The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just a war, but an epoch-making event, the shock waves of which herald a paradigm shift worldwide. Concerns about the next major conflict have long since spread – in Taiwan.
Each generation tries to classify the events that happen to it, to make sense of them, to gain insights from them and in the end, hopefully, to make good deductions for the future.
From this joint, discursive action, a narrative emerges over time, a story that will shape the self-image of this generation. What do I mean? When skimming through a colleague’s brief CV, I read: “September 11 and the financial crisis of 2008 shaped his political thinking.”
The colleague is younger than me, in his early thirties. If I had to write down which events were formative for me and my generation, then I would certainly mention the fall of the Berlin Wall in the first place.
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In many respects, the 1990s were a decade of new freedoms, because the Iron Curtain was torn, new travel destinations opened up and political change led to more freedom for the individual and for society as a whole.
The noughties, on the other hand, must have been rather pessimistic, if I may refer to the short biography of my colleague. In any case, the self-image of both of us is different, the view of the world is different, and in the end there may even be a different image of man, which is different in detail, due to these reflected experiences.
There is not one narrative per generation, but different ones that conflict with each other and represent different groups in a society.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, two schools emerged: In his book The End of History, Francis Fukuyama spoke of a new dawn for liberal democracy, which was now on the road to victory. Samuel Huntington, on the other hand, saw a multipolar world emerging, with a number of power centers and situations of competition and conflict emanating from them.
Today we are again in such a historical moment in which we have to process an epochal break and make it comprehensible through verbalization. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the post-war order of Europe, shaking old certainties that are the foundations of the international order.
So the Kremlin’s attack on the democratic neighboring country is not “just” a war, but an epoch-making event, the shock waves of which herald a paradigm shift worldwide.
There is already concern around the world that the dictator in Beijing will also start a war against a peaceful neighboring country. For some time now, China’s autocrat has been threatening democratic Taiwan with plans to annex it and, as he puts it, “reunite” with China.
Like Putin, who claims that Ukraine does not exist because its territory has always belonged to “holy Russia,” Xi says Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic. The Communist Party has never ruled over the island about 100 miles off the coast.
As a result of events, the rise of Chinese and Russian dictators, both of whom have joined in a struggle against their common enemy, freedom, commentators conclude that we are seeing the return of the bi-polar world analogous to that of the time between the building and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is not true.
The relapse into the all-out confrontation that Xi and Putin are after comes after 75 successful years in which democracy and the social market economy have shown what good they can do. This period of time also brutally revealed that a democracy without the social (very often subsumed under the keyword neoliberal), as preferred by the Anglo-Saxon world, does not work.
In this sense alone, the thesis of a new bi-polarity does not hold up: in the USA and in the People’s Republic there is a very similar degree of inequality in terms of income and the distribution of wealth. Both countries have a maximally different political system, but the same neoliberal understanding of the economy.
Both countries are therefore fighting in the same way against the anger with which those who have been left behind economically want to finally make themselves heard. So China and America are by no means two poles, but in a certain sense jointly damned and losers of history: Systems that cannot (China) or do not want to think of civil and social freedoms together (USA) cannot exist in the long run.
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I would therefore broaden my view somewhat from the big players China and America in order to understand what is shaping our time, this epoch, the second decade of the 21st century.
What is similar to the dictatorships and autocracies from India to Turkey to Hungary is that their narratives go back to ancient times: they are always looking for a scapegoat to blame for all failures and mistakes. If only this scapegoat were killed, then everything would be better.
For Xi, the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” can only succeed if Taiwan is conquered, all cities are destroyed and the people are degraded and subjugated. One wonders what positive influence such a war is supposed to have on Chinese society, which has been destroyed by the failed economic policies of Xi and the CP.
Narendra Modi wants to make India a Hindu state, which for him means “all Muslims out”. This means that 200 million people living in India are being demoted to last-class citizens by him and his party.
Viktor Orban has also discovered his scapegoat in the Muslims. Politicians like Putin, Xi, Modi and Orban act through the resentment that they inject like poison into their societies. Resentment is also the seed from which fascism grows, as the Economist has pointed out in this essay.
In democracies, on the other hand, empathy is the lifeblood. Empathy means thinking your way into people with different positions, thinking about problems and issues from different perspectives, understanding them and ultimately finding a solution through facts, science and civilized political discourse.
Where this is no longer the case, not only does democracy end, but every form of culture and civilization that wants to bear the name “human””. Because where the standard of empathy no longer counts, as we have seen, people are degraded or, in the worst form, destroyed as non- or sub-human.
A lack of empathy can also run rampant in democracies: In the USA, the sentence “Why should I pay for someone else if they are sick” was uttered with verve as the argument par excellence against universal health insurance.
The answer is provided by real democracies from Germany to Taiwan: because people who feel connected to one another as a group, like in a nation, live together in a community of solidarity. It should be easy to put yourself in the position of the poor or the sick.
Where such a simple and original human achievement is no longer possible, democracy is at an end (incidentally also Christianity, to which a number of Americans who lack empathy are known to give so much).
So if we want to talk about a bi-polar world again, then the poles are not free America and unfree China. Rather, we should speak of the confrontation between the sphere of empathy on the one hand and that of resentment on the other.
Incidentally, unlike during the Cold War, there are no “non-aligned states” here. There is no narrow degree of change between empathy and resentment on which one could, as it were, prance along between the two.
The self-understanding and the narrative of our time should reflect this realization: In this decade, a country will not be attacked, as on September 11th, or, as in 2008, a financial system that has gotten out of control will come to an end, but we are experiencing a worldwide Attack on empathy, which is the basis of every human interaction.
Where resentment triumphs – for the moment – concentration camps are set up again, as in Xi Jinping’s China.
Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian teaches democratic theory in Germany, Austria and Spain as an honorary professor at Leuphana University. In the 2017-18 academic year, he was at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong to conduct research on China’s rise. He is currently researching new technologies at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and how they are used in democracies and abused in dictatorships.
