Morality and bipolarity: a Chinese view

The Exhaustive Capacity (power) of a state is determined by the sum of three capacities: military, economic and cultural, whose effect is multiplied by a fourth one, politics. Power would be the coercive application of these capacities and Authority, its projection and recognition in an interstate or global environment. From the perspective of Moral Realism, respect for common moral principles (traditionally care for harm; justice/deception; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation) and exemplary good governance in an anarchic and unstable international system produce Strategic Credibility and lead to a peaceful and more stable order. International Leadership is the essential element for this complex equation of political theory to work. This is the approach of Professor Yan Xuetong, Dean of the Institute of International Relations at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. He explains it in his book Leadership and the rise of Great Powers, (Princeton University Press, 2019), which is on sale in Spain. A solid analysis, which also shows the Chinese will to increase their cultural influence (soft power) in the global environment.  

According to these capacities, the Dean distinguishes four categories of states: dominant (United States); emerging (China); regional (Russia, Japan, France, UK, Brazil and Australia, in addition to the sub-regional ones, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia); and small (the rest, whose aspiration is to survive in the system). A number of trends emerge from the application of this criterion. The first is that the centre of the international system has moved from Europe to East Asia in the post-Cold War period (despite the fact that the Yalta system has not been modified) as a result of the weakening of Europe, the subsequent weakening of the United States, also motivated by the decline in its strategic credibility during the Trump administration, and the rise of China to the category of emerging power since 2010 (second largest economy in the world) and 2017, when its strategy of peaceful growth has been transformed into one of global competition and strengthening of its credibility. The second is that the international configuration in the next decade is expected to evolve from unipolarity to bipolarity between the United States and China, due to the impossibility of the former exercising global leadership and the increase in the capabilities of the latter, moving it to assume its role as a major emerging power. This new configuration will not necessarily generate military confrontations between the two powers, but rather economic ones, although bipolarity will not be able to avoid possible conflicts in other regions either, nor put an end to global instability, which will be growing in a system that is ideologically fractured and more inclined to bilateral diplomacy than to weakened multilateral negotiation. Third, such instability could be counteracted by the production of international standards (climate, arms control, trade...) that can be assumed by the rest of the countries, by strategic credibility (not Chinese alignment, for example) and by leadership.  

Xuetong distinguishes four types of international leadership: the reliable humanist authority, consistent and based on moral principles; the hegemonic one (United States), reliable but based on the "double standard" typical of the Cold War and the Post-Cold War; the tyrannical one, consistent but based on fear, which in an anarchic system like the international one, where each state seeks its own interest, degenerates into the multiplication of conflicts; and the anemocracy (Trumpism), inconsistent and without criteria or credibility, which causes disorientation and chaos. To exemplify this theory, the professor takes examples from both the distant history of China and recent Western contemporaneity. By equalizing situations in both contexts, he also finds ways for joint reflection between traditional liberal thinkers (Hamilton and Paine), American realists (Morgenthau, Gilpin, Waltz) and Chinese philosophy and history (Confucius, Laosi, Xunzi, Mencius). And through him, for the theoretical creation of a new common framework of understanding: "international authority cannot be imposed, it has to be accepted, voluntarily, by the rest of the actors" (Xunzi); "universal principles cannot be exported by fire and sword, but presented to the rest of the world through successful examples" (Paine). In this way, the values of liberalism (equality, democracy, freedom) could be regenerated in a future shared leadership, by some prevalent values of the Chinese culture (benevolence, correction, good habits). 

The progressive implantation of a humanist, or moral, authority leadership in the bipolar configuration of the next decade, which the author takes for granted, also has several challenges, caused by recent events. The first, very notable, is the consolidation in recent years of ultra-personalist leaderships that are not subject to the concept of leadership as a fruit of team and organizational work within states and institutions. The cases of Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India or Shinzo Abe in Japan, that is, in the close regional powers and rivals of China, serve the professor to exemplify the hard and aggressive personalisms, according to him, that represent a type of state leadership, difficult to project a new international framework of cooperation and construction of norms based on agreement. Therefore, the prospect of global instability will not only not disappear, but will multiply. The second, partly as a consequence of this fact, is the international polarisation in the face of the inability of the dominant liberalism to universalise its principles in an environment of growing ideological confrontation at regional and global level: Shiism -unism in Islam-; liberals -anti-establishment populists in the European democracies and the United States; capitalism -socialism in Latin America-. The third, to which the author does not refer because the book is previous, is the pandemic of the COVID 19, which has meant the appearance of doubts and alterations in the international order, the economy, the credibility of the powers and in the future perspectives.   

Professor Yan Xuetong's solid political reflection helps to understand one of the Chinese interpretations, perhaps the dominant one at this time, of power and international order. Xuetong himself recognises several tendencies in current Chinese thought: Marxist, traditionalist, pragmatic, expansionist and even a liberal current. But like all good theoretical analysis, as complex as any in the area of international relations, it suffers from some weakness. One, on the contemporary political historical framework on which it focuses, which places the United States as the dominant power since the Second World War and liberalism as the triumphant theoretical foundation in contemporary times, where the role of China has been of little relevance until the 21st century.  

China's strategic distance from multilateral and global decision-making bodies may now weaken its vision and the power's own political and cultural capacity. The author omits this weakness. And another one of modern historical-political character that perhaps determines the partiality of the approach: the international system of Westphalia (1684) was reached because it had previously happened the break of the unity of the medieval religious thought, the construction of the Christian Renaissance humanism and the discovery of the Atlantic and global territory. Phenomena that sheltered the flourishing of the Enlightenment. The rise of liberalism to hegemony and moral authority was not born at the end of the Second World War, but was strengthened by that victory and by that of 1989, in both cases, against totalitarianisms. Its birth takes place with the candles and lights that illuminate the Westphalian system, the Congress of Vienna, Versailles and Yalta. A discontinuous and violent process, but also progressive and beneficial.