What is the cause of nations to rise and fall? How does one achieve liberty without sacrificing equality and fraternity? These are the questions which have vexed humanity since the 17th century, as concomitant to the rise of the West and the relative subjugation of the rest of the world, various trends emerged which accrued into stages of “High Empire” in the late 19th century and slow unwinding and reformulation through World War I, II and the Cold War.
Today, there is what is esteemed to be a reversal in the international order taking place. While the United States predominated the 20th century in terms of infrastructure, military, scientific and logistical capability, there is a growing perception that China will fill a gap left by weak US global leadership, and this in part is taking place through the concert of BRICS nations including Russia, India and to a lesser extent Brazil.
There is irony within this, in part that while nations perceive the necessity of an alternative order, they also formulate this order as a matter of self-interest rather than broader beneficence. In the current discourse, the possibility of US hostility towards Venezuela and continued buffering of Iran show outward examples of US-as-empire which within the community of nations appears to be conquest-oriented and revisionist in nature.
China, Russia and others can hold out examples of this to show that the United States is a hypocritical global actor, but they cannot actually provide stellar examples of collaboration by consent. While they can demonstrate power, brute force and economic and scientific sophistication, they have done so on size and momentum alone - there is no ideological system which permits the broader sharing, distribution of and participation in power that permits.
While Politics Shift, Does Culture Really Change?
What is not broadly understood as an institutional approach is that the United States foreign policy generally seeks to expand and reorient global markets - typically along the lines of the IMF, World Bank and US Corporate interest of course - but nonetheless within a framework that has no other shibboleths than 1) the almighty dollar and 2) protecting the almighty dollar from generally redistributionist policies.
What is entailed by joining league with Russia or China? You accept the Wagner group shaking down everyone within 50 miles of their base of operations every once in a while (yes, they’re gone, but the principle holds)? You face spanking every time you accidently say the name of Taiwan or Tibet aloud? There are simply too many rules and not enough principles to participate in this system at an effective level. This produces a purely transactional institutional order which works for a time perhaps, but unlike the global order established by the United States (with international “partners” as it were), there is basically no reason to sustain relations beyond the first transaction.
China, Russia and to a lesser extent India have failed to learn the chief lesson of the United States’ global order in the 20th century and beyond, which is to at least make your propaganda plausible. The ability to do this could still exist within the time horizon of the 21st century, but ultimately making this plausible implies a kind of institutional change in both China and Russia that neither center of power could actually tolerate in a meaningful way.
The Fates of Pericles
The possibility of American institutional collapse is not dispositive of institutional success in other nations (namely Russia, China or India). In fact, it is likely to pull a situational reversal: without the example of institutional development in the United States, most institutional drives towards popular sovereignty will be weak and feckless.
Both China and Russia are already understood as cadres of social control, India is essentially beholden to Hindu nationalist demagoguery, and has only seen economic progress at the advance of cheap oil, from infrastructure that was long ago built with the collaboration of the United States and Europe. Venezuela produces 1 million barrels of oil per day on what was otherwise capacity of 4.5 million before Chavez and Maduro came along.
Iran struggle to develop mastery of its resources in a similar, although less injurious manner. Lula in Brazil is a mostly beneficent leader, but even years of progress under his rule led to a lust for right wing authoritarianism of old, it such a manner that it had to be suppressed by both legal and extra-legal means within the institutional structure that Bolsonaro faced.
This is not an endorsement of global partisanship, or a statement that each country has “good guys and bad guys” and global collaboration should somehow be based on picking out the good guys in each and every of the 200-plus nations on the Earth, but a question of what principles and systematic approaches generate the most consent from the governed?
This leads to the classic argument for the effectiveness of commerce-driven democratic states, first delivered (at least in the canon) with Pericles’ Funeral Oration. This was recorded by the account of Thucydides of the Peloponnesian War, where Athens’ leader Pericles delivered an oration at the end of the first year of the war in the context of a commemoration of the city’s war dead. Pericles argues that what makes Athens great and worth defending is ultimately the openness provided to its people, the lack of walls and hard boundaries, the ability of of citizens to rise and fall in the social order on merit and good actions, and the broader sense of civic duty which drove its citizenry.
What Comes After You Conquer the Hill?
This speech, of course, was effective propaganda. We know that Athens had slaves, that it’s literal walls were defensive borders far beyond the actual city limits in places where Athens had significant economic interests, and ultimately that Athens lost the war to Sparta because - after being laid siege to, cut off from external food supplies and suffering a plague - it was conquered and suffered more of what the weak always must.
And yet in the aftermath of the war, Sparta could not effectively govern Athens. Athens in the centuries after remained the predominant player in the Greek world for over 100 years until the mid 4th century BC, when Philip of Macedon unified the Greeks along more “liberal” lines in the League of Corinth, guaranteeing sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, freedom of religion (as we would understand it then) and other characteristically “open” attitudes which made being governed under a new order at least as acceptable as the old, while providing other benefits.
Ultimately, Rome was in some sense an inheritor of this attitude, and while Rome in the West fractured under feudalism, in the East it last 1000 years beyond that fracture, and within such systems eventually provided the basis for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the modern western conception of democracy that we understand today.
So while the United States represents a hypocritical-but-generally-beneficent hegemon, the idea of multi-polarity in the current international system does not seem to hold because - as in magnetism - a true pole must attract. Currently, BRICS-aligned nations only attract more autocracies, and while the US is becoming more autocratic in its own right (seemingly as a matter of survival), systems that are fundamentally autocratic eventually stagnate when they run out of conquest to plunder (such was the fate of Sparta).
And, adding further qualification, we know that by consent of the governed - in addition to their active participation - is not simply a western concept, but one found inherent to many cultures globally, including the Chinese. To paraphrase Confucius (I am uncertain of the source), “By winning the people, the kingdom is won; by losing the people, the kingdom is lost.” To form a pole, how does one win the people in perpetuity, without simply promising more material benefits as time goes on? The promise is values, built on sustainable collaboration.