There is no more nebulous concept in politics than “the West”. Where it starts, where it ends, what it stands for and what it means have been disputed ever since Oswald Spengler, right-wing German philosopher, published The Decline of the West in 1918.
For Spengler, “the West” was a state of mind: a culture that had, through colonialism and racial superiority, conquered the world but was doomed to die. Weakened by democracy and rationalism, its final spasm would be a “second religiousness”, in which the masses reject the values of the Enlightenment and embrace dictatorship.
Watching far-right anti-vaxxers paralyse Ottawa, one of the most liberal-democratic cities in the West, with a truck convoy part-financed by US evangelicals, you might say Spengler had a point. Likewise, when watching Vladimir Putin run rings around the combined diplomatic corps of Britain, the US and the EU as he justifies the invasion of Ukraine.
But it is the joint declaration of China and Russia published this month that signals the biggest challenge to Western power, culture and assumed global leadership since the world system emerged 600 years ago. In it, Putin and Xi Jinping outline their conception of how the world should develop in the 21st century. Whether you like it or not, it will shape geopolitics from Taiwan to Ukraine to Canada and all points in between.
Putin and Xi claim that “Russia and China as world powers with rich cultural and historical heritage have longstanding traditions of democracy, which rely on thousand-years of experience of development, broad popular support and consideration of the needs and interests of citizens”.
To anyone who has visited these states, with their dictatorships, polluted ecosystems and prisons full of political dissidents, this claim will seem ridiculous. But its purpose is to redefine democracy. Democracy, state the two dictators, is the new label for single-party states.
Likewise, “universalism” has to be redefined. After World War II, we produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not “international” – as some governments wanted – but “universal”, meaning that no state could claim the right to interpret, localise or culturally veto the rights awarded by the charter to every human being on earth. For Xi and Putin, this has to change. The “universal nature of human rights should be seen through the prism of the real situation in every particular country”, says the joint declaration.
The declaration implicitly describes the work of human rights monitors as “outside interference” and calls on Western governments to stop criticising Russia and China for violations, since these are being measured against Western standards, not against the “real situation”.
Finally, it contains the design for a three-power world. A re-armed Russia, cowing its neighbours into submission and sending its troops to quell rebellions from Minsk to Almaty to Yerevan; a China risen to the status of a superpower; set against the declining American superpower. There is no place in this vision for the strategically autonomous Europe dreamed of by leaders like Emmanuel Macron. Europe will be just one more chessboard on which the China-Russia alliance will move its pieces.
At the core of their vision is what their supporters call “multiple modernities”. If modernity emerged during the Renaissance and became synonymous with Western power in the 20th century, then in the 21st, it must fragment. What they’re really talking about, of course, is multiple truths.
If Putin says there has been genocide carried out against Russians living in Ukraine, live on national TV, that must be true. If Xi and his propagandists claim the people being indoctrinated in the prison camps of Xinjiang enjoy it, again it must be true. Raise so much as an eyebrow against these assertions and the supporters of multiple modernity will call you a racist indulging in white supremacy.
In a way, Xi and Putin have done the world a favour by writing this document. They have made it very easy to define the West. The West, going forward, is everybody who does not want to live in the world they have designed. Everybody who wants one definition of democracy, one yardstick for human rights, and one peer-reviewed body of scientific knowledge.
The West will be a mindset that can inhabit the brains of people in Moscow and Beijing just as much as Putin’s mindset increasingly inhabits the brains of presenters on Fox News.
The West has been an ugly reality. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment on humanism could not bring themselves to classify non-Europeans as human. The drafters of the US constitution owned slaves. The Vienna of Mozart stuffed a black man’s corpse and displayed it in a museum. The Churchill who defeated Nazism is the same Churchill who presided over the Bengal famine.
Today, even to say what I’ve just written is to invite a backlash. But if we want the West to survive as an approach to being human — based on concepts of freedom, democracy and rationality — we have to cleanse it thoroughly, atone for its crimes and stop whitewashing it.
Because the Putin-Xi declaration is not simply designed for domestic consumption. It is designed to persuade people in the West who don’t like the reality they live in. It is an appeal pitched squarely at the Ottawa truckers, the far-right voters in France who support Éric Zemmour. It will be presented as the moral justification for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
To defend the best of the Western tradition, even as a minority view in a world of cruel anti-rationalist dictators, we have to redefine it.
Indeed. While the likes of Bush Blia and Little Jonnie walk free and Assange is in prison, we have no moral leg to stand on.whining about the other side doing what we did and expecting to get away with it.
Inasmuch as democracy, rule of law and human rights are ideas and a moral/ethical set of principles to live by, we have at least one leg to stand on. As ideas they function as, ideals to aspire to, standards for judgement and principles on which to formulate right action. The extent to which existing states embody or stand by them varies but it is quite clear that they are regarded as legitimate standards by which to guide and judge action in the liberal democracies. Hence, one can level charges of hypocrisy or worse at their governments for their behaviour. In non-liberal democracies you can call their governments criminal or barbarian but they (attempt to) avoid the charge of hypocrisy by redefining or negating the validity of the ideas of democracy, rule of law and human rights.
As ideas (ideals) democracy, rule of law and human rights can be held by people who live in liberal democracies and in countries where they are not even paid lip service, as the article points out. Millions of people deplored the invasion of Iraq for the same reasons they deplore the invasion of Ukraine. Plenty of legs taking a moral stance. My actions and thoughts, and yours, are not bound by decisions that our governments made. Putin’s obscene invasion of Ukraine clearly negates and tramples on these ideals, there are no moral barriers to stating this is the case and taking action against him. The barriers are political/practical.
I honestly don’t get this sort of equivalence argument. For one thing, it sets an impossible standard for any sort of criticism to take place – either we do everything perfectly or we can’t say anything. For another, even if it were the case that we fail to hit a standard, isn’t the existence of the standard what is appealed to? If that’s the case, then even the most brutal of dictators can make a point about the failure to live up to the standard.
But if you apply the standard only to the other guy and don’t apply it to yourself, then you’re not applying the standard. When you scream self-righteously when the other guy breaches a standard that you yourself have breached many times, then you’re a hypocrite and a sociopath. Andrew’s point is perfectly valid.
Exactly.
Well it’s about time you did get it.
If the US hadn’t invaded the Phiilipines, Hawwaii, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. If it hadn’t prosecuted military action on Columbia, El Salvatore, Venezuela, Libya, Yemen. If it hadn’t overthrown the Iran secular government. If it hadn’t tried regime change in Georgia and Ukraine. If it hadn’t bombed North Korean agriculture and infrastructure with more bombs than were dropped in the entire Pacific WWII campaign, a war crime by Nuremberg Standards. If it agreed to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. If it hadn’t in other words killed millions of people and if it had abided by international law and the laws jurisdiction it would still have been incredibly wealthy, but would have had a moral basis as an example to others.
The gross hypocrisy of the US has completely devalued all of the human rights and related international agreements so that they are things talked about exclusively in the breach rather than the observance. Why the hell would any country worry about these things after seeing what the US does in the world? Particularly if you are one of the victims as is Russia and China.
When the biggest and most powerful kid on the block acts like a Mafia Don why would anyone else do anything different?
Explain that to me.
Putin and Xi get it. It’s a pity you don’t.
Add up all of the people killed by the US military since WWII and think again.
I read recently a conservative estimate of 12 million people killed directly and indirectly by the US since 1945 – that’s holocaust levels, although never described as such, of course. The estimate used the formula of indirect deaths (from destruction of physical, social and welfare infrastructure, disease, starvation) being five times the number of people killed directly by bullets and bombs. The formula was determined by looking at population excess deaths pre- and post-conflict over several conflicts.
This is the argument that states that if, say, numbers are bad (or perhaps even evil), there is therefore no difference between 10 and 100, after all, they are both numbers and both bad. Logical, no? You need to brush up on your history because often, least bad is the best on offer.
Again – Exactly:
At one level, this article provides a valid and timely warning to the West of how fragile its liberal democratic institutions and values are.
At another level, the article is a classic example of Anglo/Euro/US narcissism and arrogance. After 400 years of the West raping and pillaging the untermenschen of the rest of the world through colonialism and economic imperialism, and after the 1% elites have crafted ‘democracy’ to fleece the 99% of even their own countrymen, it’s a bit precious for the West to suddenly rediscover its values, just in time to lecture those evil slavs and orientals for doing what the West has been doing for 400 years.
Not sure if one agrees with the thrust of the article on big geopolitical tactics, till we know more i.e. testing some basic questions.
Is the supposed agreement between Putin and Xi rock solid, or conditional?
Either way, what have been the perceptions of Xi and his people towards Putin, not just before, but especially after Putin gave his senior military/security people a public pasting aka Stalinist/Maoist confessional, then went onto an unhinged rant to justify a land invasion of a ‘fraternal’ neighbour (the expect to occupy Ukraine with a puppet regime ruling over passive population)?
Assuming China prefers stability and predictability, including it’s own borders with Russia, logistics through middle Asia and Russia/Central Europe; watching Putin invade Ukraine may make Xi et al. pause for thought and watch very carefully.
For example, like senior Russian military and security personnel watching Putin using their (demographically limited) forces and resources (with already some low level urban civilian protests and elites making noises in Russia), are they thinking other impacts and unintended consequences, such as unrest etc. kicking off in one, or worse, more Russian protectorate republics or border regions, while they are occupied with Ukraine?
Finally, the writer Street has missed or not explained the strange links with Anglosphere i.e. UK, US & Oz politics, promoting the Putin-Xi alliance as evidence of China planning to invade Taiwan (The Guardian article comments, like elsewhere, have triangle work being done by organised commenters, always highlighting this link)?
This helps the Trump, Fox, fossil fuels and the GOP in their quest to denigrate Biden and the Democrats as weak, and support Putin, while locally in Oz the PM and Dutton are using similar agitprop to dog whistle China, for domestic political gain.
Maybe it would be good to decouple liberal democracy from a particular geographical location.
This call to action gives me some hope. “Everybody who wants one definition of democracy, one yardstick for human rights, and one peer-reviewed body of scientific knowledge.”
Are there other elements that are just as important, such as the rule of law and recognition of private property? It’s about the west, and enlightenment and defining progress, not about the left! How could such an aspiration be advanced within our current, heavily divided politics? Could influencers, independent politicians, academia, professions or think tanks use this geopolitical idea to bring people together in a common identity? Such a definition could help conservative forces in Australia, the US and the UK to see themselves more clearly and reject the loonies within.
There are useful ideas elsewhere in the comments, eg that this definition has no relation to geography – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are natural members. It could also help the west to see which nations are a natural part of the alliance and should be strengthened with positive investment to become a beacon within their geographic region – perhaps Uruguay, Botswana, and some provinces within India – helping with things like traceability of labour to ensure human rights. Strengthening enlightened economies with investment and trade before conflict is much more effective than weakening their enemies with sanctions once conflict starts.