[einhverfr]

I am an American expat who just moved from Germany to Indonesia about six months ago. One thing I see is that the comments he makes about China echo my views of the West. Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression (though in the US, we outsource this to the private sector so that we can actively argue that it doesn't exist). What is driving a lot of this in the West is the effort to sever economic ties with both Russia and China. I can imagine that this provokes a similar though opposite-facing response in countries like Russia and China, as if Newton's Third Law applies to geopolitics as well. My brother lives in Beijing, though.

What I see in Southeast Asia, though, is quite different. While there is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of global geopolitics, and while this also has a strong effort at finding a direction towards economic development on their own terms. Indonesia is becoming increasingly assertive in this regard, for example banning export of nickel ore (and ending up in a legal fight with the EU over that), and planning to do the same for bauxite soon as well. These bans are designed to ensure that those who want to exploit the nation's natural resources have to contribute directly to its economic development on Indonesian and not WTO, US, or EU terms.

Indonesian approaches to social management and rule of law are still quite foreign to me but these (even more than in the US) are very decentralized. A majority of the population still works independently or for small family businesses though the largest employer is the government. I still struggle with the disconnect between rules and laws. But the optimism here, in part born by the hope that the legacy of colonialism may finally be drawing to a close, is contagious.

I think sometimes leaving the great powers can be liberating.

[throwaway2037]

Moving from Germany to Indonesia is a wild move! Did you move to Bali or somewhere else?

"the West": This term is meaningless to me. Does this include Africa, South America, AUS/NS, Middle East?

"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.

[einhverfr]

I am in Jakarta. was thinking of moving to Bali but that isn't practical.

I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say

'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'

Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.

That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.

I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.

[raspberry1337]

"I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples."

You would get fired in Sweden if you spoke against mass immigration just 15 years ago. The social democrats still ban people who have romantic relationships with an individual of the nationalist party.

Working corporate in the west is about having the correct progressive opinions, dissent means you are an evil conspiracy theorist. Just 2 years ago it was evil and racist conspiracy theorist to say that Covid came from a lab leak.

It's evil to say the the truth until the emperor becomes absolutely naked, such as the case with mass immigration in Sweden. When you suddenly have more murders than the UK (a 7x larger country) and bombings every day it's kinda hard to deny that immigration has a link to crime.