Telos 201 (Winter 2022): Civilizational States and Liberal Empire

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In concluding that “All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or of the good society,”^[1] Leo Strauss describes an essential link between power and values. Because the power to make decisions about our future cannot be separated from the fundamental goals and ultimate meaning of our lives, we cannot exercise power that would be divorced from some set of values. Even the narrowest understanding of self-interest must come to terms with one’s own mortality and the meaning of others for our own existence. Consequently, raw power does not exist, as it can only be exercised within some understanding of its purposes.

When we consider the way in which power functions on a global level, it will also be crucial to understand how a world order will reflect a particular way of structuring the relationship between values and power. Even the seemingly most egregious use of power can only take place within the framework of an attempt to realize values in the world, and realist accounts of global order must also recognize the importance of some ideology such as nationalism as a means of establishing political values.^[2] Accordingly, discussions of balance-of-power dynamics can only begin once great powers emerge as a consequence of the political will of certain peoples to understand themselves in a certain way. Based on such measures as GDP, population, and military spending, Russia does not rank particularly well in relation to countries such as Brazil and India, neither of which pretends to great power status. If Russia can be considered a great power today, it is primarily because of the goals and values that its government embodies. Values form the foundations of global order, and Russia only continues to project its power because it maintains a sense of the global reach of its values for determining order for others.

The difficulty is that every model of global order tends to exclude others because each model will define the relevant units of order and this definition of units will determine the relevant political entities. In their attempts to define themselves as great powers, China and Russia are seeking not simply to affirm their status as large nation-states within the existing international system but to redefine the premises of this system away from the nation-state as the basic form of sovereignty. They can only do this by establishing new value frameworks that would justify their political ambitions and potentially unify a larger civilizational entity as a sovereign political unit that would challenge the nation-state framework itself.

The three primary frameworks for establishing global order today are the models of liberal internationalism, civilizational states, and nation-states. Each framework presumes a particular understanding of the basic unit of global order in the construction of values. Liberal internationalism imagines a single values framework that is based in the universality of liberal values. Its most consistent implementation would involve some version of a world state or a liberal hegemony. The model of the civilizational state imagines a handful of regional power centers in the world, each supported by an enduring civilizational vision of order. In contrast to the first two models, the nation-state is the fundamental political unit of an international order in which each nation-state maintains its own sovereignty based on the unified will of its inhabitants.

The present era is a transitional one in which these competing frameworks are attempting to displace the others. While the United States has struggled in its attempt since the end of the Cold War to establish the universal legitimacy of liberal democracy, the resistance to this model coming from China, Russia, and the Islamic world has led to a focus on the idea of competing civilizations as a new basis for sovereignty rooted in cultural values. Meanwhile, the defense of Ukraine is part of an attempt to maintain the nation-state as the basic underlying political unit in world politics, upsetting the aspirations of those who seek to forge larger political entities. Based on presentations made at a Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference in New York in the spring of 2022, this Telos special issue on Civilizational States and Liberal Empire attempts to better understand each of these conflicting perspectives on global order in order to evaluate their goals and prospects.

The primary challenge to liberal empire has come from China, whose leaders and theorists have sought to use a critique of Western imperialism as the basis for establishing an alternative Asian-centric basis for global order. Eric Hendriks-Kim considers how contemporary Chinese theorists have attempted to conceive of world order from a Chinese perspective in order to counter the dominance of Western-centered theories of universality. He situates these theories within a broader history of attempts to theorize alternative approaches to universalism that date back to Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas on cultural particularity and include the various reprisals of German romantic conceptions in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Beginning as particularist critiques of Western imperialist universalism, these previous challengers ended up imagining new forms of universalism founded upon their own German or Japanese foundations. Chinese theorists fall into the same pattern to the extent that they seek to focus on Chinese traditions to establish what they deem to be a true universalism, in contrast to the hidden imperialism of the West. Hendriks-Kim argues that the contradictions between particularism and universalism and between imperialism and anti-imperialism in these theories are an indication not of confusion but of their polemical function. Each theory attempts to imagine a certain direction for the development of Chinese power in relation to the rest of the world.

As Gordon Chang outlines, however, Chinese attempts to oppose Western imperialism are not simply defensive but seek to undermine the Westphalian system of nation-states by establishing a unified “tianxia” system in which sovereignty is centralized in China. In contrast to this Chinese-centered global order, the Westphalian system, though originating in Europe, is truly international to the extent that it allows sovereignty on an equal footing for all nations. The maintenance of this system of order is not a case of Western imperialism but the most effective way to protect the sovereignty of each individual nation-state. Chang argues that China’s alternative idea of a harmony and unity of mankind implies the subordination of other nations to the Chinese center.

Rather than seeing current conflicts in terms of civilizational states seeking hegemony as opposed to nation-states seeking self-determination, Miles Yu sees ideology as the key determiner of conflict between different conceptions of order. He lays out three frameworks for imagining global order: liberal internationalism, civilizational states, and ideology. The first framework imagines the end of history in which the whole world is unified within a liberal democratic order and on the basis of globalized trade. He rejects this vision due to its inability to recognize the reality of cultural differences that lead to the persistence of alternative ways of organizing society. The second framework imagines different civilizations, each of which forms a unity based on its history. He rejects this idea by pointing to cases, such as North and South Korea or China and Taiwan, in which a common historical tradition does not prevent a situation of political division and extreme enmity. He finally settles on ideology as the driving force that creates political differences and leads to practical consequences such as conflict and war. According to Yu, the United States has not properly recognized the importance of ideology in ordering global relations and causing conflicts. Because it has focused more strictly on confronting disruptive actions such as terrorism, genocide, or invasion, the United States has often neglected to combat the ideologies that lead to such deeds. Marxist ideology, by imagining a harmonious unity of mankind, leads to the suppression of cultural differences, as with the attempt by the Chinese government to eradicate Islam amongst the Uighurs in Xinjiang. By contrast, the ideology of liberal democracy is more compatible with the freedom of different cultures to develop without interference. This ideological contrast lies at the root of the current struggle to determine the shape of global order.

In his consideration of Japan’s mid-twentieth-century attempt to refashion world order, John W. M. Krummel argues that the Kyoto School developed a theory of a multipolar world that, in spite of its support for Japanese leadership in world affairs, was in tension with the Japanese army’s imperialist policies. In emphasizing Japan’s ability to economically and militarily pose an alternative to a Eurocentric world order, the Kyoto School imagined a world of separate regions, each with a hegemonic leader such as Japan in East Asia. But in proposing this leadership position for Japan, they also sought to shift Japan away from its imperialism toward a morally responsible fostering of East Asian autonomy. As opposed to a European philosophy of progress, they proposed a philosophy of “nothingness” leading to selfless action as well as continual change. Accordingly, Krummel argues that for the Kyoto School thinkers the role of Japanese leadership in East Asia was not to subjugate and colonize other East Asian peoples but to foster their autonomy and ethnic self-awareness. They argued that to have subjectivity in world history and be able to exercise moral energy, a people had to be organized within a nation-state. But as opposed to the European focus on individual freedom, the enduring legacy of the Kyoto School lies in their endeavor to establish a subjectivity of responsibility that would be based in a confrontation with the absolute “nothing” and a realization of the “no self,” leading to a selfless moral attitude in relations with other nations.

The second half of our special issue turns to Russia’s critiques of the West and of liberal world order. Richard Sakwa argues that a new cold war has been underway since 2014, with Ukraine serving as a proxy for the liberal Western powers aligned against Russia. Following a realist logic, Sakwa argues that this second cold war could have been avoided if the United States, after its victory in the first cold war, had not tried to impose a liberal hegemony by exporting its liberal democratic model of governance to the rest of the world. The alternative that Sakwa offers is a sovereign internationalism that is based in the UN Charter and combines “state sovereignty, rights of national self-determination, and human rights.” As opposed to this model of world order that is based on the multilateral sovereignty of nation-states, the United States attempted to establish and extend a liberal democratic hegemony, thus denying powers such as Russia and China their separate forms of sovereignty, which did not fit that model. Though he describes the opposition to the liberal democracies as a “struggle for autonomy,” Sakwa also recognizes the hypocrisy involved when Russia characterizes its invasion of Ukraine as a way to defend its own autonomy. The key question becomes autonomy for whom. If Russia has been undermining the principle of state sovereignty in Ukraine, Russia has also been suppressing through its authoritarian system the principle of self-determination within its own borders. Autonomy in both Russia and China becomes the privilege of a certain government elite, which maintains domination over the rest of the population. To the extent that the self-determination of peoples requires the rule of law and free elections, the human rights aspect of international order cannot be realized without the spread of these liberal democratic procedures. Consequently, the West’s support for liberal democracy still seems to be much closer to the kind of UN-based internationalism that Sakwa imagines than Russia’s and China’s neo-imperialist ambitions, cloaked behind a rhetoric of autonomy and cultural difference.

Russian theorists have attempted to establish a values-based argument for Russian actions, arguing that the opposition to both the West and the nation-state order itself is part of an attempt to defend moral values. Paul Grenier describes how Konstantin Krylov insists on a radical break between Russia and the West based on their differing civilizational types. For Krylov, the West is dominated by a liberalism that on the one hand is based on tolerance of different perspectives in a “live and let live” attitude but on the other hand can deteriorate into a desire to extend its own individualist values to the whole world, thereby undermining the ethic of tolerance. But because liberalism is based in an ethic of “autonomy from external determination,” in which individuals are granted the right to make their own choices, liberalism deteriorates into a lack of restraint and thus amorality because it is based on self-interest. In contrast to the West’s liberalism, Krylov argues that Russia has an ethic of resistance to evil, in which one’s own sense of what is impermissible needs to be extended to apply to other cultures as well, but in which one also denies to others what one does not have oneself. This Russian ethic leads to the desire to oppose evil, if necessary, with violence, and in this account Russia’s role in the world is to lead a moral crusade for the benefit of humanity. Because this perspective justifies the need for Russia to project its power beyond its borders, addressing it will be crucial for achieving an eventual long-term peace.

A key part of the Russian perspective is the critique of the moral emptiness of the nation-state system, and John Milbank outlines a similar view of global order in terms of an opposition between an orientation around the sacred as opposed to a Western liberal focus on self-interest. He differentiates three approaches to global order described in Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth: a world that unifies spiritual and material concerns in a Catholic unity, a world of competing nation-states, and a world of competing empires. Milbank criticizes the nation-state model for its establishment of a secularizing dissolution of any recognition of the sacred. For him the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent establishment of the Westphalian system were responsible for the most destructive aspects of modernity because they shifted the global order away from an orientation around the spiritual concerns that grounded the medieval primacy of pope and emperor. As opposed to the sacral land of the medieval world, the land of the nation-state is occupied based on “crude possession and expansionary discovery.” Milbank differentiates his position from the Russian one, however, by arguing that the world of competing regional empires that Schmitt invokes as a possible future global order is most similar to both the Nazi empire and the current Russian ambitions, in which a nation attempts to establish a land-based empire as opposed to a sea-based one. Milbank makes here a key distinction between the genuine friend/enemy distinction in the medieval struggle of Christendom against Islam and the secularized, contrived enemy of the nation-state, whose decisionist logic is cut off from any theological context. In establishing this distinction between true and contrived enemies, Milbank attempts to imagine a global order that is organized in such a way that there would be a theologically sanctioned global order in which all are “united under charity” and in which the main political task would be to oppose the evil of the true enemy of the sacred, which would be the secular world of pure power. The path toward this revival of the medieval form of order would be the dissolution of state sovereignty in order to reestablish the medieval European model of a “complex network of gift-exchanging communities and corporations that naturally and traditionally pursue intrinsic good purpose and virtue, out of which a true and relatively more peaceful order can be distilled.” The guarantors of this new order would not be the technocrats of state sovereignty, who attempt to manage people as they dominate nature, but a “clerisy” of spiritual leaders who can guide a world of estates in which people are organized in interlocking spiritual relationships rather than the nation-states of a secularizing modernity of exploitation.

Pursuing a similar perspective, Matthew Dal Santo argues that the war in Ukraine is part of a larger struggle between the sacred and the secular, in which the Western separation of religion from politics is part of a secularizing evisceration of all values. While the Russian civilizational state understands the political to be a consequence of the sacred, a liberal empire headed by the United States pursues a program of secularization, confining the sacred to the private sphere, thereby denying the sacred the right to establish an ordering influence on human affairs. He cites the work of Augusto Del Noce, who saw in the 1917 Russian Revolution both a culmination of the secularizing thought of the nineteenth century and a continuation of a millenarian attitude in its Marxist utopianism. With the fall of communism, the millenarianism has come to the fore in the project of reconstituting the Holy Rus as a civilizational state that is grounded in a theological vision and opposed to the secularizing tendencies of the West. This sacred framework for human order opposes the Western commitment to a world centered around sexual liberation and the fulfillment of human desire. The key question for Milbank and Dal Santo is whether a top-down establishment of values through a partnership of church and state authority, as opposed to the bottom-up processes of national self-determination and the liberal idea of religious freedom, would be able to avoid the enemy dynamic manifested in the medieval persecution of heretics and the creation of opposing civilizational empires separated by such religious differences as those between Christianity and Islam.

Adrian Pabst criticizes the tendency to identify the West with a narrow notion of liberalism, embodied in the ideas of the primacy of the individual and a negative notion of liberty understood as freedom from limitations. Rejecting an Enlightenment-based ideology of progress and scientism, Pabst recalls a broader history that includes the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions as the foundations for a conception of Western civilization built around the rule of law, the dignity of the person, and freedom of association in pursuit of a shared vision of the good. As opposed to both nationalist self-interest and a progressive cosmopolitanism that functions according to a logic of economic growth, Pabst invokes a Western tradition grounded in the cultivation of virtue and autonomous associations. He argues for a conception of global order oriented around a commonwealth of nations connected by a common heritage and covenants about shared goals. Such goals can become the basis for eventually reintegrating Russia into a Western civilizational order and for avoiding increasing conflicts with China.

For Russell Berman the civilizational state attempts to establish a vision of the good through reference to a substantive set of values and a specific tradition. This project may involve an imperial gesture to the extent that the civilizational state deems it necessary—as in the case of Russia in Ukraine or China in Xinjiang—to extend its values to a set of people who resist. By contrast, liberal empire does not attempt to establish substantive values but instead seeks to establish the procedural norms—such as the rule of law, free elections, and the protection of individual rights of freedom of speech and religion—within which different cultures might develop. While liberal norms may try to present themselves as neutral, and therefore subject to critique as tradition-less and deracinated, those procedures are nevertheless not culturally or politically neutral but the legacy of a specific European tradition. At the same time, by refraining from establishing a substantive notion of the good through state action, liberalism can be either criticized for being value-less or praised for being open to a variety of cultural conceptions of the good. In the end, however, Berman rejects both the civilizational state and liberal empire as the key political forces in the current global order. Rather, the war in Ukraine demonstrates the centrality of the nation-state as the bearer of both substantive values and the means for allowing for cultural diversity within a global order. Russia’s invasion, if considered as an attempt to establish a vision of the good, demonstrates how a state-imposed conception of the good can lead to a form of imperialism that seeks to expand the power of a nation-state by increasing the number of people subject to its control. At the same time, the reluctance of the United States and Europe to assist Ukraine undermines the idea that the West is attempting to establish its own liberal empire. Instead, the Ukrainians themselves have demonstrated the centrality of the nation as the protector of both a conception of the good and the stability of global order. In the end, it may be that what is at stake in Ukraine is an international order in which each nation-state is able to affirm its values while recognizing other states’ rights to do so as well, as opposed to both the civilizational state and liberal empire, which are committed in their own ways to top-down attempts to impose their values on others.

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Notes

1. Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1989), p. 3.

2. See, for example, John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2018), pp. 139–49.