The Decline of the Western-Centric World and the Emerging New Global Order

Contending Views

Yun-han Chu, Yongnian Zheng, Yun-han Chu, Yongnian Zheng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000202168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Western liberal democratic world order, which seemingly triumphed following the collapse of communism, is looking increasingly fragile as populists and nationalists take power in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, as the momentum of democratization in developing countries stalls, and as Western liberal establishments fail to deal with economic stagnation, worsening political polarization, social inequality, and migrant crises. At the same time there is a shift of economic power from the West towards Asia. This book explores these critical developments and their consequences for the world order. It considers how far the loss of the West's power to dominate the world order, together with the relative decline of US power and its abdication of its global leadership role, will lead to more conflict, disorder and chaos; and how far non-Western actors, including China, India and the Muslim world, are capable of establishing visionary policy initiatives which reconfigure the paths and rules of economic integration and globalization, and the mechanisms of global governance. The book also assesses the sustainability of the economic rise of China and other non-Western actors, explores the Western liberal democratic order's capacity for resilience, and discusses how far the outlook is pessimistic or optimistic.

Part I

The crisis of liberal democracy in the West and its competitors from Asia

1

The principal vulnerabilities of Western liberalism

John Dunn ^*

What we actually have to do is demonstrate by our behavior that our values are better than theirs. That’s the only thing we’ve got to work with. It will take a long time and you’ll take a lot of hits for it but finally you can’t coerce people. You have to be more attractive than the competition.¹

To identify the vulnerabilities of a political viewpoint you do not have to be its settled enemy nor presuppose it any more determinate than it proves on inspection.² The fact that liberalism is indeed vulnerable from many different angles has always been apparent,³ but that does not distinguish it from any other political or cultural orientation of comparable breadth or longevity, nor from any of the great world religions. Still less does it distinguish it from the far less imposing protocols for economic explanation which have traveled the world since the globe became a single ragged domain of economic interaction for the great majority of its human inhabitants. Insofar as these are not simply misnomers, it may well distinguish it in some respects from non-Western forms of liberalism (like those which entered the Chinese thought world quite early in the last century and even now perhaps remain uneasily and somewhat hazardously alive within it);⁴ but insofar as it does, it is inherently unlikely that it will do so by proving less vulnerable.

Liberalism, of course, comes in many different shapes and sizes and is plainly least vulnerable when carefully contextualized and presenting itself in its slenderest and most parsimonious forms. Recently, however, it has been at its most vulnerable and most conspicuous in its most expansive form – as a would-be connected answer to the question of how the relations between human beings should best be structured in living with one another across the globe. In this billowing guise it is scarcely surprising that, inspected with even minimal attention, liberalism should have proved very vulnerable indeed. So seen, it unites a conception of an order of right with a rationale for a structure of power and fuses both, at least in aspiration, in a single global legal and institutional format which can somehow furnish the power to realize the structure of right: the liberal model of world order and the apparatuses through which that aspiring order was briefly and sporadically enforced. Less transparently, it aligns all of these with a conception of a global economy, held together by, and consisting in, free exchanges on the basis of existing rights of ownership. Behind all these, and casting an implausibly flattering light on most of them, is an implicit but confident conception of the character of the good life for any individual: the free exploration and choice by each of how to live day by day and hour by hour.

Viewed at the receiving end, as it has perforce been historically by most of the world’s population, this is intensely provocative. It unites an overweening normative self-regard, an evasive and flagrantly implausible conception of the basis and justification of existing and effectively enforced property rights, with a robust indifference to the resulting distribution of suffering, humiliation, and privilege across the world.

Envisaged through the history of Europe and its diaspora, it is not hard to discern the value of each component of this synoptic and immodest vision; but viewed from any other angle it was always hard to miss the scale of effrontery and self-deception involved throughout in pressing it promiscuously upon the rest of the world. It is not that the world’s human population as yet have between us any other surviving and comparably encompassing model for world order, nor that there is the least plausibility to the hope that the world may not need any such order. It is just that the passage of this remarkable vision through the power structures which organize human life across the world has reached a very different point today from where it stretched as it entered the twilight years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Trump Presidency’s, the Brexit Referendum’s, and the European Union’s feeble responses to economic crises over the last decade have turned what once looked like a formidable structure of power into an assemblage of rapidly disintegrating expedients for damage limitation. Across the United States, Great Britain, and the European Union, the lighting conditions differ markedly from place to place; but seen from elsewhere in the world, this looks very much like The Twilight of the West.⁵ Nowhere do the countries of the West at this point seem more wounded than in their residual capacities for effective political response.

You could perhaps say, echoing Britain’s then Foreign Secretary as the First World War loomed,⁶ that the lights are going out all over the West. I am not a prophet and cannot confidently guess just how rapidly or drastically they will prove to be dimming now, but with the incomparable benefits of hindsight it is clear enough already that this is a more instructive point than in 1989 at which to assess the vulnerabilities of liberalism. In its most expansive form, it is scarcely surprising that liberalism should have compounded the vulnerabilities of each of its components in a grotesque caricature of them all. The relation between any structure of power and such rationales as it chooses to offer for itself is necessarily contingent, and the more assertive the rationale the stronger the grounds for audiences to disbelieve it and the probability of there being good reason for them to do so. What there is not, however, is the least reason to expect the force of the impulse to match the cogency of the grounds for disbelief.

In its contemporary Western guise, the force of this impulse is especially important in the case of liberalism’s currently preferred political form. The view that representative democracy on the basis of free elections, constitutional government, the rule of law, an expansive schedule of civil rights, freedom of thought and speech, and political organization, taken together offers a dependably felicitous form for choosing governmental policies and pursuing them steadily and effectively, which has always itself depended on a wholly unwarranted and epistemically indefensible view of the political role and content of public opinion.⁷ At no point in liberalism’s history as a political doctrine has this fundamental flaw been remedied. Scanning across the polities of the West today, from the United States to Britain and the European Union, no one could possibly see it as currently vindicated.

Long-term coherence and efficacy have always been the prime criteria for governmental merit, but as human life becomes more densely and tightly connected across the globe, and its fundamental ecological precariousness in that form becomes ever more evident, it should be clear by now that they have become by far the weightiest criteria. That is surely, at this stage in its long history, where liberalism’s most portentous weakness lies. Perhaps it is especially apparent just how weak it has become when it is viewed from China’s perspective.⁸ From that angle it offers virtually a mirror image of the classical Chinese vision of social order, where the order is effectively taken as given absolutely and any detriment to it thus automatically discredited by that alone. To see order as integral in this way is necessarily to presuppose a comprehensive social theory, which liberalism may indeed have always covertly assumed itself to possess;⁹ but which it has never convincingly articulated,¹⁰ and is certainly now in no position to invoke in its own defense. The less that vision corresponds to reality in any given setting, the more rapidly liberalism must disintegrate as a coherent viewpoint within practical politics and, accordingly, the less able it is sure to prove to muster its own protection from political resources of its own.

Global liberalism was an overstretch from the start, not because it presented an inherently inequitable or malignant model for several key aspects of the relations between human societies, political units. and domestic economies in contrast to alternative models which unite justice in acquisition and distribution with proven feasibility,¹¹ but because the human population of the world as a whole has always been an unimagined and unimaginable community and has yet to become the focus of any compelling social theory.¹² The impulse to govern the world is necessarily self-assigned and unlikely ever to elicit unalloyed gratitude from anyone else at the receiving end. As President Trump shows incomparably, you do not need to be poor or maltreated to experience it in this way.

The United Kingdom, and even the realm of England which would no doubt survive its demise, have also always been very much imagined communities and in both cases have now become communities increasingly unable to imagine themselves as such. On a more parvenu basis, this has also always been evidently true of the European Union. Over at least the last four presidential elections very much the same has clearly proved so too for the United States of America. Insofar as you are lucky enough to belong to a community with determinate boundaries and a current population, most of whose members view it as such, you do not need a comprehensive social theory. But as soon as either its scope or its constituents come seriously into question, neither liberalism nor democracy offer any clear basis on which to supply either on your behalf. The intimacy and the claustrophobic intensity of social media amplifies anxieties, suspicions, and questions far more potently than they supply ease, confidence, or convincingly common answers; and the images for which our citizenries reach, and the slogans to which they respond, evoke social theories with no foundation whatever in historical reality.

It is clear in liberalism’s case that this flaw is structural and ineliminable.

Like one of those assemblages of hanging sticks which delight an Issey Miyake boutique in Tokyo, because from one angle and one angle only they look like chairs,¹³ liberalism is a composite of discrete elements which fit together as a whole only when viewed from a single angle, and insofar as they ever do come together in time and space, can never reasonably be expected to stay together for long or bear the weight of anything else. Liberalism’s deep sources in the west lie far back in the past: in its vision of the good life for individuals and in attitudes to ownership and to exertion in economic life. The aspirational elements of this vision are rooted primarily in the imaginative life of Christianity which privileges the individual soul overwhelmingly as a site of significance for human beings, along with the primacy of choice for humans in determining its ultimate fate. The momentum of the latter in an ever more commoditized world is scarcely aspirational, but it is increasingly insistent and gains constantly in causal force whatever it lacks in spiritual dignity. It no longer matters quite what launched it on its course;¹⁴ and it is in any case less than plausible that its terminus ad quem today in the West differs markedly from the point it has now reached in the People’s Republic itself. It is not for me to judge how far the People’s Republic as a political form clashes with or corresponds to the realities of China’s society and economy as these are today.¹⁵

Comprehensive social theories are epistemically ambitious creations and apt to seem like superstitions or impostures to anyone who does not share them, so there is no reason whatsoever to view more skeptical versions of liberalism as necessarily vulnerable in comparison with rival political doctrines with more encompassing pretensions. The most sophisticated of pretensions is no substitute for political efficacy.

In the West, the evaluative primacy of autonomy and the exhilarations of Romanticism have little elective affinity with the characteristic pleasures elicited today by Benjamin Constant’s modern liberty,¹⁶ the...