China’s Global Civilization Initiative & Restoring the Westphalian World Order

Professor Glenn Diesen

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 laid the foundation for the modern world order, which is based on a balance of power between sovereign equals to obstruct hegemonic ambitions. The Westphalian balance of power could reduce zero-sum rivalries by championing the principle of indivisible security, as enhancing the security of adversaries would also improve one’s own security.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been promoting a revisionist world order based on US hegemony and sovereign inequality, which is legitimized under the banner of universal liberal values. The hegemonic world order aimed to transcend international anarchy, yet it was inevitably temporary and unstable as its durability depended on obstructing the rise of potential rivals and promoting a system of sovereign inequality. The era of hegemony is already over as the world transitioned to a multipolar balance of power, and there is subsequently a need to rediscover the principle of indivisible security.

China’s Global Civilisational Initiative can contribute to restoring and improving a stable Westphalian world order based on a balance of power among sovereign equals. China’s Global Civilizational Initiative, organized around the principle of “the diversity of civilizations”, can be interpreted as a rejection of universalism and thus support for sovereign equality. By rejecting the right to represent the values of other people, the Global Civilizational Initiative reassures the world that an intrusive US hegemony will not be replaced by an intrusive Chinese hegemony. The Global Civilization Initiative complements China’s economic and security initiatives around the world, which are also organized around the principle that stability requires a multipolar world order.

World order: Hegemony or balance of power?

World order refers to the arrangement of power and authority that provides the foundation for the rules of the game in terms of how world politics should be conducted. The modern world order is primarily based on the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, in which a hegemonic order was replaced with a balance of power between sovereign equals. While the Peace of Westphalia was a European order, it laid the foundation for the modern world order due to 500 years of Western dominance.

The European order had previously been organized under the hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire. However, power began to fragment and the Reformation undermined the universalism of the Catholic Church as a legitimacy for its rule. The collapse of the hegemonic order led to the brutal Thirty Years War (1618-48) in which none of the conflicting sides were able to claim a decisive victory and reassert hegemonic control, while the universal legitimacy of the Catholic Church had collapsed. While the Thirty Years' War initially began as a religious dispute between the Catholics and the Protestants, the primacy of power politics became evident as even Catholic France aligned itself with Protestant Sweden to balance the excessive power of the Catholic Hapsburg Empire. The Europeans were killing each other at a horrific rate, yet none would be able to restore a European order based on one centre of power.

The war ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which laid the foundation for the modern world order. The Westphalian peace outlined a new European order based on a balance of power among sovereign equals. The Peace of Westphalia eliminated the overlapping authorities by asserting the sovereignty of princes, which in time led to the concept of national sovereignty. In a system of sovereign states, peace was ensured by a balance of power as a nation or group of nations defended itself by matching the power of the other side.

In the absence of a hegemon, Europe had to address the subsequent international anarchy as the state became the highest sovereign. International anarchy refers to a state of international relations where there is no centralized authority or governing body to regulate the interactions and behaviour of nation-states. In other words, it is a situation where each country is sovereign and independent, with no superior authority to enforce rules or resolve disputes. Conflicts thus derive from security competition, as the efforts by one state to increase its security may undermine the security of others.

A key principle of the Peace of Westphalia was thus the principle of indivisible security as ensuring the security of opponents was a critical step toward achieving lasting peace and stability in Europe. To ensure stability, it is required to guarantee the security of all states participating in the order. This principle was a departure from the traditional approach to international security in which the victors in a conflict could punish and subjugate the defeated side. Thus, the order aimed to replace conquest and domination with constraints and cooperation. This principle was largely embraced with the establishment of the Concert of Europe in 1815 as France was included as an equal participant, despite being defeated in the Napoleonic War.

However, Westphalia was a European order and sovereign equality was limited to the Europeans as the representatives of advanced and “civilized states”. However, the gradual diffusion of power and weakening of European dominance resulted in the incremental dismantlement of colonial empires, which entailed extending sovereign equality to all states. The Westphalian world order subsequently laid the foundation for international law in accordance with the UN Charter and the concept of colonial trusteeship was gradually eliminated. Yet, the bloc politics of the Cold War and the security dependencies recreated limited sovereignty.

At the end of the Cold War, there was an opportunity to establish a truly reformed Peace of Westphalia based on the principle of indivisible security within a global balance of power between sovereign equals. Yet, the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in an immense concentration of power in the West, under the leadership of the US. Furthermore, the ideological victory of the Cold War fuelled hubris and the conviction that liberal democratic values were universal and should lay the foundation for sovereign inequality. Subsequently, an international balance of power was rejected in favour of what was envisioned to be hegemonic stability.

The Rise and Fall of Pax-Americana

For the first time in history, there was a prospect of establishing a truly global hegemon under US rule. The desire to establish a new world order based on US hegemony was legitimized by claims of representing universal values - liberal democracy.

The benign theory was that hegemony and liberal democratic values would ensure a more durable peace than a balance of power. The peaceful coexistence in the West during the Cold War was to be extended to the entire world in the post-Cold War era. One month after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, President Bush triumphantly declared at the State of the Union address in January 1992: “We are the United States of America, the leader of the West that has become the leader of the world”.

The concept of Pax-Americana derives from “Pax-Romana”, a period of peace and stability that existed under the hegemonic rule of the Roman Empire during the first and second centuries AD. The 200-year-long period ensured relative peace and exceptional levels of economic prosperity and cultural development. While Pax-Romana was characterized by relative peace and stability, it was also marked by the suppression of dissent and the imposition of Roman culture and values on conquered peoples. The US ambition of advancing its global primacy to spread liberal values had many benign intentions, yet hegemony requires suppressing rising powers and denying sovereign equality. President John F. Kennedy had cautioned against a hegemonic peace in 1963 when he stated: “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave”.

Hegemonic peace can only be sustained by preventing the rise of rival powers. Less than two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Wolfowitz doctrine of global dominance was revealed in a leaked draft of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) of February 1992. The document asserted that the “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”, which included the rise of allies such as Germany and Japan. Furthermore, under the rule of a hegemon, the principle of sovereign equality is abandoned as the hegemon claims the right to represent and defend other peoples. Thus, international law per the UN was undermined and replaced with what Washington refers to as the “international rules-based order”, which is a hegemonic system based on sovereign inequality. To some extent, this replicates the same authority the Catholic Church previously had in Europe to claim universal sovereignty over all peoples.

Under a balance of power international law is designed to promote mutual constraints, when there is a hegemon the new rules of the game will remove constraints on the hegemon. Under the collective hegemony of the West during the unipolar era, the world was subsequently artificially redivided into liberal democracies with full sovereignty versus authoritarian states with limited sovereignty. Irrespective of benign intentions, the common denominator of democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, and the global war on terror was full sovereignty for Western liberal democracies and limited sovereignty for the rest. Liberal democracy thus became a new indicator of civilized states worthy of full sovereignty, and the West could again reassert its virtue in a new civilizing mission – recreating the ideas of the garden versus the jungle.

In 1999, NATO invaded Yugoslavia in a breach of international law in accordance with the UN Charter. However, it was argued that the war was illegal but legitimate. This was an extraordinary framing as legitimacy was decoupled from legality. Liberal democracy and human rights were argued to be the alternative source of legitimacy. Implicitly, the reference to liberal values as a non-legal source of legitimacy was the sole prerogative of the West and its allies. Liberal values thus become a clause of exceptionalism in international law for the US and its allies. Following the illegal invasion of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed the relevance of Westphalia in the era of liberal hegemony:

“I was already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country's internal affairs are for it and you don't interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance. I did not consider Iraq fitted into this philosophy, though I could see the horrible injustice done to its people by Saddam”.

There was a desire to institutionalize the clause of exceptionalism to legitimize liberal hegemony. Discussions began to advocate for an “alliance of democracies” as an alternative source of legitimacy to the UN, as the West should not be constrained by authoritarian states. This idea was reformed as the proposal for a “Concert of Democracies”, which “could become an alternative forum for the approval of the use of force in cases where the use of the veto at the Security Council prevented free nations from keeping faith with the aims of the U.N. Charter”. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, likewise promised to establish a “League of Democracies” if he won the presidency to reduce the constraints on Western democracies under US leadership.

Decoupling legitimacy from legality eventually resulted in the so-called “rules-based international order” based on sovereign inequality, which replaces international law with its foundation in sovereign equality. The rules-based international order allegedly builds on international law by supplementing democratic values and humanitarian law, although in reality, it is instrumental in legitimizing hegemony. When conflicting principles such as territorial integrity or self-determination emerge, the “rules” are always power interests. In the case of Kosovo and increasingly Taiwan, the US leans towards self-determination. In Crimea, the US insists on the principle of territorial integrity. The West’s deliberate dismantlement of international law thus resulted in what was interpreted by much of the world as a hypocritical condemnation of Russia.

Liberal hegemony predictably came to an end as the US exhausted its resources and legitimacy to dominate the world, while other centres of power such as China, India and Russia began to collectively balance the excesses of the US and create alternatives. The international system subsequently gravitates towards equilibrium, which is the “natural state” of the international system.

China’s Multipolar Balance of Power

China has been the leading state among the “rise of the rest”, which develops a multipolar balance of power based on sovereign equality. To ensure that a new balance of power is benign, China is seemingly reviving the principle of indivisible security by arguing that no state can have proper security unless the other states in the international system also have security. China’s support for a multipolar distribution of power, legitimized by civilizational diversity, signifies powerful efforts to restore the Westphalian world order - although as a world order rather than a European order.

China has to some extent replicated the three-pillared American System of the early 19^th century, in which the US developed a manufacturing base, physical transportation infrastructure, and a national bank to counter British economic hegemony and subsequent intrusive political influence. China has similarly decentralized the international economic infrastructure by developing leading technological ecosystems, launched the impressive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, and developed new financial instruments of power.

A natural “balance of dependence” has emerged, which replicated the geopolitical balance of power logic. All economic interdependent partnerships are defined by asymmetries, as one side will always be more dependent than the other. In an asymmetrical interdependent partnership, the more powerful and less reliant side in a dyad can convert economic dependence into political power. The more dependent side, therefore, has systemic incentives to restore a balance of dependence by enhancing strategic autonomy and diversifying economic partnerships to reduce reliance on the more powerful actor. The international system thus moves toward a natural equilibrium in which no states can extract unwarranted political influence over other states.

China has not displayed hegemonic intentions in which it would seek to prevent diversification and multipolarity, rather it has signalled to be content with merely being the leading economy as the “first among equals”. Case in point, Russian efforts to diversify its economic connectivity in Greater Eurasia have not been opposed by Beijing, which has made Moscow more positive to China’s economic leadership in the region. This represents a very different approach from the hegemonic model of Washington, in which the US attempts to decouple Russia from Germany, China, India, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and other economic partners.

China has avoided imposing dilemmas on other countries to choose between “us” and “them” and has even been reluctant to join formal military alliances that advance a zero-sum approach to international security. The development of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as economic institutions are similarly pursuing the seeking security with member states rather than security against non-members, which is evident as membership in these institutions is extended to rivals such as India. The Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative are attempts to create new platforms for global economic and security cooperation.

The Global Civilisational Initiative

More recently, China built further on the initiatives for a multipolar distribution of power by launching the Global Civilizational Initiative. Xi Jinping’s call for a diversity of civilizations is very significant as it translates into support for sovereign equality, and rejecting universalist ideals that can legitimize interference in domestic affairs. The anti-hegemonic rhetoric was made apparent by China’s President Xi Jinping in his argument for civilizational distinctiveness:

“A single flower does not make spring, while one hundred flowers in full blossom bring spring to the garden… We advocate the respect for the diversity of civilizations. Countries need to uphold the principles of equality, mutual learning, dialogue and inclusiveness among civilizations, and let cultural exchanges transcend estrangement, mutual learning transcend clashes, and coexistence transcend feelings of superiority”.

Xi Jinping’s vision of constructing a benign Westphalian peace was also indicated by reiterating the need to replace zero-sum calculations with the recognition that security is inherently indivisible:

“Humanity lives in a community with a shared future where we rise and fall together. For any country to achieve modernization, it should pursue common development through solidarity and cooperation and follow the principles of joint contribution, shared benefits and win-win outcome”.

The ideas of Xi Jinping reflect those of the 18^th-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who argued that preserving national distinctiveness builds international diversity and strength when it does not disparage other nations or claim cultural superiority. Translated to the current era, preserving civilization distinctiveness requires avoidance of concepts such as a “clash of civilizations” and “superiority of civilizations”.

The proposal for Xi Jinping enjoys support from Russia, as President Putin previously argued that each nation must have the freedom to develop on its own path and that “primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition”. These words are based on the ideas of Nikolai Danilevsky who argued in the 19^th century that pursuing a single path of modernization prevented nations from contributing to universal civilization:

“The danger consists not of the political domination of a single state, but of the cultural domination of one cultural-historical type… The issue is not whether there will be a universal state, either a republic or a monarchy, but whether one civilization, one culture, will dominate, since this would deprive humanity of one of the necessary conditions for success and perfection – the element of diversity”.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky similarly argued in 1873 that Russia would not be able to be independent or contribute much to the world if it merely emulated the West:

“Embarrassed and afraid that we have fallen so far behind Europe in our intellectual and scientific development, we have forgotten that we ourselves, in the depth and tasks of the Russian soul, contain in ourselves as Russians the capacity perhaps to bring new light to the world, on the condition that our development is independent”.

Civilizational diversity is imperative as it, much like biodiversity, makes the world more capable of absorbing shocks and handling crises: “Universalism, if realized, would result in a sharp decline of the complexity of the global society as a whole and the international system in particular. Reducing complexity, in turn, would dramatically increase the level of systemic risks and challenges”.

The objection to intrusive claims of universalism is also fundamental to Western civilization. In ancient Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, it was recognized that universalism and uniformity weakened the vigour and resilience that defined the Hellenic idea. The benign cooperation and competition between various Greek city-states created a diversity of ideas and a vitality that elevated Greek civilization. Integration into one political system would entail losing the diversity of philosophy, wisdom, and leadership that incentivized experimentation and advancement.

The first world order that truly encompasses the entire world

It can be concluded that restoring a Westphalian world order does not only require a multipolar distribution of economic power, it also demands respect for civilizational diversity to ensure that the principle of indivisible security is preserved. The international order should counteract nefarious claims of civilizational superiority clothed in the benign rhetoric of universal values and development models. Through this prism, the US efforts to divide the world into democracy versus authoritarianism can be considered a strategy to restore hegemony and a system of sovereign inequality by defeating adversaries, rather than building an international system based on harmony and human progress. Xi Jinping has thus repudiated the US hegemonic model, and instead advanced the Westphalian argument that states must “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others”.

The new Westphalia can for the first time truly be a world order by including non-Western nations as sovereign equals. One should therefore not be surprised by the positive response from the majority of the world to the proposal of replacing conflict and dominance with cooperation based on equality and mutual respect.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]