Values in the 21st Century - Europe, US and China

围棋 based on encircling your opponent on the Board provides an insight into Chinese values

Max Weber and Karl Marx, the founders of modern sociology, underestimated the importance of the way people in power think, behave and persuade others of the supremacy of their values. 

The Soldier, the Merchant and the Sage

Throughout most of history three groups, the soldier, the merchant and the sage, have struggled to gain predominance over a fourth group, the greater populous. When one of these groups achieves unchallenged control over the others the result has culminated in an imbalance of values leading to war, economic disaster or revolution.

Interestingly, most societies are based on an informal alliance between two of these three groups. For example, early agrarian societies were often led by aristocrats with warrior and landowner values (soldiers) in close alliance with priests (sages), who provided a spiritual justification for their rule. The merchant was usually tolerated for bringing wealth through trade, but was also resented for being cleverer and often richer than traditional elites.

During the 17th century, the merchant's power increased and decreased always dependent on protection from the soldier group. But it was not until the late 17th century that merchants first began to emerge as the dominant group in Europe. 

 

During the 19th century the rise of “soft" merchant values really took off. The British used their growing empire as a force for promoting free trade and globalisation in the so called interests of all. Nevertheless their competitors regarded these imperial projects as less benign. By the mid-19th century, the world of merchants was becoming one of competing business cartels, increasingly backed by the might of Nation States. But no country adopted the values of the “warrior-hard merchant” with more vigour than Bismarckian Germany, where repression at home and brutal zero-sum commercial competition with other rising industrial powers became the order of the day. The first world war was largely a consequence of the limits of allowing  merchant values to become the dominant group of values.

After the first world war, the US emerged as the wealthiest nation and dominant exporter of capital. This led to the spread of a new form of merchant power across much of the developed world in the form of debt-fuelled consumer capitalism. Yet the massive financial and trade imbalances that resulted again brought the dominance of merchant values to an end with the  Depression in the early 1930s.

The second world war ultimately inspired a new alliance of “sagely technocrats” and “soft merchants”. They were determined to learn the lessons of the past, this partnership worked to create a new world order of prosperity and social harmony. The early fruit of the combination of these values was the Bretton Woods monetary system, which established the rules governing commercial relations between the developed industrial nations.

 

Interestingly, the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in 1971, heralded a new renaissance of the dominance of hard merchant values. This period was led by the Anglosphere and was characterised by the so-called Washington consensus and "Davos Man". It launched a renewed age of the dominance of merchant values without the sagely values to reign it in. This age still continues today. To understand the banking and sovereign-debt crisis that has taken hold since 2007/08, the Geo-Trade Blog believes the US and Europe are paying the price for succumbing to the values of merchants, who believe in the justice of the market, and prize the pursuit of short-term profit fuelled by credit and risk. 

 

But perhaps there is a much broader problem. Modern democratic governments in the US and Europe play a much larger role in the economy than any governments in the ancient Greek democracies could ever have imagined, therefore, this in turn makes political leaders a huge source of patronage, in the form of business contracts, social benefits, jobs and tax breaks.

What are China's中国 values ?

Perhaps a more interesting question in the 21st century is, which of these three groups, the soldier, the merchant and the sage will gain dominance in a China led world? China owes its re-emergence to its embrace of the contemporary US and European model of modernisation – to a large extent driven by hard merchant values that put the country on its current path more than three decades ago. But the question of values remains unanswered.

It is interesting to note that Chinese traditional values are being replaced by what researchers have identified as an emphasis on material values - making money has become a major concern for most Chinese people. The new material values are expressed by a desire to buy apartments, cars and fashionable clothes. Showing external signs of wealth has become a basic social requirement.

The Chinese do not play chess, a game with a rather adversarial objective to eliminate your opponent from the board. Instead the Chinese invented 围棋 where the object of the game is to encircle your opponent and gain control of a larger total area of the board (see above picture). To some extent, this provides an insight into the different ways of thinking in Europe and the US compared with China 中国. 

In traditional Chinese culture, righteousness, or justice are perceived to be an important value. If democracy can protect an individual's political rights, it would seem the Chinese are sceptical as to whether it can ensure that people use their power to do the right thing. In Chinese culture, the legality and morality of procedure as well as the result are both just as important. Here in lies the eternal challenge that all democracies are forced to grapple with - what if the laws and democratic processes do produce “immoral” results, for example, an extreme-right wing party is able to win power in democratic elections or what of wars fought by a country that are not supported by its citizens.

In conclusion, it would seem that there is some commonality of horizon but the ways of thinking and framing problems remain different. It is still too soon to tell what combination of the Soldier, Sage and Merchant values will emerge in China 中国 as dominant but the Geo-Trade blog will continue to follow closely the new thinking on values emanating from China 中国 in the 21st Century.

The Future of the Nation State in the 21st Century

Flag Map of the World

The idea of the territorial state’s sovereignty goes back to 1555, when at a meeting in Augsburg called by the warring dynastic rulers desperately seeking an exit or at least a respite from the devastating religious wars tearing the Christian Europe apart coined the formula cuius regio, eius religio (he who rules, determines religion of the ruled). 

 

Sovereignty meant supreme – unconstrained by external interference and indivisible – authority within a territory: Since its inclusion into the political vocabulary the concept of sovereignty referred to a territorially confined state of affairs and territorially fixed entitlements. 

 

Any attempt to meddle with the order of things established by the sovereign on the territory of his rule was therefore illegal, condemnable, a casus belli; the Augsburg formula may be read as much as the founding act of the modern phenomenon of state sovereignty as well as it is read, simultaneously and necessarily, as the textual source of the modern concept of state borders.

It then took almost 100 years more until 1648 when the “Westphalian Sovereignty” agreement was negotiated and signed in Osnabrück and Münster, this allowed the principle recommended by the Augsburg formula to take hold of European social and political reality: a full sovereignty of every ruler on the territory they ruled and over its residents – that is, the ruler’s entitlement to impose “positive” laws of their choice that may override the choices made individually by the subjects, including the choice of God they ought to believe in and must worship.

By a simple expedient of substituting “natio” for “religio”, the mental frame was used to create and operate the (secular) political order of the emergent modern Europe: the pattern of nation-state – that is, of a nation using the state’s sovereignty to set apart “us” from “them” and reserving for itself the monopolistic, inalienable and indivisible right to design the order binding for the country as a whole, and of a state claiming its right to the subjects’ discipline through invoking the commonality of national history, destiny and well-being.

The Westphalian Model in the 21st Century

After the two world wars in the 20th century the Westphalian model of sovereignty was once again the basis on which the Charter of the United Nations was founded - an assembly for the rulers of sovereign states called to collectively monitor, supervise and defend the state of peaceful coexistence. In fact, Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibits attacks on “political independence and territorial integrity”, whereas the article 2(7) sharply restricts the eventuality of an intervention from outside into affairs of a sovereign state. 

 

So far the United Nations is still the closest we have to an idea of a “global political body”. But it clearly has the entrenchment and defence of the Westphalian principle written into its charter.  While many powers (finances, commercial interests, information, drug and weapon trade, criminality and terrorism) have already obtained in practice the freedom to operate on a global level. The absence of global political agencies capable of catching up with the already global reach is held back by the grip of the nation-state and the rhetoric of state sovereignty. We live still in a “post-Westphalian era”. The process of emancipation from the shadows cast by “Westphalian sovereignty” is increasingly protracted.

 

A recent example of this is the fate of euro: the absurdity of a common currency served by seventeen finance ministers, each bound to represent and defend their country’s sovereign rights. The plight of the euro highlights the limits of local (nation-state) politics under pressures coming from two distinct, uncoordinated and thereby not easily reconcilable authoritative centres, the nationally confined electorate and supra-national European institutions, all too often instructed to act at cross-purposes. This is just one of many manifestations of a double bind: the condition of being clenched between the ghost of the Westphalian state sovereignty on one side and the realities of the global, or regional nonetheless supra-national, dependency on the other.

The essential problem of nation-state sovereignty in a global world

During the 17th, 18th and possibly 19th centuries, the nation-state was relatively well attuned to the realities of the time, but the Geo-Trade blog believes this is no longer the case. In the 21st century, our interdependence is already global, whereas our instruments of collective action and will-expression are as before local and resisting extension, infringement and/or limitation.

 

In the 21st century much of the power has evaporated from the nation-state into the supra-national, global space – while politics remains, as before, local: confined to the boundaries of the state’s territorial sovereignty. What we confront therefore is, on one hand, a free-floating power cut off from political supervision and guidance and on the other fixed and territorially-limited politics that in addition is bound to suffer from a perpetual deficit of power. 

 

Hence the essential problem is that the two abilities, power (that is, the ability to have things done), and politics (that is, the ability to decide which things need/ought to be done), conjoined for a few centuries in the institutions of the nation-state, now inhabit, as the result of globalisation processes, two different spaces.