On the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the continuing war indicates that the foundations of a rules-based global order are not just the rules themselves but also the structure of sovereignty that supports those rules. Sovereignty includes both the use of power and the establishment of a legitimating vision of order. The challenges to the Westphalian system of global order consequently come not just from the Russian invasion but also from the Russian idea of its civilizational mission against Western secularism as well as China’s idea of a “shared humanity for mankind.” Telos 201 provides analyses of both of these alternative visions for global order. Matthew Dal Santo, for example, describes Russia’s stance as a defense of a spiritual rather than a secular conception of the basis of order. Gordon Chang analyzes the way in which China has been promoting its tianxia model of unified global governance against the chaos and conflict of separate sovereign nation-states. The frame within which to view these alternative visions is not the struggle between spirituality and secularism or between China and the West, but the global development of nationalism.
In presenting its vision of peace and harmony in a unified world, the Chinese Communist Party is extending to the world the same compromise that it has established for the Chinese people: give up political freedom in exchange for peace and harmony. In some ways, such a compromise has been the organizing principle of Chinese history since the Qin dynasty’s initial establishment of a unified imperial center, in which the cultural, economic, and political dominance of a central Chinese empire stands at the basis of the tianxia system of world unity. Centered economically around the agricultural fertility of the core Chinese regions, this system could maintain itself by either conquering or absorbing foreign peoples, all of whom ultimately wanted to gain access to the material abundance and stability of the Chinese heartland. This material abundance also grounded the centrality of China for the global economy, in which Chinese manufactures dominated world markets from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. But if access to Chinese goods provided the impetus for European colonial exploration, the economic consequences of European colonization eventually established the industrial capitalism that would displace the centrality of China for the global economy.[1] To the extent that industrial capitalism necessitated a nation-state political structure,[2] China could not regain its prominence for the world economy until it became a nation-state itself, abandoning the tianxia model of its place within the world and adding to its existing central bureaucracy the components of a modern nation-state: a unified internal market, universal public education, and an industrialization of its military.
The nation-state model originated out of the compromises stemming from the historical lack of an overarching political unity in Europe since the dissolution of the Roman and Carolingian Empires. In the Middle Ages, Christianity provided the basic spiritual orientation that could define Europe in contrast to the Muslim world, but this identity did not establish a unified political order. Rather, the long period of feudalism established a model of constant political and military conflict between different sovereign lords. Such conflict within Europe was tempered though not eliminated by the influence of Christianity. By the time of the Crusades, Europe had attained an increasing religious and political unity in which emperor and pope were able to exercise a dual sovereignty, but in which this sovereignty was not administratively unified.
While this relative unity was established at the cost of violence against external enemies such as Muslims and internal heretics such as the Albigensians, such violence became more widespread after the Reformation undermined the spiritual unity of the medieval church. The Peace of Westphalia brought an end to this devastation with a compromise between unity and heterogeneity. Henceforth, religious differences could be set aside by allowing heterogeneity to exist within a system of sovereign nation-states, each with its own spiritual basis, but all agreeing to limitations on war, at least within Europe. This compromise established the conceptual foundations for a European order of nation-states, each with its own sovereignty and separate understanding of the basis of its own political identity. This framework created limitations on war and the basis for international order.[3]
During the colonial era, however, this model did not apply on a global level. Limitations on war only applied between nation-states, and nation-states only existed in Europe. These European nation-states carried out absolute war and genocide in the space outside of Europe, eventually becoming nation-empires, whose conflicts with each other culminated in World War I.[4] At the same time, the success of the colonial project eventually led in turn to the development of nationalist movements in the colonies as a prerequisite for successful anti-colonial struggles. Japan and, later, China participated in this shift toward nation-state structures as a means of countering European colonialism. As a consequence, the idea of a Chinese tianxia model of global order must be seen in the context of the current nationalist basis of the modern Chinese state.
As Hannah Arendt laid out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, nationalism has two incarnations. On the one hand, a focus on the nation-state presumes a Westphalian order that recognizes the boundaries of nation-states and the principle by which cultural and political heterogeneity is maintained through the system of nation-states. On the other hand, both the British and French nation-empires and the expansionist tendencies of pan-nationalist movements such as Nazism and pan-Slavism established an alternative notion of nationalism that is grounded in the idea of a continuing expansion of the nation as a basis for new forms of imperial domination. As opposed to the stabilizing influence of the principle of internal sovereignty and the recognition of the integrity of boundaries between existing nation-states, the expansionist form of nationalism has led to world wars and genocides.
Unfortunately, the world seems to be standing between these two alternatives once again. Erik Hendriks-Kim analyzes how Chinese political philosophers have recently been promoting a tianxia model of global order that would replace the incessant conflict of the nation-state model. In doing so, however, they are not leading the world toward harmony but back toward the colonialist model of nation-empires. China and Russia are attempting to project their power in a way that recalls how the Japanese sought to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Germans imagined the Third Reich. As John W. M. Krummel indicates, the Kyoto School could frame Japan’s expansionist project as anti-colonialist, pointing to the way in which the Westphalian system had been premised on nation-empires rather than nation-states.
Until 1989, colonialism and then the Cold War prevented the Westphalian system from protecting the sovereignty of individual nation-states. U.S. supremacy after the Cold War offered the opportunity to establish the Westphalian system globally, combining a common set of rules for international order with heterogeneity spread out across separate nation-states. Russia’s and China’s challenges to this order do not fit the mold of pre-modern civilizations but of the postmodern revival of the model of the nation-empire. Today’s building of alliances between nation-states will be crucial to stemming this renewed threat of imperialism.
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1. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
2. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983).
3. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006).
4. Kai Evers and David Pan, eds., Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2018).
