Today’s world order is bi-polar: on the one hand there are democratic systems, on the other dictatorial ones. The USA and China face each other as centers of power. But they are not real opponents, because there are more similarities than you might think. One of them: You are at risk of losing your livelihood.
When the Cold War came to an end, the Berlin Wall fell and the run-down Soviet Union dissolved, two authors made a steep career with their theses on the future of the world: one was the Harvard historian Samuel Huntington, who wrote the “Clash of Civilizations ‘, the other by Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who spoke of the ‘end of history’. Both book titles have become dictums with which one can succinctly summarize one’s own world view. It’s every author’s dream to do that. And if it succeeds, then that speaks in a certain way for the content of the book, regardless of whether you agree with all the theses in it.
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In any case, Huntington sees the end of the bi-polar world as an opportunity for different civilizations in the world to reposition themselves and each become their own power center. Overshadowing this inherently charming multipolar model was Huntington’s thesis that war would break out at the fringes where these civilizations met. What was particularly important to the historian here was the reference to “the limits of Islam”, which are bloody all over the world.
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.
Fukuyama, on the other hand, saw the world shine in a new, glorious one-dimensionality: With the victory of democracy and freedom over dictatorship and repression, the everlasting interplay between good and evil came to an end. In fact, the enthusiasm for democracy that broke out after 1990 proved the political scientist right for the moment.
Today, a little more than a quarter of a century later, we are smarter in some areas, since a reality that has happened is something different than a prognosis about a future that is yet to happen. And it can be said that both authors were somehow right and somehow wrong: The world is polar again, but not multi-polar, but bi-polar. Democratic values are enjoying measurably increasing popularity among people all over the world.
At the same time, the number of well-functioning democracies is decreasing every year. So we’re back at a point where you have to come up with new projections about the future from the various data points. The following applies: As long as the future has not happened, it is open. In other words, every projection is no more than that, although everyone who writes one knows that only exaggeratedly formulated scenarios have a chance of being discussed by a broad public.
I think it’s fair to say that there hasn’t been a multitude of powerhouses. Like every power vacuum, the one at the beginning of the 1990s also reshuffled the cards and hegemonic interests were re-articulated. In this sense, the thirst for power that the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has developed with increasing economic prosperity is not a specifically Chinese development, but one that was and is to be found in all corners of the world.
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Countries in China’s immediate vicinity cannot help but relate to this new, aggressive center of power. The immediate periphery, Hong Kong and Taiwan, has suffered the most. Such a new articulation of power is also expressed internally, towards its own population, which the people in Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia have to experience bitterly and on a daily basis.
Many, if not all, of the challenges facing the world’s democracies stem from the uneasiness that countries like China and Russia feel when democratic values take root in their immediate vicinity. Disinformation campaigns, fake news and cyber attacks are just as much a part of the agenda as military provocations and threats of war. That comes from outside. But there is also a danger lurking within democracy itself: everywhere in the world they must close the gaping gap between those who have and those who have not. This is only possible if everyone has access to affordable health care and good education.
The fact that the USA, as the mother ship of modern democracy, does not have either, i.e. is at most far removed from this ideal, proves that the Anglo-Saxon marriage of democracy with unrestrained capitalism does not work and must be overcome by the free world. Democracy would do well to free itself from this fixation and look at the continental European model of a social market economy, which emphasizes the primacy of people over the economy, and measures and balances fairness in this way, where the market follows other interests that are different not oriented towards people.
In the struggle between the two models, between such a renovated, liberal democracy and a totalitarian system based on repression and oppression like the Chinese, the majority of people opt for the former. In a survey by the PEW Institute in autumn 2020, large majorities in sixteen out of seventeen countries (16 democracies and Singapore) gave answers that make this view plausible: China was attested that it oppresses its own population and the respondents therefore from the People’s Republic move away and wish for closer cooperation with the USA. In Singapore, the ethnic Chinese, who make up the largest group, voted for the Chinese model, while the other ethnic groups in Singapore were also clearly in favor of democracy.
The judgment spread in the West by propaganda and fake news, among other things, that democracy is on the retreat everywhere is wrong. Nevertheless, she cannot start an unhindered triumphal march, but has to face the aggression of the other side. This has already led to countries like the United States of America giving up a “strategic ambiguity”, a certain form of neutrality, especially because of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also because of an announced campaign by China against the neighboring island democracy of Taiwan , because, so the reasoning goes, neutrality must no longer have any place in such a changing, polarized world.
Every country must respond to the attack on Ukraine, just as the international community would have to respond to a war of aggression by China on Taiwan. At the same time, there are still actors like India who behave as if they belong to the non-aligned countries. India’s leadership, although nominally democratic and hostile to China, buys oil from Russia and does not condemn the Kremlin’s illegal war.
Both blocs, the democratic and the dictatorial, have begun a contest for influence over the countries in their respective orbits. The People’s Republic’s “New Silk Road” initiative is probably best known. This infrastructure loan project has pushed countries into political and economic dependence on China. The G7 recently decided, as a quasi-democratic response, to put 600 billion into a similar project as a first step, which, according to US President Biden, should be purely economic and for the mutual benefit of all those involved.
So are China and the US now adversaries in a way that Russia and America were during the Cold War? No, because both countries are more similar than one might think: the inequality in China and America is about the same, prosperity and wealth were only granted to a small caste of the 1.4 billion people. China inherited from America the predatory capitalism that has tested and potentially destroyed communities in both East and West. Both countries are therefore fighting against their own demise, because without equality in democracy and without meritocracy, as it is actually upheld in Confucian societies, neither America nor China can continue to exist.
The European Union will therefore play a decisive role in the future world order. Democracy, freedom, human rights, a social market economy, health insurance and education for all can throw the value alliance into the balance. The dispute is already tough, military escalation is always possible. Neither Huntington nor Fukuyama have given Europe a key role in the future of the world. But like I said, the future isn’t set in stone until it happens.
