation, climate limits and trade in services have altered the route. The World Bank now describes East Asia’s model as requiring services, innovation, advanced skills, inclusion, transparency and citizen voice.
Pakistan should link agro-industry and competitive manufacturing with tradable services, renewable energy and research. Credit, protection and public contracts must be time-bound and tied to disclosed export, productivity and employment targets. Otherwise, the ‘developmental state’ becomes a subsidy state for favoured families.
The transformation Pakistan needs is rooted in its own constitutional compact. The Constitution commands the elimination of exploitation, equality, social and economic justice, and elected local government. These promises require universal education and health, land reform, taxation of unearned rents and power transferred to accountable municipalities under Article 140A of the Constitution. An independent judiciary, free press and open budgets are safeguards against capture of industrial policy by the interests it must discipline.
Modernity need not mean Westernisation. The sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt called its diverse historical forms multiple modernities. Pakistan can shape its own, but ‘our way’ cannot become a shelter for inherited privilege, patriarchy or unaccountable power. Science has no compass direction, and justice is not the monopoly of any civilisation.
Sardar Ali is right that transformation must be structural. The respectful disagreement concerns who transforms whom. Modernisation imposed by an unaccountable state turns citizens into material for a plan. Democratic development makes them its authors.
At a time when Western dominance is receding and East Asia is revising its old model, arriving late at somebody else’s past would not be transformation. Pakistan needs growth anchored in constitutional freedom, equitable opportunity and productive capability.