Confucian new tianxia order: Humaneness to restrain nationalism and save globalisation

Globalisation is in crisis. This should come as no surprise as globalisation has always been led by nation-states. A nation-state, by definition, will do whatever it takes for its own national interest. Globalisation, in contrast, means going beyond nation-states and national interests. Thus if globalisation is led by nation-states, it can only flourish if the leaders of globalisation find it beneficial to their states’ national interests. Once this falls apart, globalisation will be in peril. 

The fall of globalisation

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been the leader of globalisation. When it thought that it was to its benefit, it was happy to offer the service of leadership. In the past decade or more, when the US lost faith in this endeavour, it started rejecting the leadership role, and accusing every other state of taking a free ride from its service and even stealing from it. This sudden change is almost comical, like that of French police chief Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca, who said he was “shocked to find that gambling is going on in here”, only to be handed his winnings.

If the world’s largest economy will not maintain the global order, will the second largest, China, do so? The history of the rise of new national powers does not give us confidence. When a nation-state is rising, it will demand more for its own national interest. The rest of the world, also nation-states, obviously do not want to give in. The result, then, is wars, including World War I and World War II. 

The rise of right-wing populism in the West

The West, especially “old Europe” or Western Europe, having learned the lesson from these wars, tried to go beyond nation-states by way of cosmopolitanism, or the belief that all humans are citizens in a single community. A more aggressive form of the attempt at cosmopolitanism is guided by the idea that human rights override sovereignty, which has led Western countries to intervene with many human rights violations and even crude oppressions and mass killings. 

Interventions in the past two decades, such as with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, however, seem to create new and even more miseries that they are intended to eliminate. To make things right seems to be so demanding on Western countries that oftentimes, they can only pay lip service to the principle that human rights override sovereignty, leading to skepticism and cynicism. A less aggressive form of cosmopolitanism, such as the formation of the European Union (EU) and the creation of a world market, does not seem to be doing too well either. For it leads to serious domestic problems, such as rising economic inequality and political instability that is caused by the failure to assimilate a large group of people with different cultures and religions. All these have led to the rise of right-wing populism in the West. 

A different model: Confucius’s way

Are we doomed, then, by the radical swing between nationalism and cosmopolitanism? These two alternatives seem to be all we have come up with since modernity, or, should we say, European or Western modernity. But is there another modernity? I say yes.

About 2,000 years before European modernity, China entered a transitional period, from 770 BCE to 221 BCE. Before this transition, the old “world order” — the world known to the Chinese — was built on a hierarchy of nobility, in which noble men of each level ran their fiefdoms with some autonomy, and through the pyramid of nobility, a large empire was divided into small, close-knit feudal communities, like Europe in the Middle Ages. But this order collapsed, and through wars of all against all, large, populous, well-connected, plebeianised societies of strangers emerged. 

There were a few de-facto sovereign states that emerged in the “world”. This transition may be a forerunner of the European transition to modernity. Common to both transitions is the need to answer three key political issues in this new reality: the bond of a large state of strangers, the principles of international relations among independent states, and the selection of the ruling members of the state and even the world. I have illustrated the Confucian answer to the third question, and argued why the mixed regime inspired by Confucianism can still be viable and address the crises of “democracy” well, in the first instalment published in this journal. In this second instalment, I will focus on how Confucians answer the first two questions and why it is a viable and even better alternative to the nation-state and cosmopolitan models that came out of Western modernity. 

Familial bonds the primary building blocks

On the issue of a new social bond, Mencius (372 BCE to 289 BCE), an important Confucian thinker, discovered that all human beings have the sentiment of compassion, a sense of care toward strangers. A famous thought experiment he offered to show this is, if you suddenly see a baby who is about to fall into a well, that is, to be killed, would you feel a sense of alarm and distress? It is a beautifully designed experiment for many reasons. It uses a baby that embodies innocence, rather than an adult who might have done something to deserve to die; it asks for our immediate rather than calculated response (which makes the baby a perfect stranger); and it asks us how we feel, not what we will do. 

It is hard to answer no in this hypothetical case. But he also realised that this sentiment of compassion, though universal, is also very fragile. In order for it to be strong enough to hold strangers together, it needs to be cultivated, and family is a universal and important institution to do so. For even an orphan has a family; otherwise, he or she would not survive. We take family as something private, but at the same time, family is the first place for us to transcend our mere self, when, for example, we are asked to save a piece of candy for our baby sister or the best seat for our grandma. This is why familial care is so important to Confucians. 

Confucianism would not be the philosophy of Don Corleone in The Godfather movies (“Never go against the family”), as some have criticised. Rather, family is an institution where we learn to care about others by first learning to care about our family members. The Confucian moral psychology assumes that we care about the sufferings of strangers because they remind us of the sufferings of the ones closer to us. The expansion of care is continuous, and one should keep pushing our care outward, until it embraces every human being, living, not yet born, and dead, and also animals, plants, and things in the world. Family is our path to transcendence, and in this transcendence, the world of strangers is united. 

However, even at the stage of universal care, Confucians think that one still does and should care about the closer ones more than the more distant ones. Just imagine, even if you are this ideal person of universal care, whom would you save first if your daughter and a stranger are drowning? In sum, the Confucian moral ideal is universal but unequal love. 

Therefore, by compassion, the whole world can be bonded together, but at the same time, one is justified to care about one’s own state and people more than other states and peoples. Patriotism is thus justified. But while caring about one’s own state first, one should not disregard the interests of other peoples completely because we, as human beings, also care about other peoples, if we deserve to be called human. For example, if my state and another state are flooded, Confucians would reject the cosmopolitan idea that they should be treated equally, and argue that naturally and justifiably, I should try to save my state first, but I should not do so by directing the flood to a neighbouring state, a practice a defender of nation-state would not object to. 

Preserving a shared human heritage

Moreover, all the humane states should form an alliance and play the role of world police that protect the civilised way of life. Being civilised means the preservation of the shared human heritage, such as the classics and historical statues and buildings, and treating peoples humanely (their own people first, and other peoples second). They should never go to war with each other, because being civilised and compassionate, these human and humane states would never fight against another state for material gains, an act of the beast. But if the people of another state suffers greatly from a bad regime, the alliance of civilised states should intervene, including using military forces, although using force has to be used cautiously and only as the last resort. 

Indeed, Mencius argued that only when a people suffers so greatly as to be ready to welcome the “invaders”, can the liberation be carried out and justified. The Confucian world order is a humaneness-based hierarchy. It is different from the United Nations model where each state is treated equally, or where the five permanent members of the security council are the de-facto dominant forces due to historical contingencies. 

The principle beneath this world order is that humane duties, not human rights, overrides sovereignty. A state that treats its own people well, but emits a lot of carbon dioxide that exacerbates global warming and harming other peoples is not fully humane and thus should not enjoy full sovereignty. This means that other states can legitimately intervene with the climate polices of this state. If a state doesn’t treat its own people well, and even put them in desperate situations, the state loses its sovereignty completely and a liberation by other truly humane states can be justified. 

Only humaneness can tame the power of the state

Unlike cosmopolitanism, a radical version of liberalism, according to which everyone should be treated equally (with equal care?) and states should eventually be abolished, Confucians consider the existence of states legitimate, and the Confucian model puts a state’s interest above other states’. But unlike in the nation-state model, this priority is not absolute, and the legitimacy of a state is limited by how humanely the state treats its own people and other peoples. Confucians would argue that the cosmopolitan model is too good to be true, because it demands too much from human beings, and that the nation-state model is too demeaning to human beings because it treats human beings as self-interest-driven animals only and is also the source of human strives. 

Thus, the Confucian model is more realistic than the cosmopolitan model, and is more idealistic than the nation-state model. It is a “realistic utopia” that strikes a golden mean between the two. Putting it differently, the Confucians realise that only states have power. International organisations cannot really impose their will on states, for a covenant without sword is mere words, as Hobbes would put it. Until there is a united world government that has authority backed up with force, only states can enforce trans-state order. The only hope, then, is to tame the powerful states with humaneness. 

How do we get there if this Confucian new tianxia  (天下, all under heaven) order is truly desirable? A simple path is for G2, the US and China, to take up the role of a benevolent world police, which does not seem likely now. Still, the EU, ASEAN and other responsible great and middle powers can form alliances and offer public goods to all. I am not optimistic about this path, but it is the only realistic path for global order.

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