While I am not sure I agree with the author, he did present some interesting points. I appreciated his thinking outside the box, but what I really enjoyed was the frutiful discussion between the author and the various commentators on this site.
Yes, his message seems both muddled and unrealistic.
To begin with, he doesn't take into account the degree to which western resistance to multi-polarity has changed the development path that countries like Russia and China might otherwise have taken. The persistent aggressiveness they've had to contend with has almost certainly tilted them towards a more hunkered down, authoritarian stance.
Despite that, both have displayed a light touch in their dealings with smaller nations. The foundational premise of both BRICS+ and the SCO is respect for sovereignty and a focus on cooperation. I've seen nothing to suggest that Russia and China don't take that premise seriously. Indeed, I think both see it as critical to achieving their larger vision of how the world should work.
If the US could bring itself to accept that the unipolar moment is gone and attempt some sort of "landing", while Russia, China et al would take a whole lot of convincing that it was genuine, once the belief that perhaps it was took root I suspect the tenor of our world would change both radically and surprisingly quickly.
There is little actual evidence, not witstanding the West's halucination, of "Eurasian despots of our time". Nor there is there evidence of actual liberal democracies in the west. The west is characterized by constitutional monarchies or republics with constitutions set up to serve an oligarchical class.
"On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”" https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
I confess to being somewhat uncomfortable with some of the presumptions here. The first being this idea of 'principles', left purposefully unarticulated with an insupportable vagueness. The first and most pressing question should be: what are these principles? What is their content? Where are they coming from? Whose interests do they serve? Will non-Westerners find these unarticulated principles as palatable as Westerners do? Will the parishioners at Saint Porphyrios or Holy Family Church in Gaza, for example, be able to find any sort of meaningful refuge in these principles against the Israeli mortars and snipers that are killing them right now?
I am equally uncomfortable with Adam's deliberate allusions to and invocations of Caesars of ages past. Actually, not only Caesar but also Alexander ('cutting the Gordian knot'), William the Bastard or less charitably Erwin Roemmel ('ramming bridgeheads'), etc. Such invocations run toward exactly the sort of jingoistic great-power logic which he is decrying the 'Eurasian despots' for deploying. For that reason, even if they're ultimately incorrect, it's easy to see how Victor Taki and Mr J Davis could come to the conclusion that Adam is ultimately making his stand on the side of the Western hawks here, however subtly or with however much thenceward-aimed critique.
The major problem that I can see with this thesis is that there are always going to be would-be Caesars and merchant-princes, and the halcyon state of 'ordered liberty' and 'sturdy social pluralism' that Adam imagines was always at some level a carefully-maintained illusion, built on the destruction, subjugation and exploitation of the non-Western peoples he is claiming them for. Another historical irony to bear in mind here as well is that within Eurasia itself, the spread of the open and cosmopolitan 'society' as such, and in particular the penetration of the societal institutions of Islam and (non-Chalcedonian) Christianity from one direction and Buddhism from the other, into Central Asia, were enabled precisely by the conquests and reign of Genghis Khan: the Eurasian despot par excellence.
Personally, I don't think that you're ever going to beat Alexander, Caesar, Roemmel or Temujin at his own game. I don't think vague appeals to ordered liberty or civil society are even going to slow him down at this point. I think the best example to bring to bear, instead, is the Jewish prophets. What you can do instead is appeal to a higher Law, a singular textual tradition. That solution might not be open or cosmopolitan, but it at least has the benefit of being able to definitively and in absolute terms tell off Caesar for being a jerk, and subject him to a God who isn't going to cater to his excuses.
"what are these principles? What is their content? Where are they coming from?"
A reasonable question, though one could go deeply into various rabbit holes of religion and philosophy to flesh the position out. For this purpose, contrasting liberty rooted in society with an atomistic version of liberty, I could do worse than to invoke Bertrand de Jouvenel's critique of power:
"Liberty [is] the direct, immediate, and concrete sovereignty of man over himself, the thing which allows and compels him to unfold his personality, gives him mastery over and responsibility for his destiny, and makes him accountable for his acts both to his neighbour, dowered with an equal right claiming his respect—this is where justice comes in—and to God, whose purposes he either fulfils or flouts…. It is not as an element in the happiness of the individual that the loftiest spirits have vaunted liberty, but rather because it consecrates the dignity of his personality and thus saves the human being from playing the merely instrumental rôle to which the wills of authority tend ever to reduce him.”
There are many other currents across traditions sensitive to the intrinsic worth of virtuous engagement in spheres of life that get their due autonomy from otherwise overbearing states who do treat their subjects as a herd penned into a sovereign territory. And it would be anachronistic to say that such traditional understandings of the texture of society are "built on the subjugation and exploitation of the non-Western peoples," given that many of them predate colonialism.
"within Eurasia itself, the spread of the open and cosmopolitan 'society' as such, and in particular the penetration of the societal institutions of Islam and (non-Chalcedonian) Christianity from one direction and Buddhism from the other, into Central Asia, were enabled precisely by the conquests and reign of Genghis Khan: the Eurasian despot par excellence."
Yes, just as Arnold Toynbee suggested that the technological scaffolding of European imperialism and modernity had created space for a new Axial Age, in which the flowering of ideas from the encounter among civilisations would matter far more in the long run than the Faustian excesses that preceded it. History works in strange ways. That does not mean taking Genghis Khan as a model for a new Eurasian bloc.
“Will the parishioners at Saint Porphyrios or Holy Family Church in Gaza, for example, be able to find any sort of meaningful refuge in these principles against the Israeli mortars and snipers that are killing them right now?”
There are surely crimes to answer for there and in other such cases. But what sort of states want to lock in impunity for their own leaders based on Westphalian sovereignty? Yes, the US and Israel, but also the likes of China and Russia.
“Personally, I don't think that you're ever going to beat Alexander, Caesar, Roemmel or Temujin at his own game. I don't think vague appeals to ordered liberty or civil society are even going to slow him down at this point. I think the best example to bring to bear, instead, is the Jewish prophets. What you can do instead is appeal to a higher Law, a singular textual tradition. That solution might not be open or cosmopolitan, but it at least has the benefit of being able to definitively and in absolute terms tell off Caesar for being a jerk, and subject him to a God who isn't going to cater to his excuses.”
I'm not sure what to make of this logic. I entirely agree with appealing to a higher Law. But the higher Law gets teeth and has an appreciable impact on reining in the worst temptations of power when it informs an institutional landscape as well. Otherwise I don't see what "subject him" means.
I also felt that this piece was an attempt to wrap the old "democracy vs despotism" thesis in a new clothing. If diversity is anything meaningful, it is precisely the assumption that each country has its own approach as to where the boundary between state and society should be traced and how sharp or blurred this line should be. It it true that the great power equality alternative to the liberal democratic hegemony does not expressly include the smaller countries. However, the survival of the smaller states in the post-Westphalian period was made possible precisely by the great power balance. I do not see why a global balance of power cannot have the same effect.
"If diversity is anything meaningful, it is precisely the assumption that each country has its own approach as to where the boundary between state and society should be traced and how sharp or blurred this line should be."
So what is the unit of analysis and what power is involved in "each country" deciding that "approach"? In practice, this is not some organic evolution of a social model in a pluralistic society. It involves strongmen and ruling parties who shot their way into power in the twentieth century and prefer narratives of self-contained nation-states in which the political sphere is dominant over other spheres of social life. Strong nationally-bounded states are very bad at letting genuine multilayered diversity flourish. Indeed, the great powers in question have a long history of modernising elites using state power to curtail the autonomy of families, religious institutions, local communities, varied sorts of education, and so on. It is simply inconsistent to denounce global liberal technocracy and then give political elites in Eurasia a free pass on their own corralling of society.
If you criticize the "corralling of society" by "the political elites in Eurasia" in the name of "inalienable rights", I will have to tell you that these are as much a modern invention as a "self-contained nation states" and that the individual appears to be the right unit of analysis only from the point of view of modern liberalism - both the Old Left and the Old Right will have their doubts. On the other hand, I do not know where you saw "nationally bounded states" in Eurasia. Neither Imperial nor Soviet Russia was a nation-state - in fact, both were two radically different forms of management of diversity, and the same applies to today's Russia. My knowledge of China is limited, but I still cannot see how Imperial China could be anything other than a form of management of diversity, as ultimately all Eurasian empires had been. They all allowed, if not directly promoted, a "blooming complexity" of social and cultural forms. The only thing that they could not really accommodate was the individual with his or her "inalienable rights."
I said nothing about individual "inalienable rights." There are plenty of other arguments well-grounded in pre-liberal religious and philosophical traditions for human dignity and the claims of society against despots. By and large, premodern civilisations were heterarchical in the sense that despots regularly ran into stiff-necked opposition from religious institutions, local communities, customary law, and circuits of social interaction on varying scales large and small that cut at right angles to their domains of political authority. To be sure, there were strands of absolutism that privileged the state and the duties of the subject over other social goods, but they were not well legitimised by the standards of most traditions. The political elites today who would fare well under "great power equality" and national sovereignty are no more the heirs of tradition than an EU bureaucrat is the heir of Marcus Aurelius. They are merely donning the mantle of one or another civilisation that once happened to occupy their present patch of blood-and-soil rule but has largely been decapitated by modern revolution and social ambition. If those regimes are compatible with tradition and pluralism, why have they done things like shut down religious institutions, close borders, and regulate family life in ways that would be unrecognisable and repellent to generations past? Society and diversity certainly do not get stronger under such a model. Absolutist ideas of sovereignty tend to generate widespread distrust, passivity, and alienation, as we have seen with countless historical examples, gathering momentum since the early twentieth century. One does not need to be a liberal using language of "inalienable rights" to see things for what they are.
I am not sure that things that happen to religious institutions or family life within the framework of contemporary Western multiculturalism are less disturbing than the impact of the "absolutist" policies of the Eurasian "despots." The modernizing policies of Stalin and Mao had their numerous victims, but they did not put into question the very notions of "father," "mother," "husband," "wife," "man", "woman" etc., just as they did not pose the goal of transcending humanity itself. And the neo-liberal "governance" can be as deadly for "local communities, customary law, and circuits of social interaction" as the political agendas of the twentieth-century tyrants.
Yes, I agree that those liberal assaults on religious institutions, family life, and some elements of civil society are deeply disturbing. They are also at odds with the best practices of various traditional models of state-society relations. I am not a liberal and no one who looked at any of my writing would see me as aligned with “Western multiculturalism" or "neoliberal governance." This is precisely the point: it may be tempting to depict the world on a single simplified axis contrasting Hollywood and Brussels with Moscow and Beijing, but that certainly does not exhaust the space of reasons why one might assess *both* the liberal technocratic model and blood-and-soil absolutism as toxic for humanity and pluralism.
It is striking how readily these comments conflate my position with some alleged apology for Washington, when half or more of the article was very critical of Western hawks. I entirely agree that there is a lot of superficial and misguided interpretation and bandying about of "diversity" among Western elites. But there is something alarming about the claim that "diversity should be tolerated as long as it does not threaten the stability and continuity of the whole." This amounts in practice to society existing on sufferance of and at the convenience of absolutist states. It is in the company of Rome's persecution of Christians for undermining Caesar, and of the Legalist Qin emperor who buried Confucian scholars alive. All diversity is not a mere tool of imperialist subterfuge. Nor is tradition served by the idolatry of state-worship just because those states happen to be non-Western.
A good question to ask of any position is whether it is inconvenient for certain power-holders. I submit that what I have said about the excesses of Western containment and the need to adapt to the end of Western hegemony would be quite inconvenient in its implications for Washington's current foreign policy. At the same time, I do not see anything in the defence of "strong states in Eurasia" that is at all inconvenient in its implications for those there who happen right now to be locking up dissidents and crushing tradition into nationalist grievance.
While I am not sure I agree with the author, he did present some interesting points. I appreciated his thinking outside the box, but what I really enjoyed was the frutiful discussion between the author and the various commentators on this site.
Yes, his message seems both muddled and unrealistic.
To begin with, he doesn't take into account the degree to which western resistance to multi-polarity has changed the development path that countries like Russia and China might otherwise have taken. The persistent aggressiveness they've had to contend with has almost certainly tilted them towards a more hunkered down, authoritarian stance.
Despite that, both have displayed a light touch in their dealings with smaller nations. The foundational premise of both BRICS+ and the SCO is respect for sovereignty and a focus on cooperation. I've seen nothing to suggest that Russia and China don't take that premise seriously. Indeed, I think both see it as critical to achieving their larger vision of how the world should work.
If the US could bring itself to accept that the unipolar moment is gone and attempt some sort of "landing", while Russia, China et al would take a whole lot of convincing that it was genuine, once the belief that perhaps it was took root I suspect the tenor of our world would change both radically and surprisingly quickly.
There is little actual evidence, not witstanding the West's halucination, of "Eurasian despots of our time". Nor there is there evidence of actual liberal democracies in the west. The west is characterized by constitutional monarchies or republics with constitutions set up to serve an oligarchical class.
"On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”" https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
I confess to being somewhat uncomfortable with some of the presumptions here. The first being this idea of 'principles', left purposefully unarticulated with an insupportable vagueness. The first and most pressing question should be: what are these principles? What is their content? Where are they coming from? Whose interests do they serve? Will non-Westerners find these unarticulated principles as palatable as Westerners do? Will the parishioners at Saint Porphyrios or Holy Family Church in Gaza, for example, be able to find any sort of meaningful refuge in these principles against the Israeli mortars and snipers that are killing them right now?
I am equally uncomfortable with Adam's deliberate allusions to and invocations of Caesars of ages past. Actually, not only Caesar but also Alexander ('cutting the Gordian knot'), William the Bastard or less charitably Erwin Roemmel ('ramming bridgeheads'), etc. Such invocations run toward exactly the sort of jingoistic great-power logic which he is decrying the 'Eurasian despots' for deploying. For that reason, even if they're ultimately incorrect, it's easy to see how Victor Taki and Mr J Davis could come to the conclusion that Adam is ultimately making his stand on the side of the Western hawks here, however subtly or with however much thenceward-aimed critique.
The major problem that I can see with this thesis is that there are always going to be would-be Caesars and merchant-princes, and the halcyon state of 'ordered liberty' and 'sturdy social pluralism' that Adam imagines was always at some level a carefully-maintained illusion, built on the destruction, subjugation and exploitation of the non-Western peoples he is claiming them for. Another historical irony to bear in mind here as well is that within Eurasia itself, the spread of the open and cosmopolitan 'society' as such, and in particular the penetration of the societal institutions of Islam and (non-Chalcedonian) Christianity from one direction and Buddhism from the other, into Central Asia, were enabled precisely by the conquests and reign of Genghis Khan: the Eurasian despot par excellence.
Personally, I don't think that you're ever going to beat Alexander, Caesar, Roemmel or Temujin at his own game. I don't think vague appeals to ordered liberty or civil society are even going to slow him down at this point. I think the best example to bring to bear, instead, is the Jewish prophets. What you can do instead is appeal to a higher Law, a singular textual tradition. That solution might not be open or cosmopolitan, but it at least has the benefit of being able to definitively and in absolute terms tell off Caesar for being a jerk, and subject him to a God who isn't going to cater to his excuses.
"what are these principles? What is their content? Where are they coming from?"
A reasonable question, though one could go deeply into various rabbit holes of religion and philosophy to flesh the position out. For this purpose, contrasting liberty rooted in society with an atomistic version of liberty, I could do worse than to invoke Bertrand de Jouvenel's critique of power:
"Liberty [is] the direct, immediate, and concrete sovereignty of man over himself, the thing which allows and compels him to unfold his personality, gives him mastery over and responsibility for his destiny, and makes him accountable for his acts both to his neighbour, dowered with an equal right claiming his respect—this is where justice comes in—and to God, whose purposes he either fulfils or flouts…. It is not as an element in the happiness of the individual that the loftiest spirits have vaunted liberty, but rather because it consecrates the dignity of his personality and thus saves the human being from playing the merely instrumental rôle to which the wills of authority tend ever to reduce him.”
There are many other currents across traditions sensitive to the intrinsic worth of virtuous engagement in spheres of life that get their due autonomy from otherwise overbearing states who do treat their subjects as a herd penned into a sovereign territory. And it would be anachronistic to say that such traditional understandings of the texture of society are "built on the subjugation and exploitation of the non-Western peoples," given that many of them predate colonialism.
"within Eurasia itself, the spread of the open and cosmopolitan 'society' as such, and in particular the penetration of the societal institutions of Islam and (non-Chalcedonian) Christianity from one direction and Buddhism from the other, into Central Asia, were enabled precisely by the conquests and reign of Genghis Khan: the Eurasian despot par excellence."
Yes, just as Arnold Toynbee suggested that the technological scaffolding of European imperialism and modernity had created space for a new Axial Age, in which the flowering of ideas from the encounter among civilisations would matter far more in the long run than the Faustian excesses that preceded it. History works in strange ways. That does not mean taking Genghis Khan as a model for a new Eurasian bloc.
“Will the parishioners at Saint Porphyrios or Holy Family Church in Gaza, for example, be able to find any sort of meaningful refuge in these principles against the Israeli mortars and snipers that are killing them right now?”
There are surely crimes to answer for there and in other such cases. But what sort of states want to lock in impunity for their own leaders based on Westphalian sovereignty? Yes, the US and Israel, but also the likes of China and Russia.
“Personally, I don't think that you're ever going to beat Alexander, Caesar, Roemmel or Temujin at his own game. I don't think vague appeals to ordered liberty or civil society are even going to slow him down at this point. I think the best example to bring to bear, instead, is the Jewish prophets. What you can do instead is appeal to a higher Law, a singular textual tradition. That solution might not be open or cosmopolitan, but it at least has the benefit of being able to definitively and in absolute terms tell off Caesar for being a jerk, and subject him to a God who isn't going to cater to his excuses.”
I'm not sure what to make of this logic. I entirely agree with appealing to a higher Law. But the higher Law gets teeth and has an appreciable impact on reining in the worst temptations of power when it informs an institutional landscape as well. Otherwise I don't see what "subject him" means.
I also felt that this piece was an attempt to wrap the old "democracy vs despotism" thesis in a new clothing. If diversity is anything meaningful, it is precisely the assumption that each country has its own approach as to where the boundary between state and society should be traced and how sharp or blurred this line should be. It it true that the great power equality alternative to the liberal democratic hegemony does not expressly include the smaller countries. However, the survival of the smaller states in the post-Westphalian period was made possible precisely by the great power balance. I do not see why a global balance of power cannot have the same effect.
"If diversity is anything meaningful, it is precisely the assumption that each country has its own approach as to where the boundary between state and society should be traced and how sharp or blurred this line should be."
So what is the unit of analysis and what power is involved in "each country" deciding that "approach"? In practice, this is not some organic evolution of a social model in a pluralistic society. It involves strongmen and ruling parties who shot their way into power in the twentieth century and prefer narratives of self-contained nation-states in which the political sphere is dominant over other spheres of social life. Strong nationally-bounded states are very bad at letting genuine multilayered diversity flourish. Indeed, the great powers in question have a long history of modernising elites using state power to curtail the autonomy of families, religious institutions, local communities, varied sorts of education, and so on. It is simply inconsistent to denounce global liberal technocracy and then give political elites in Eurasia a free pass on their own corralling of society.
If you criticize the "corralling of society" by "the political elites in Eurasia" in the name of "inalienable rights", I will have to tell you that these are as much a modern invention as a "self-contained nation states" and that the individual appears to be the right unit of analysis only from the point of view of modern liberalism - both the Old Left and the Old Right will have their doubts. On the other hand, I do not know where you saw "nationally bounded states" in Eurasia. Neither Imperial nor Soviet Russia was a nation-state - in fact, both were two radically different forms of management of diversity, and the same applies to today's Russia. My knowledge of China is limited, but I still cannot see how Imperial China could be anything other than a form of management of diversity, as ultimately all Eurasian empires had been. They all allowed, if not directly promoted, a "blooming complexity" of social and cultural forms. The only thing that they could not really accommodate was the individual with his or her "inalienable rights."
I said nothing about individual "inalienable rights." There are plenty of other arguments well-grounded in pre-liberal religious and philosophical traditions for human dignity and the claims of society against despots. By and large, premodern civilisations were heterarchical in the sense that despots regularly ran into stiff-necked opposition from religious institutions, local communities, customary law, and circuits of social interaction on varying scales large and small that cut at right angles to their domains of political authority. To be sure, there were strands of absolutism that privileged the state and the duties of the subject over other social goods, but they were not well legitimised by the standards of most traditions. The political elites today who would fare well under "great power equality" and national sovereignty are no more the heirs of tradition than an EU bureaucrat is the heir of Marcus Aurelius. They are merely donning the mantle of one or another civilisation that once happened to occupy their present patch of blood-and-soil rule but has largely been decapitated by modern revolution and social ambition. If those regimes are compatible with tradition and pluralism, why have they done things like shut down religious institutions, close borders, and regulate family life in ways that would be unrecognisable and repellent to generations past? Society and diversity certainly do not get stronger under such a model. Absolutist ideas of sovereignty tend to generate widespread distrust, passivity, and alienation, as we have seen with countless historical examples, gathering momentum since the early twentieth century. One does not need to be a liberal using language of "inalienable rights" to see things for what they are.
I am not sure that things that happen to religious institutions or family life within the framework of contemporary Western multiculturalism are less disturbing than the impact of the "absolutist" policies of the Eurasian "despots." The modernizing policies of Stalin and Mao had their numerous victims, but they did not put into question the very notions of "father," "mother," "husband," "wife," "man", "woman" etc., just as they did not pose the goal of transcending humanity itself. And the neo-liberal "governance" can be as deadly for "local communities, customary law, and circuits of social interaction" as the political agendas of the twentieth-century tyrants.
Yes, I agree that those liberal assaults on religious institutions, family life, and some elements of civil society are deeply disturbing. They are also at odds with the best practices of various traditional models of state-society relations. I am not a liberal and no one who looked at any of my writing would see me as aligned with “Western multiculturalism" or "neoliberal governance." This is precisely the point: it may be tempting to depict the world on a single simplified axis contrasting Hollywood and Brussels with Moscow and Beijing, but that certainly does not exhaust the space of reasons why one might assess *both* the liberal technocratic model and blood-and-soil absolutism as toxic for humanity and pluralism.
It is striking how readily these comments conflate my position with some alleged apology for Washington, when half or more of the article was very critical of Western hawks. I entirely agree that there is a lot of superficial and misguided interpretation and bandying about of "diversity" among Western elites. But there is something alarming about the claim that "diversity should be tolerated as long as it does not threaten the stability and continuity of the whole." This amounts in practice to society existing on sufferance of and at the convenience of absolutist states. It is in the company of Rome's persecution of Christians for undermining Caesar, and of the Legalist Qin emperor who buried Confucian scholars alive. All diversity is not a mere tool of imperialist subterfuge. Nor is tradition served by the idolatry of state-worship just because those states happen to be non-Western.
A good question to ask of any position is whether it is inconvenient for certain power-holders. I submit that what I have said about the excesses of Western containment and the need to adapt to the end of Western hegemony would be quite inconvenient in its implications for Washington's current foreign policy. At the same time, I do not see anything in the defence of "strong states in Eurasia" that is at all inconvenient in its implications for those there who happen right now to be locking up dissidents and crushing tradition into nationalist grievance.