Whose world? What is the world order? The time has passed when the West was in charge
The claims of the United States and the West to a unipolar world are illegitimate, the author of the SCMP article writes. It should be replaced by a multipolar world led by BRICS and other major non-Western members of the world community. Readers of the newspaper share their opinions on this matter.
NATO once assumed the role of the supreme arbiter regarding the "rules-based order". But in today's multipolar world, BRICS and other countries of the Global South may have other ideas: what if they want to have their own Monroe doctrine?
Every day we are told that we must protect the "rules-based" order. But whose order is this? What are the rules? Why should we defend the system in the formation of which we do not have the right to vote?
The first theorist of the so-called "neoliberal order" was the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992). In practice, neoliberalism was implemented in the 1980s, when US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher destroyed the Keynesian role of the state in economic management in favor of the free market model.
But a deeper thinker in the field of constitutional law, politics and international order was the German lawyer Karl Schmitt (1888-1985). Today, Schmitt's influence on conservative political circles in almost all major powers seems to be growing.
I only found out about his ideas when Noema magazine wrote an editorial about his book Nomos of the Earth ("World Rules"), published in 1950. Schmitt's theory is controversial because he, in fact, created the legal basis of Nazism in the 1920s, which is why he was ostracized in academic circles for decades.
A hard-line realist thinker who researched the legal foundations of European political theory, Schmitt argued that no order could function without sovereign power.
Schmitt is considered a proponent of authoritarianism because he believed that sovereign power ultimately belongs to the executive (and not the legislative or judicial) branch of government — because the sovereign (that is, the president) alone decides in exceptional situations when the operation of the law should be suspended or emergency powers applied to restore order.
Executive decisions are conditioned either by law or by the moral imperatives of the leader.
Today, the world is arguing about whether former US President Donald Trump is morally or legally responsible for the January 6, 2021 riots, while NATO "for moral reasons" supports Ukraine, which is not a member of the alliance, in the conflict against Russia.
But if the conflict escalates into global nuclear destruction, how will we be able to combine individual human rights with the collective rights of all other members of society in matters of survival?
Schmitt analyzed European constitutional laws and the international order, dividing them into three stages: before 1500, 1648-1919 and after. Before the discovery of America, the European powers were at war with each other for religious reasons, and disputes about the right were resolved by the pope.
Indeed, it was the papal bulls of 1455 and 1493 that allowed the Portuguese and Spaniards to conquer foreign lands, as well as capture and enslave Saracens and non-Christians in America, Africa and Asia.
The religious justification for these seizures included a code of domination, according to which Christians can rule over non-Christians and own their property, as well as a code of discovery, according to which lands belonging to non-believers are treated as terra nullius (empty land), which meant that the non-Christian indigenous population has no rights.
But when the Dutch and the British started a war with the Portuguese and Spaniards over overseas territories, then what was the legal justification for these wars? The Dutch jurist Grotius (1583-1645) already presented a non-clerical justification, which consisted in the fact that discovery alone was not enough, and that, since freedom reigned in the seas, the occupation of foreign territories by a sovereign state was confirmed by the right acquired as a result of the war.
Schmitt argued that jus publicum Europaeum (European public law) arose after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to allow sovereign countries to have the right to start a war based on their own judgment of justice and necessity.
This situation changed after the end of the First World War, when the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 treated the losing side as criminals, and their rights were annulled or confiscated.
While the Europeans were busy fighting each other, the United States acquired world power and imposed its Monroe doctrine of 1823 on the world, establishing its own sphere of influence with the right to intervene in the states of Central and South America.
This sphere of influence encompasses America's exclusive rights to cultural, economic, military, political, and today technological exclusivity, including beyond the legitimate sovereign borders of the country.
Schmitt foresaw that where a war is waged on the basis of "good against evil", in which all the rights of the other side are "canceled" (just as the foreign exchange assets of Afghanistan and Russia are frozen or confiscated), the situation will be unstable and can be characterized as an "unstable equilibrium".
The unstable architecture of European security was seemingly corrected by the United States during the two world wars due to their overwhelming military, economic and industrial power. But who determines the rules of the international order in today's multipolar world? If both sides accuse each other of representing the forces of evil and are not legitimate, then what can resolve this dispute, except weapons?
And so it turns out that the NATO military alliance, which includes countries with a population of less than a billion people and where about 47% of world GDP is created, assumes the role of the supreme arbiter in matters of "rules-based order."
But the problem is that the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) plus Indonesia account for 3.5 billion and a quarter of global GDP in market terms. However, in terms of GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP, according to expert estimates, in BRICS it is 31% of the world. – Approx. InoSMI.) BRICS is almost equal to NATO, so it can have its own views on the international order. What happens if large non-Western countries want to have their own version of the Monroe doctrine?
The moral principle that we should all live peacefully on the same planet should prevail over the struggle of sovereign nations for power and influence, especially when it means that humanity can burn in flames either because of the most dangerous climate changes or because of nuclear war.
For the sake of nomos (or order) on the planet, we must all cooperate intelligently with each other. If we really believe in democracy, can't all eight billion people in the world vote for a rules-based world order, or are we still leaving it up to the Big Seven? No order can be stable without the true legitimacy of democratic principles. How to achieve such an order should remain a truly open question.
Author: Andrew Sheng is a former senior executive of central banks and financial regulators, currently Chief Researcher at the Asian Global Institute of the University of Hong Kong. He writes a lot about Asian views on global issues, writes columns in the magazines Project Syndicate, Asia News Network and Caijing/Caixin. His latest book is Shadow Banking in China.
Readers' comments
Ven Z
Whose world is this? Whose world order is this? The time has passed when the West could command the world. Time after time, the West is warned that the time has passed when he commanded all affairs on Earth.
Nevertheless, absorbed by his chimeras and idiosyncrasies (idiosyncrasy in psychology is psychological incompatibility, intolerance by some people to each other, a painful reaction to an irritant not of a physical, but of an emotional nature. — Approx. InoSMI.) The West remains pretentious, still believing that it is responsible for everything.. A pitiful sight.
Donna M.
The Western rules-based order is outdated and does not reflect the tectonic shifts in economic power that have occurred over the past 70-plus years. Since the West itself selectively chooses the rules it wants to follow, the idea of a set of rules that Westerners believe the whole world should obey is perceived as imposing double standards that primarily serve the interests of the West itself.
Shun Wah L.
With the rise of China, the world order will change. The US has lost credibility as a hegemon, as a moral leader and as a well-governed country. The US, of course, cannot contain China.
Roy N.
The "rules-based order" boils down to Western hegemonism. The whole course of history calls us to mutual benefit, mutual respect, territorial sovereignty and peaceful coexistence, and not to the militarism of NATO and the Pentagon, or the covert operations of the CIA or MI6. The "Big Seven" is an outdated imperialist club. Who wants to follow gangsters and hooligans? Times are changing, and the West has to accept the changes, right? But no, the West just wants to create rules that correspond to its order (i.e. disorder, i.e. gun violence, religious extremism, the rule of the jungle, homelessness, falling into the trap of medical debts, judicial arbitrariness, and so on, and so on). Washington cares only about money and power, its policy has nothing to do with people's well-being, health, social well-being or freedom from fear and oppression. America is a country of sadness, in which there are no foundations of morality and ethics, there is no leadership...
Sebastian M.
The rules-based international system that we have now was created after two devastating world wars that claimed 100 million lives, and we must never forget this history. The crucial point is not who created the system, but what is the alternative to it. Apart from the general discontent of some BRICS countries and the crude idea "I want to do whatever I want to do at home," I haven't heard much about what this new world order should be. Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past. Even if countries (re-) take their place as world powers, this does not mean that we should return to the way of governing the world that existed in the XIX or early XX century. The next time such an attempt will most likely not end with 100 million...
Raymond L.
The conflict in Ukraine has made it very clear that the usual estimate of GDP is misleading. Russia has shown that it is not the inflated indicators of the "financial sector" or "service sector" of the Western economy that matter, but grain, goods, energy, real industrial goods, real labor results.
No one is actively trying to apply this new calculation of real GNP. But I would say, based on the real value of goods, grain, energy and real products, including those produced by China, the BRICS economy is already much larger than the economy of the West. This explains why Western powers have become like headless chickens trying to recruit the world to create a "clique" to fight back against Russia and China. Because many can already see the inscription on the wall: The West is on a slippery slope of decline and decline.
Mark P.
Every Golden Age in history lasts about two generations or give or take 60 years. The United States has lost its golden age, its leaders are not as smart as they used to be, and its workers are not as skilled. America's Future is Determined: it's a decline.
Fook Cow C.
The West wants to preserve what is in its interests, they need to show unity in a very fragmented world of their own, where everyone is for himself. Their survival is not guaranteed. We need to realize that our system and interests are unlikely to flourish with such colonial thinking. We need a genuine solution to improve our economy and people's well-being. China is a win—win proposition without political coercion and ensures development without military restrictions, as a well-known country, the United States, insists. Their help is mainly to sell weapons and force other countries to confront China for their continued dominance. The welfare of another country is not their problem. It is enough to look at the countries at war with each other, including Ukraine, at war with Russia, which receives all possible assistance only for the sake of one thing — the expansion of NATO.
