Alternative reality to hegemony

The law of the jungle must be replaced by the pursuit of harmony if humanity is to avoid another global conflict

Looking at the rising tensions between the United States and China, and between the US and Russia in recent years, it becomes difficult for many to believe that the three nations stood shoulder to shoulder fighting a common enemy more than 80 years ago. During World War II, the three nations made unprecedented sacrifices in the fight against Nazism and Fascism and worked together to achieve their final defeat. That victory was crowned by the signing of the United Nations Charter, the founding document of the UN, in San Francisco in 1945. The sovereignty, independence and equality among nation states was a key pillar of the charter.

However, the legacy of colonialism and imperialism lingered in the world. Winston Churchill, and Harry Truman together paved the way to the Cold War and the division of the world into "we and them" again. The US National Security Act of 1947 turned the enormous US military institutions into a unified tool under the whims of Anglo-American leaders. This was consolidated with a paranoid "red scare" of Russia and China and McCarthyism. The "military-industrial complex" is just one product of this process. "National security" became a selfish and destructive obsession.

Simultaneously, China and other Global South nations pursued their struggle for freedom and independence despite the massive headwinds of the Cold War, creating a different vision for the world. This culminated in the Asia-Africa Bandung Conference which celebrated its 70th anniversary in April. The Bandung Spirit combined the principles of the UN Charter and China-proposed Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

The Bandung Spirit and the Anglo-American notion of unilateral hegemony are coming to loggerheads today. The enormous changes in the past four decades, with China's peaceful economic rise as the best illustration, have ushered a new era of multilateralism where these two notions cannot co-exist on the same planet.

The West must come to grips with this reality to avoid a new global conflict. The philosophical grounds for the hegemonic thinking must be exposed and abandoned. One attempt to clarify such a philosophy is made by the so-called realist school of international relations. As US scholar John Mearsheimer asserts, great powers are "concerned mainly with figuring out how to survive in a world where there is no agency to protect them from each other" and "the anarchic international system creates powerful incentives for states to look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of rivals". In such a cynical condition, "might makes right" and justice is whatever serves the strong. Realists claim that the law of the jungle in human relations is the natural state of things. They evoke examples from history to support their view as if it were as solid as natural science. Their idea is that there is no "right or wrong", and the notions of charity, mercy and empathy are creations of the minds of weak people. The example often cited by these realists is derived from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. In this book, the Athenians tell the people of the island of Melos that they cannot be neutral in the war and that they either join the Athenian alliance or be destroyed. When the people of Melos refused, the Athenians killed all the males on the island, enslaved all the females, and resettled the island with their own supporters. In "the natural state of things", the Athenian envoy said to the people of Melos, "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". This is called "realpolitik" today.

In modern Western philosophy, Thomas Hobbes' notion of a state of "war of all against all" as natural state of affairs became dominant in imperialist thinking.

The way out of this pessimistic and ultimately destructive thinking is through wisdom and invoking what makes us truly human. It is important to remember that the reason the United Nations was created is to avoid repeating the horrendous suffering caused during World War II. Especially in today's multipolar world, where one power cannot assert its hegemonic desires without risking the annihilation of the entire human race through a nuclear holocaust, some self-reflection is necessary.

The notion of hegemony must be replaced by the notion of harmony of one human family with a shared future. Asian wisdom can serve us well in these decisive moments, as it has managed to bring decades of peace and economics prosperity. China's rise to be the world's second-largest economy and the largest industrial power in just four decades, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty, without firing a single bullet against a neighbor over that period, is unprecedented in history.

In his news conference on the sidelines of the two sessions in Beijing on March 7, China's Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi responded to the notion of "America First "from a US journalist by saying that there are more than 190 countries in the world and should everyone stress "my country first "and obsess over a position of strength, the law of the jungle would reign in the world again. He emphasized that international norms and order "would take a body blow "and asked: "does right prevail over might, or does might make right?" He advised that history should move forward, not backward. He stressed that the supremacy of common interests over selfish and narrow-minded policies that endanger the world.

It is in this light that the Global Security Initiative in 2022 was launched to highlight the importance of thinking in terms of common and indivisible security of all nations, rather than what some powers deem as their own pure interest no matter what the consequences are. With the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative, China has laid out a roadmap for achieving global peace and prosperity through cooperation and harmonizing the interests of all nations in a community with a shared future for mankind. This is not mere rhetoric but a reality of what China has achieved both at home and in cooperation with its neighbors and the Global South nations.

The author is vice-chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden and a distinguished research fellow at the Guangdong Institute for International Strategies. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.