Obligation, East & West

Abstract

World trade is often a purveyor of social and political values as well as of goods. The economic development of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore—and increasingly China itself—will likely bring attempts at changing today's standards of international commerce and law to bring them into greater conformity with those that prevail in the East. As this process unfolds, different concepts of obligation— as between the Judeo-Christian tradition prevalent in Europe and areas settled by Europeans and the Confucian tradition prevalent in China and other countries of East and Southeast Asia—will become far more noticeable than in the past.