By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 11, 2021
The best movie about newspapers is The Paper,
in which Michael Keaton plays an editor at a scrappy tabloid (that is totally
not the New York Post) who lays out his editorial vision in a
conversation with a snooty editor at a prestigious broadsheet (that is surely
not the New York Times), thundering: “I don’t live in the world! I live in New York City!”
(Serial expletives deleted serially.)
I always thought that was the right point of view for a
newspaper editor, because, at least in ye olden days of print, a newspaper was
about a place, usually but not always a city. The New York
Times really was about New York City for most of its history. If you
started the paper today, you’d call it the Unbearable Yuppie Lefty Who
Is Just a Little Too Upscale for Salon.com Times, because media
is now demographic rather than geographic.
I used to think that there was no such place as “the
world,” by which I mean something like what Margaret Thatcher meant when she
said there is no such thing as “society.” Of course, there is a world out
there. But it is difficult to see the world or to take it in. I have seen some
places pretty well, I think — Lubbock, Austin, New Delhi, Philadelphia,
northwestern Colorado, Las Vegas — and I have seen a great many more places in
less detail, but these do not add up to “the world.”
I don’t live in the
world — I live in Texas!
Or so I used to think.
The coronavirus epidemic is the closest thing to a
genuine world event that has occurred during my lifetime, and
might be the most genuinely global event in recorded human history. (Even word
of Jesus’s resurrection took a long time to travel any great distance from the
original scene.) The great world wars were international events,
but those are not quite the same thing as a world event.
Borders and the responses of national governments (and international agencies)
may influence the course of an epidemic, but the coronavirus does not interact
with us as Americans or Italians or Chinese or Armenians — it interacts with us
as H. sap., in a particular way that follows from its evolution and
ours: We were, in a horrible sense, made for one another.
The epidemic has been (and is) a time of great suffering
for a great many people — the sick and the dying, the bereaved, the unemployed
— but it also represents, like so much in our public life in the past 20 years,
a lost opportunity. The great world event has not led to our developing a
richer and more useful concept of “the world,” a more fruitful understanding of
world relations, or a more promising model of world politics. We still give
very little thought to what Martin Heidegger (or was it
NoMeansNo?) called “the worldhood of the world as such.” If anything, our
politics has moved in the opposite direction, toward a reinvigorated
nationalism and intensified sub-nationalisms, from the class-war politics of
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to the independence movements thriving from Catalonia to Scotland to
(if you take talk radio seriously) Texas. It is significant that one of the
favorite epithets of today’s populists is one that was thrown at Jews by
anti-Semites for generations: “cosmopolitan.”
“I don’t live in
the world! I live in Albuquerque!”
It is natural and usually sensible to think first of
one’s own home and one’s own people, especially in times of crisis. The
principle of subsidiarity — fixing social problems as close to the source as
possible, beginning with families and local communities — is derived in part
from the fact that the world is intractable, and that if we
have to reform the world before we can pick up the garbage in Cleveland, then
Cleveland is going to end up buried while the world muddles on as best it can.
It is also natural (though not always good) that people generally
prefer their own homes and communities, and tend first to the interests of
these — we are not naturally inclined to be citizens of the world who feel a
natural disaster in Japan or a famine in Kenya as keenly as we do a house fire
next door or the death of a cousin. Even the worldliest and most cosmopolitan
people do not live in “the world,” and are not connected to it in the way they
are connected to the 100 square miles around the place where they eat
breakfast. This is not small-mindedness (except in the sense that all human minds
are limited); instead, it follows from the fact that we do not have a useful
world concept or a very developed philosophy of world relations or world
interests.
In our time, there have been two groups that have worked
to develop that world consciousness, largely independent of each other, doing
so for reasons of genuine belief and in the service of naked political power.
These two groups are the environmental movement and the intellectual wing of
the Chinese Communist Party, each of which says, in its own way for its own
reasons, “You live in the world.”
***
Pollution in many of its forms is a local issue: The
roadside litter in Arkansas is a local issue that could be addressed locally;
the smog in Los Angeles is a local-regional issue that has been greatly
improved by local-regional efforts empowered by federal law, including the
Clean Air Act signed by Richard Nixon in 1970. Even much pollution that crosses
borders (by air or by sea) has a local character — it comes from somewhere.
Sometimes, addressing that kind of pollution involves many jurisdictions, which
is why we created such regulations as the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, part
of our successful campaign to reduce the effects of acid rain.
(“Acid rain,” with its terrifying sci-fi resonance, is
one of the great triumphs of green marketing.)
Power-plant regulations, interstate pollution compacts,
and multilateral environmental agreements may take our politics beyond the
strictly local, but none of these requires the development of a usable world concept.
Climate change, previously known as global warming, is different: As its former
name attests, it is an issue that is global in character — its causes are
global and its effects are global. If global warming were the result of a
single industry or activity in a single country or region, then it would be a
relatively easy problem to address, because if it is really worth it to you,
you can buy your way out of an externality. If climate change were caused by
potato-farming, then we could adjust our diets a little bit and pay potato
farmers to switch to a different crop. (That’s how you know that Washington’s
so-called war on drugs isn’t really about drug use: We put only chump change
into “crop substitution” programs that would pay coca and opium farmers to grow
something else, but fund the DEA to the tune of billions of
dollars a year. The war on drugs is a jobs program.) Global warming is like the
“black shakes” in Johnny Mnemonic: The world
causes it, technological civilization causes it — all the stuff we can’t
live without causes it.
There has been no meaningful world response
to climate change because there is no intellectual or political basis for it.
There have been many attempts at an international response — Kyoto, Paris — but
these all belong to an older and more traditional politics of nations, national
interests, and international agreements. This may be for the better, and it may
be the case that the best that can be done on climate change is a series of
piecemeal reforms and adaptations. Even if there were a genuinely world-minded
response at hand, there would be no world institution with the credibility or
the competency to implement it. Direct experience with the United Nations has
made a great many would-be cosmopolitan idealists into workaday nationalists,
and sane people naturally recoil from the fanciful prospect of a world state,
even one with a very limited scope and purpose.
Witnessing the failure of “solidarity” politics in the
European Union’s response to the coronavirus epidemic ought to make us very
modest indeed about our expectations for supranational relations: If a
reasonably well-administered, voluntary association of mostly rich, mostly
democratic countries that accounts for about a quarter of the human race’s economic
output cannot function according to its own cooperative principles during a
crisis shared roughly equally among its members, then what hope can there be
for a world politics in the service of the diverging interests and aspirations
(some of them shared, some of them incompatible) of such diverse constituents
as the United States, the European Union, China, India, Brazil — and Andorra,
Lichtenstein, San Marino. . . .
***
Here in the United States, we naturally prefer
a national politics to a world politics: We are the most
powerful nation. And for as long as we have been the most powerful nation, we
have looked with dread and suspicion on whichever nation is No. 2: Great
Britain, once upon a time, but also Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and, now,
China. Americans are particularly fearful of the Asian economic superman of
myth and lore, a tireless laborer who subsists on a cup of rice a day and with
whom no American can compete while enjoying a decent standard of living. Donald
Trump spent the 1980s complaining that Japan was about to eat our national
lunch once and for all and, when that did not come to pass, he moved on to
China. Before Japan, there was the Eurasian economic superman of the Soviet
Union, where rapid forced industrialization produced an economic transformation
that convinced a generation of America’s most gullible that Stalin had cracked
the code. (“I have seen the future, and it works,” the progressive reformer
Lincoln Steffens said of Soviet society.) Perhaps one day India or Korea will
surpass China as the Asian economic superman of some future generation.
As the Chinese journalist and policy thinker Jin Canrong
(about whom you can find some interesting material here in National
Review, where Manyin Li has gone to the trouble of translating some of his
speeches) sees it, second banana to the United States is a position that necessarily comes with great and unique
geopolitical risk. His analysis is plausible from a certain point of view:
Of course the United States does not desire to be supplanted as top dog, and
things did indeed work out pretty poorly for former challengers; the Soviet
Union no longer exists, having been transformed into a pathetic gangster state,
while Japan has entered a long period of economic and cultural stagnation. The
collapse of the USSR looms large in the thought of Xi Jinping, who understands
it as the result of the ideological and moral decline of the Soviet Communist
Party, while the belief that Washington is engaged in a ceaseless active
conspiracy to topple the Chinese Communist Party is a commonplace of Chinese
political discourse.
Beyond politics proper, commerce and culture have
emigrated to the Internet, which is dominated by U.S.-based firms: The European
Union does not have a single technology company comparable to Google, Facebook,
or Apple. From Beijing’s point of view, an Internet dominated by Amazon and
Google is, in effect, one dominated by Washington. China’s Internet companies
have been mostly China-oriented, although Beijing intends to see that change —
and Chinese leaders surely see U.S. efforts to police Chinese technology
companies such as Huawei and Lenovo in a different light than Americans do.
Americans see a democratic government in a country with an open economy
protecting itself from the agents of a predatory police state; Beijing sees a
hegemon deviously expanding its borders.
From that point of view, the U.S.-China relationship is
only another exercise in the politics of nations and nationalisms that compete
where they can and cooperate where they must. The international-order game is
one that Beijing has done pretty well at playing: China rose to a position of
great power and prominence in a world dominated by the “Washington Consensus,”
and it made the most of the institutions and rules associated with that
consensus. Beijing did not have to be coerced into making common cause with the
World Trade Organization, UNESCO, the International Monetary Fund, or the World
Bank. It was Beijing that proposed a free-trade zone to ASEAN, not the other
way around. From Beijing’s point of view, China engaged the hegemon and the
hegemon’s world order on the hegemon’s own terms. The most cynical and narrow
interpretation of Beijing’s strategy — which is not obviously the
wrong one — is that the Chinese Communist Party is a nationalistic,
self-interested, brutal, dictatorial regime that plays by international rules
only to the extent that doing so accords with its own interests, and that its
resistance to the international regime created by the United States in the
post-war era is not resistance to hegemony as such but simply an aspiring
hegemon’s strategy for beating the incumbent hegemon at its own game. Seen from
this point of view, the West’s open-handed engagement with China is only the
fulfillment, at long last, of Lenin’s prophecy that capitalists eventually will
sell their enemies the rope with which they are to be hanged.
Put less dramatically, Beijing may simply look forward to
an international order that is in many ways like the one with which we are
familiar, one in which nations voluntarily enter into international agreements,
join multilateral organizations, and agree to follow certain international rules
because doing so accords with their own interests to the extent that these
institutions and relationships are the gatekeepers of the globalized economy
and the prosperity that is derived from it. The difference, of course, would be
that the 20th-century institutions created and dominated by Washington would
give way to 21st-century institutions created and dominated by Beijing,
reflecting Beijing’s priorities, interests, and sensibilities.
Absent some fundamental shift in Beijing, this would be a
catastrophe for the world.
It is tempting to write that this would be a catastrophe
for the world in the same way and to the same degree that the current regime in
Beijing has been a catastrophe for the Chinese people, but the Chinese people
by most accounts do not believe that they have been the victims of a
catastrophe. Of course, it is not the case that domestic support for the
Chinese regime is total, but neither is it the case that opposition to the
regime is total. There are many important networks of resistance in China — and
not just in Hong Kong and Xinjiang — but Chinese popular nationalism has the
character of an organic phenomenon. It is not something that has been imposed
on the Chinese people by Beijing, and it is not merely the product of
propaganda or an affectation adopted to ward off the gestapo. Critics may make
jokes about Chairman Xi’s resemblance to Winnie the Pooh, but the notion that a
rising China must inevitably challenge and overcome the United States as the
ultimate force in world relations is not the exclusive domain of the CCP
intellectual elite.
The evil of the regime in Beijing would be difficult to
exaggerate — it is guilty of everything from mass murder to religious
repression to organ-harvesting, slavery, and genocide. (Strange that our own
right-wing populists, who burn with moral indignity at the mention of China, have
mainly complained about the trade deficit.) But it would be a mistake to
proceed as though that were all there is to it. We should still take Chinese political
ideas seriously, because they are taken seriously in Beijing. And the
conversation there is more complex and nuanced than you might assume, and more
interested in a world politics that transcends mere international politics.
***
In 2012, the year Xi Jinping assumed paramount
leadership in Beijing, William A. Callahan considered “China’s Strategic
Futures” in a very interesting paper published in Asian Survey,
laying out three distinct but related points of comparison: the “harmonious
world” policy described by Xi’s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao; the more
militaristic and chauvinistic “China Dream” described by Colonel Liu Mingfu in
a popular book cited by Henry Kissinger as typifying the “triumphalist view” in
Beijing; and the Chinese political philosopher Tingyang Zhao’s attempt to
delineate a new vision of world politics based on the Chinese concept of Tianxia,
a slippery word that literally means “all under heaven” but also can be used to
mean China itself, empire, or the world as a whole.
(One must bear in mind that the Chinese Communist Party
and the intellectuals associated with it do not always use words such as
“harmony” and “peace” in the way we might use them in the West: China bestowed
its World Harmony Award — a cooked-up competitor to the Nobel Peace Prize — on
the general who ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre, and it honored Vladimir
Putin’s brutal campaign in Chechnya with the Confucius Peace Prize.)
Each of these three ways of looking at the world has its
own distinctive emphases and assumptions, but they all have something in common
with one another and with certain critiques one hears in the West from both the
Left and the Right: that Washington-style internationalism is if not inherently
deficient then at least insufficient to the world’s current needs, that
Anglo-American liberalism has run its course, that liberal democracy no longer
serves the authentic common interests of workers and citizens outside of the
ruling elites, that what we call for lack of better terms “capitalism” and
“globalization” create many billionaires but fail to satisfy urgent social and
environmental criteria, and that the West in general and the United States in
particular are in the midst of a spiritual crisis that implies a more urgent
crisis of American legitimacy as a hegemon-superpower. Viktor Orbán’s embrace
of China is about more than vaccine-sourcing, using Beijing as a cat’s-paw
against Brussels, or the comfort his regime must take from being adopted by a
big brother who also detests liberal democracy and brutalizes minority groups.
As Callahan writes, none of the ideas coming out of Beijing may suffice to
usher in that “harmonious world” — instead, “their impact may be more negative
than positive; even if such alternative world orders are not realized, they can
still serve to delegitimize American-influenced global norms.”
Hu Jintao was, in his context, a mostly conventional
leader, and his “harmonious world” may have amounted to little more than
rhetoric. Colonel Liu’s analysis would be familiar to most Western military and
diplomatic thinkers, a version of top-dog “great game” politics: Callahan
quotes him insisting that “if China in the 21st century cannot become world
number one, cannot become the top power, then, inevitably, it will become a
straggler that is cast aside.” From Colonel Liu’s point of view, the great
problem with the Great Leap Forward was that Mao Zedong underestimated how long
it would take to build China into a world-dominating power. The phrase he uses,
“Chinese dream,” has come to be closely associated with Xi Jinping. This is
mostly ordinary competitive zero-sum nationalism — for someone to rise, someone
must fall.
But Tingyang Zhao’s reconsidered Confucian politics, as
expressed in his Redefining a Philosophy for World Governance (recently
published in English translation by Palgrave Macmillan) offers something rare
and precious in this time of stultified, bean-counting populism: a set of
genuinely interesting political ideas and a genuinely interesting sensibility.
Interesting ideas are not necessarily good ideas or practical ones: The phrase
“world governance” naturally terrifies Americans, especially when it comes from
the pen of a man who is highly regarded by at least some senior figures in what
is arguably the most awful government on earth. (There are crueler states, but
none that matches both China’s cruelty and its geopolitical significance.) What
Zhao is interested in, his great theme, is the creation of a world politics
that superintends the national and the international. Unlike Colonel Liu and
others of that persuasion, he specifically disclaims traditional imperialism
and hegemonism, not because these are illegitimate but because they are, in his
conception, unnecessary: Without putting it in precisely these terms, he
assumes the superiority of Chinese culture, from which it follows that the
Chinese concept of Tianxia will provide the intellectual and moral order the
world needs to achieve the kind of cooperation the times demand — to provide a
conceptual and philosophical basis for managing the interdependency among
nations that already exists. The point, he writes, is to “attract people rather
than conquer them.”
Rather than Pareto Improvement — a change in the
allocation of resources that harms no one’s interests while improving the
situation of at least one person — he offers “Confucian Improvement,” by means
of which “any society improvement in overall interests must bring about
simultaneous improvement in everybody’s interests, rather than a unilateral
improvement only.” This is, in his view, the test of legitimacy: “If and only
if a system is universally legitimate, then it will be able to guarantee Pareto’s
Improvement in everybody’s interests so long as the overall interests of a
society are improved . . . for every individual.” Of course that has an
ivory-tower sound to it. But it is a mistake — American conservatives of all
people should realize this by now — to ignore what is being debated in the
ivory towers.
Zhao writes:
A real history of the world must
begin with a world order that narrates a shared life of mankind. World order is
not one in which a hegemony or allied major powers rule the world, but one that
is based on universal common interests of sovereign nations; not one in which a
certain country establishes the game rules for the entire world, but one in
which a global constitution establishes the game rules for all nations. . . .
So far, the world has not become Tianxia. For that reason, the real
history of the world has yet to begin.
. . . With the current state
of anarchy, the world is only a living place that is fiercely fought over and
is being much damaged in the process. The real problem is not the so-called
failed states, but the failed world.
He sees this Tianxia as “supervisory,”
but insists that “the system is anti-imperialist in nature because it belongs
to the entire world, not to any country.”
***
It is easy to ignore this sort of thing as
philosophical wheel-spinning: Xi Jinping does not live in the world — he lives
in China, and his main interest is in fortifying the exclusive
power of the Chinese Community Party. His notorious “Document 9” expressly
forbade Chinese schools or media to promote “universal values,” meaning Western
ideas that are incompatible with the current Chinese regime, such as democracy
and human rights. “Xi Jinping Thought,” as it is known, is militaristic,
nationalistic, and — though we sometimes forget this — socialist.
Xi’s 14-point agenda is concerned with ensuring that the
Chinese Communist Party does not go the way of the Soviet one — that it
maintains control of “all forms of work in China” and “absolute leadership
over” the military, that it more closely incorporates Hong Kong and Macau (and,
eventually, Taiwan) into the so-called People’s Republic, that it polices
“party discipline,” etc. But he also insists, almost poetically, that China’s
foreign policy is organized around the pursuit of a “community of common
destiny,” or, more prosaically, that China aims to “take an active part in
reforming and developing the global governance system.” It is difficult not to
hear some trace of Tingyang Zhao in that.
China’s obvious project is building a state.
Its less obvious project is building a world. And while Beijing
needs its tanks and guns and factories to build up and fortify the state, it
needs ideas to build a world — and it needs the world to
embrace those ideas, or at least to accept institutions and arrangements
derived from them. Tingyang Zhao presents his Tianxia as the
“acceptable empire,” and the idea has some real resonance in China. “In the
early 20th century,” Callahan writes, “imperial China’s hierarchical world
order was seen as the problem, but now many Chinese people see it as the
solution to the world’s ills.”
Turn up your noses at the professors all you like — ideas
matter, and, in the long run, all important political conflicts are ideological
and philosophical conflicts. The Chinese people are giving some thought to what
a Chinese view of the world — a Chinese world — should look
like. Americans are not. And if the world no longer believes that the
American-led international order provides such benefits as to command
allegiance to the system and its institutions, it is only following the example
set by the United States itself, with its increasing bipartisan hostility to
trade and trade accords, its nickel-and-dime approach to NATO and other
trans-Atlantic institutions, its heavy-handedness in relations with the
European Union, its peevishly short-tempered diplomacy. Joe Biden’s economic
nationalism is in all but rhetoric indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s.
We are unprepared to defend the U.S.-led world order on
intellectual grounds — and, worse, a great many Americans, both on the left and
on the right, would not be inclined to mount such a defense even if they were
able to do so. Right-wing populists and left-wing populists both reject the
liberal order developed and cultivated by the United States from World War II
through the early 21st century, and both sides hold its institutions and
organizing principles in low regard. The fashionable young men of the right are
as hostile to capitalism as any batty socialist wandering the streets of
Brooklyn. Some Americans thrill to Karl Marx, and others to Viktor Orbán,
Marine Le Pen, or the memory of Francisco Franco.
Such Americans will not build a world,
because their ambitions are too small: free false teeth, student-loan
forgiveness, owning the libs. But the world will be built all the same, and we
will live in it.
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