After the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Oksana Zabuzhko reproachfully criticized Western intellectuals for recommending wrong books to read. Indeed, they suggested Harari, Pinker, Friedman, Ferguson, Fukuyama. And one should rather read again Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes. Many people believed indeed in “fairy tales” that the world is flattening and that globalization is softening customs. And here again there is violence and national egoism.The age of globalization is over?
Tribalism is winning after all? The proponents of tribalism undoubtedly have reason to be pleased. Globalization is slowing down indeed, protectionist walls are being rebuilt, the Internet has become irrevocably balkanized, physical borders between countries are being sealed, nationalist populism is a ticket to power. Everyone plays its own egoistic game.
The utopia of the end of history has collapsed. Instead of a general victory of liberal values, the world split again into the camp of democracy and the camp of authoritarianism. Some say: so what, one planet, two systems.
Politically, the West had to readjust itself to the logic of geopolitical confrontation. This time with Russia (military-political) and China (economic-political). And the neutralistic attitude of many Third World countries towards this confrontation awakened the demons of the prospect of almost the entire world conspiring against the West (The West versus the Rest).
Western intellectuals and theoreticians of international politics see a chance to overcome these contradictions in the revival of universalism when thinking about the world and political action.
However, we must accept the obvious truth: that old universalism that the West has practiced for more than two centuries is history. It is irrevocably dead.
The problem with it was not only that it bore the stigma of Western supremacism and the “white man’s burden” in particular. It was invented in the Enlightenment period with the conviction that the Western man was the most conscious kind of man, that all people living in even the most remote corners of the world would inevitably undergo the process of becoming a Western man. Western man knew before everyone the truths that governed life. He assumed that these truths belonged to everyone, and his role was to help everyone to accept them as their own and to copy Western patterns of social life and political institutions. As Jean-Marc Ferry wrote: “in the eighteenth century Europe was perceived (by Europeans) as a continent that transfers its rules to the world”, and European civilization was cemented by a mixture of cosmopolitanism and Eurocentrism.
The old universalism was mortally wounded by the political emancipation of the “Third World” and ideologically dismantled by post-modernism. Political emancipation challenged the paradigm of Western leadership in the world. While post-modernism replaced the idea of westernization of the world with the hypothesis of its cultural “creolization”, a new civilizational convergence.
The old universalism was crushed by the growing sense of guilt in the West. Because the old universalism was once tied to colonial expansion, it was used to ennoble imperialism. And colonial excesses in the form of racism, apartheid, slavery, concentration camps also went to its account, though unfairly.
Guilt (self-criticism) is as indelible a part of Western identity as universalism itself. Its sincere, straightforward exponent became in November 2022 FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who, in response to allegations of silence regarding the state of human rights in Qatar, stated emphatically: “For what we Europeans have been doing around the world in the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.”
This guilt, this moral masochism, disempowers the West from claiming intellectual and political leadership. And it shuts the West’s mouth when the political elites in many African or Asian countries bash the West at every opportunity, blame the West for all the misfortunes of the world, want to shift the responsibility for their own, those elites, incompetence in management and banditry in stealing from their own societies.
The West has been thus deprived of the political and moral privilege of setting universal rules for the organization of societies and states, as well as rules for international coexistence.
But no one can fill the gap left by the West. Neither Russia, nor China, nor India have a better, alternative vision for the world.
Yet the problem with the old universalism is more serious. It consists in the fact that it was already married two hundred years ago to the paradigm of the nation. The problems of the world were to be solved by self-organization and harmonious coexistence of nations. The noble combination of universalism and the nation took the form of internationalism.
This relationship was so beautifully expressed by Giuseppe Mazzini: “As long as you are ready to die for humanity, the life of your country is immortal.”
Because the nation-state concept was central to the organization of the world for over two centuries.
It was in many dimensions the only possible and effective model for its time. However, it turned out to be very limited in effectiveness when taking up modern challenges.
The good news for the world is that a new universalism is emerging and solidifying.
The old universalism came from a community of descent, a community of roots, proclaiming that we are all children of the same God, equal in rights and dignity. The new universalism is based on a common destiny, claiming that we all move towards a common future, we sail in one boat, we share a common fate in the face of the world’s challenges.
The new universalism has today taken the form of pangeism and other similar slogans. In a political sense, it is reflected in the concept of “one world philosophy”. According to it, common global challenges that should be tackled together require action that is more than just the sum of national efforts. However, for this concept to be anything more than wishful thinking, we would need to find and drive our global identity as individuals within ourselves, as Professor Christopher Coker of the LSE has rightly pointed out.
The problem is that the concept of “one world” circulates in public discourse more in the circles of civil society than in the midst of political decision-makers. If it appears in the conversations of politicians, it is as an intellectual ornament in Davos and other such meetings. It is not visible in national doctrines of foreign policy, much less in practical action. International policy at the global level follows the old and proven paradigms – raison d’etat, national interests, mutually beneficial cooperation. And civil society in global terms does not have a significant impact on the activities of global international organizations. There is no organization as cut off from the voice of citizens as the United Nations and its specialized agencies. Without ensuring a stronger influence of citizens and non-governmental organizations on the activities of global institutions, the change of these paradigms will not happen quickly. Greta Thunberg’s occasional appearances in New York change nothing about that.
And what seems to be an even more serious problem is the fact that the concepts of “one world” and related concepts limit their circulation in principle to the Western world. In the “Third World” (or the so called Global South) their attractiveness is still weak. They do not stir the imagination of local societies. For obvious reasons, it is hard to imagine that the Earth Strike would involve China on a mass scale. But even if you look at the countries of Africa and Asia, where the freedom of speech and assembly is at a relatively good level, such actions either do not take place at all or have a symbolic effect. These societies have their vision of priorities. And it is a vision far removed from the vision followed by the West.
It would seem that the crisis caused by the Russian aggression against Ukraine may lead to a turning point, become a kind of catharsis that will make people aware of the need to change the way the world is governed. Because this crisis has revealed the fundamental nature of the dispute over the future of international relations. Russia (and China) want to return us from building new paradigms, they want to bring back the world to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, a world divided into spheres of influence, a world governed by the argument of force, a world of absolute sovereignty of internal policies consisting in the unlimited right to repress one’s own society. The crisis caused by the war in Ukraine should also have made people realize that without resolving this confrontation, it will not be possible to effectively take up global systemic challenges, that the war in Ukraine is a world war, because it shows what diverts attention, strength and resources from tackling global challenges.
While the strategic importance of the war in Ukraine was quickly assimilated by Western societies, in the “Third World” the war did not stir the imagination. For most of the elites there, this is a war within the rich world, from which the poor world should stay away. And the Global South certainly shouldn’t have paid for it. While the vast majority of developing countries supported UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia’s actions, the vast majority of them refused to join Western sanctions.
In 2022, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar stated nothing less than that the Western world order must be replaced by a “multi-alignment” world in which states will freely choose their policies, preferences and interests. As if the Western order meant something else. Paradoxically, the war in Ukraine led, as Roger Cohen wrote, to a decrease in confidence in the power of the West, in its ability to rebuild the world based on rules (“rules-based-order”). The “Third World” decided that it was necessary to protect oneself just in case (that is, in the event of the defeat of the West) by a mild treatment of the policy of China and Russia. And Jaishankar said: “When people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based-order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, call it out.”
Western theses about the dichotomous nature of the division of the world, about the clash of democracies with autocracies (Russia, China) did not appeal to the imagination of the societies of the “Global South” at all. According to research by the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge, while rich Western societies have become more and more liberal in terms of values in recent years (secularization of life, women’s and LGBT rights, divorces, abortions, euthanasia, personal freedoms), the “Third World” remained conservative, patriarchal, and religious. Worst of all, authoritarianism has found quite solid reserves of public support in many developing countries.
This growing gap in the sphere of values is used by Russia and China in their propaganda policy, strengthening it with a policy of unconditional development aid, and even unconditional military aid (arms supplies, the Wagner Group in Africa).
This leads to the thesis that the continuation of the US policy of pro-democracy crusade in particular will bring more losses than benefits. As stated by Ross Douthat in the New York Times in April 2023: „You cannot simply build alliances required to contain China or Russia if you can’t work with countries that don’t embrace Anglo-American liberalism or European proceduralism.”
And yet the West should not renounce its values in its policy. It should not compromise the strategic course for tactical considerations.
So what should the West do?
Firstly, it should consolidate itself, take care of its own coherence. Trump’s folly mistake, as one example, was to try to break up the European Union. Last year Kaczyński followed a similar path with theses about the “moral rightness” of Poland’s exit from the European Union. But also Macron harmed the interests of the Western community with his statements about Europe distancing itself from the US in its policy towards China. Driving a wedge between the US and Europe is strategic foolishness. Initiatives like the “Community of Democracies”/”Summit for Democracy”, with all their shortcomings, have the advantage of consolidating the West. Although too limited, they have a political basis. They definitely lack a security component. But a global NATO is unlikely to be created. The United States will remain the only keystone of Western solidarity in this area. But one can imagine creating a more organic network of connections between the countries of the broadly understood West, based on a common system of values. For a start, in the US-Europe-Asia-Pacific system.
The West should beware of any actions that would lead to the suspicion that it is trying to impose values. All it should care about is keeping the channels of ideas flowing freely. It should stand even more strongly as a defender of Internet freedom.
It should not teach others. It shouldn’t be running preaching campaigns. It should not get involved in ideological debates, enter into considerations about different cultures of human rights, about the superiority of individualism over collectivism, etc. They do not lead to anything good. They only legitimize the autocratic understanding of the role of the state, the restrictions on civil rights practiced by non-democratic states. I am writing this as a person seasoned in such disputes.
The West should engage instead in dialogue with the rest of the world on the basis of international law. Develop global standards, apply intelligent methods of their universalization and hold partners accountable for their application. Also through the conditionality of development aid and political, economic and educational contacts.
No ideological crusades, please. If crusades, then only about international law. Within these frameworks, let’s universalize the so-called Magnitsky law, involve the International Criminal Court, apply personal sanctions, freeze funds.
More concrete ideas to follow.
(Based on a panel presentation at a conference in Berlin in December 2022)
