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Book Review: World Order by Henry Kissinger

5/4/2016

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Henry Kissinger – World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

General Information:
- Published by Penguin in May 2014; last research data that author refers to also May 2014
- Conceived at a dinner between Kissinger and his old mate Charles Hill, when they concluded that the crisis in the concept of world order was the ultimate international problem of our day.
- Written by Kissinger with a wide range of support like expert historians and research assistants
- All text clippings in the review are printed in Italic.
- Written for a global audience (vs. only American)
- Objective: generating more public consensus for international order? Leaving a testimony about his own work? Shedding a favorable light onto American foreign policy? Convincing the Western reader of a more realist view of international order without bashing directly China?
- Influential work looking at int. order in historical perspective;
- Others who have written about international order at such a level of proficiency: Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, John Mearsheimer;

Credit & Critique
- Critique that no effort is made to talk about other concepts of international order, which do not have the nation state as its smallest unit in the center of perspective, but e.g. a district [compare to Leopold Kohr’s “The Breakdown of Nations and the documentary “The Economics of Happiness” > the origins of all misery are to be found in excess of size]
- Critique of the author for shedding a all too positive light onto American foreign policy and portraying at times a neo-crusader-like picture of American values converting the barbarian world – Kissinger does not spend even one thought to the lost respect in regard to American values in Europe or China. A nation that shows a wrecked health system, poor and antiquated infrastructure as its main achievements lost credibility. A successful interior policy comes first. A successful foreign policy second.
- Critique of the author for not having understood to what extent the Chinese government already wields control of the internet; the cyberspace will is a model for the Chinese government on how to deal with the international community in the real world: authoritarian, non-inclusive decision making will be the norm
- Critique of the author (but also understanding) of not openly discussing the threats of China’s rise and not making clear analogies in Western appeasement politics with the current situation [compare Micheal Ledeen article]
- Credits to the author for categorizing international order and writing about international order in a historical context which reveals some insights that have not been obvious to the general audience
- Credits to the author for explaining the original doctrine and fundamentalist currents of Islam: Islam was at once a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order. The areas Islam had conquered or where it held sway over tribute-paying non-Muslims were conceived as a single political unit: dar al-Islam, the “House of Islam,” or the realm of peace. It would be governed by the caliphate, an institution defined by rightful succession to the earthly political authority that the Prophet had exercised. The lands beyond were dar al-harb, the realm of war; Islam’s mission was to incorporate these regions into its own world order and thereby bring universal peace:
- Credits to the author for explaining that Central Europe stayed divided for hundreds of years because of French foreign policy
- Credits to the author for explaining Russia and thus making some conclusions possible in regard to China – since I did not understand Russia very much, I always felt that there was a missing link in understanding China. I had a few “AHA” experiences when reading about Russian history, because China just carbon copied much of Russian policies, which Russia in turns adapted from European countries.
- Credits to the author for dissecting the risks and chances of new technologies, in particular the requirement to adapt our educational institutions to enable people to deal with daily floods of information without being drowned into an abyss – empty of knowledge and wisdom.

Structured into 11 chapters
- Introduction: The Question of World Order
- Chapter 1: Europe – The Pluralistic International Order
- Chapter 2: The European Balance-of-Power System and Its End
- Chapter 3: Islamism and the Middle East: A World in Disorder
- Chapter 4: The United States and Iran: Approaches to Order
- Chapter 5: The Multiplicity of Asia
- Chapter 6: Toward an Asian Order: Confrontation or Partnership?
- Chapter 7: “Acting for All Mankind” – The US and Its Concept of Order
- Chapter 8: The US – Ambivalent Superpower
- Chapter 9: Technology, Equilibrium, and Human Consciousness
- Conclusion: World Order in Our Time?
  - The Evolution of International Order
  - Where do we go from here?

What is international order?
- A widely accepted mechanism of how peoples interact based on power and legitimacy
- World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world. An international order is the practical application of these concepts to a substantial part of the globe – large enough to affect the global balance of power. Regional orders involve the same principles applied to a defined geographic area.
- Any order concept bases itself on two components: a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that enforces restraint where roles break down, preventing one political unit from subjugating all others.
- Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.
- No truly global - all encompassing – “world order” has ever existed […] yet of all concepts of order, Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole generally recognized basis of what exists of a world order.
- Q: is there any requirement that the world must be governed by one single order concept? is there a possibility for a peaceful bipolar or multipolar order concept?

What World Orders Do We Know?
- Anarchy
- Pax X e.g. Romana, Americana, Napoleonica, etc.
- Westphalian Balance of Power
- French Revolution [compare to Chinese Cultural Revolution]

Rousseau condemned all existing institutions—property, religion, social classes, government authority, civil society—as illusory and fraudulent. Their replacement was to be a new “rule of administration in the social order.” The populace was to submit totally to it—with an obedience that no ruler by divine right had ever imagined, except the Russian Czar, whose entire populace outside the nobility and the communities on the harsh frontiers beyond the Urals had the status of serfs. These theories prefigured the modern totalitarian regime, in which the popular will ratifies decisions that have already been announced by means of staged mass demonstrations.

Vienna Congress = Westphalia + same outlook in regard to internal order between signing parties (then monarchy)
G X > China vs. US have different internal orders (authoritarian vs. democratic regime)

Which philosophical concepts/questions are relevant to world order / international relations (IR)?
- Realism: Power is what matters
  - Thomas Hobbes interpreted by Theodore Roosevelt: “In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs.” For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them.
  - Liberal societies, Roosevelt believed, tended to underestimate the elements of antagonism and strife in international affairs. Implying a Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest.
  - Roosevelt’s favorite proverb: “Speak softly, but carry a big stick”
  - Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, applied the principles of the balance of power to domestic policy by describing a concept of checks and balances later institutionalized in the American Constitution.
- Constructivism: ideas matter for ultimate success “Anarchy is what states make of it” > balance of power
- Idealism: e.g. Wilsonian Idealism with League of Nations
- Kissinger takes no clear stance. He surely is a realist (10/10), referring much to T. Roosevelt, but also believes in the construction (6/10) of a better world with some American puritan fervor, and he holds Wilsonian Idealism (3/10) – though failed – in great esteem.

How can the current international world order be described – what is the balance-of-power concept?
- The current international world order was devised in Western Europe approx. 4 centuries ago at a peace conference to conclude the Central European Thirty Year War (1618-1648) in the German region of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even awareness of most other continents or civilizations
- Religious unity had fractured in Europe (prior: Catholicism only) with the survival and spread of Protestantism; political diversity was inherent in the number of autonomous political units that had fought to a draw.
- So it was that in Europe the conditions of the contemporary world were approximated: a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeat all the others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.
- The papacy had been confined to ecclesiastical functions, and the doctrine of sovereign equality reigned.
- Thomas Hobbes provided a theory to justify the functions of a secular political order in 1651 in Leviathan
- The Westphalian Peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.
- Division and multiplicity, an accident of Europe’s history, became the hallmarks of a new system of international order with its own distinct philosophical outlook.

What is the raison d’etat?

Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu developed [in 1624] a radical approach to international order. He invented the idea that the state was an abstract and permanent entity existing in its own right. It’s requirements were not determined by the ruler’s personality, family interests, or the universal demands of religion. Its lodestar was the national interest following calculable principles – what later came to be known as raison d’etat. Hence it should be the basic unit of international relations.
Salvation might be his personal objective, but as a statesman he was responsible for a political entity that did not have an eternal soul to be redeemed. “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he said. “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”
Royal power would continue to be exercised by the King as the symbol of the sovereign state and an expression of the national interest.
Richelieu saw the turmoil in central Europe not as a call to arms to defend the Church but as a means to check imperial Habsburg preeminence.
For two and a half centuries – from the emergence of Richelieu in 1624 to Bismarck’s proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 – the aim of keeping Central Europe (more or less Germany, Austria and Northern Italy) divided remained the guiding principle of French foreign policy.

- How can Russia’s difference and similarity from Europe be explained?

As Charlemagne’s empire had fractured in the ninth century into what would become the modern nations of France and Germany, Slavic tribes more than a thousand miles to their east had coalesced in a confederation based around the city of Kiev.
This “land of the Rus” stood at the fraught intersections of civilizations and trade routes. With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears. Too far to the east to have experienced the Roman Empire (though “czars” claimed the “Caesars” as their political and etymological forebears), Christian but looking to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople rather than Rome for spiritual authority, Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent’s historical trends.
Russia a uniquely “Eurasian” power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.
Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty (1237–1480) and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era.
As the Protestant Reformation impelled political and religious diversity in Europe, Russia translated the fall of its own religious lodestar, Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, to Muslim invaders in 1453 into an almost mystical conviction that Russia’s Czar was now (as the monk Filofei wrote to Ivan III around 1500) “the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe,” with a messianic calling to regain the fallen Byzantine capital for Christendom.
Russia affirmed its tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors.
With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia, then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers (and for a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and Californian settlements). It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states (on average, 100,000 square kilometers annually from 1552 to 1917).
Thus the world-conquering imperialism remained paired with a paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had generated more potential foes than additional security. From that perspective, the Czar’s empire can be said to have expanded because it proved easier to keep going than to stop.
In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold. While Renaissance Europe rediscovered its classical humanist past and refined new concepts of individualism and freedom, Russia sought its resurgence in its undiluted faith and in the coherence of a single, divinely sanctioned authority overpowering all divisions—the Czar as “the living icon of God,” whose commands were irresistible and inherently just. A common Christian faith and a shared elite language (French) underscored a commonality of perspective with the West. Yet early European visitors to czarist Russia found themselves in a land of almost surreal extremes and thought they saw, beneath the veneer of a modern Western monarchy, a despotism modeled on Mongol and Tartar practices—“European discipline supporting the tyranny of Asia,” in the uncharitable phrase of the Marquis de Custine.
Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance. The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. In the Chinese view, the Emperor ruled wherever possible through the serenity of his conduct; in the Russian view, the leadership of the Czar prevailed through his ability to impose his will by unchallengeable assertions of authority and to impress on all onlookers the Russian state’s overwhelmingly vast power. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of as the embodiment of the superiority of Chinese civilization, inspiring other peoples to “come and be transformed.” The Czar was seen as the embodiment of the defense of Russia against enemies surrounding it on all sides.

What are the characteristics of the Vienna Order – how came it into force and what destroyed it?

the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had redrawn the mental map of Europe. In place of the eighteenth century horizontal world of dynasties and cosmopolite upper classes, the West now consisted of vertical unities—nations, not wholly separate but unlike.
Linguistic nationalisms made traditional empires—especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire—vulnerable to internal pressure as well as to the resentments of neighbors claiming national links with subjects of the empire. The emergence of nationalism also subtly affected the relationship between Prussia and Austria after the creation of the “great masses” of the Congress of Vienna.
The Vienna settlement had reinforced Prussia’s strong social and political structure with geographic opportunity. Stretched from the Vistula to the Rhine, Prussia became the repository of Germans’ hopes for the unity of their country—for the first time in history.
Once considered among the strongest and best-governed countries in Europe, Austria was now vulnerable because its central location meant that every European tremor made the earth move there. Its polyglot nature made it vulnerable to the emerging wave of nationalism—a force practically unknown a generation earlier. For Metternich, steadiness and reliability became the lodestar of his policy: Where everything is tottering it is above all necessary that something, no matter what, remain steadfast so that the lost can find a connection and the strayed a refuge.
Finally, the Crimean War of 1853–56 broke up the unity of the conservative states—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—which had been one of the two key pillars of the Vienna international order.
For Metternich, the national interest of Austria was a metaphor for the overall interest of Europe—how to hold together many races and peoples and languages in a structure at once respectful of diversity and of a common heritage, faith, and custom. In that perspective, Austria’s historical role was to vindicate the pluralism and, hence, the peace of Europe.
Bismarck, by comparison, was a scion of the provincial Prussian aristocracy, which was far poorer than its counterparts in the west of Germany and considerably less cosmopolitan. While Metternich tried to vindicate continuity and to restore a universal idea, that of a European society, Bismarck challenged all the established wisdom of his period. Until he appeared on the scene, it had been taken for granted that German unity would come about—if at all—through a combination of nationalism and liberalism. Bismarck set about to demonstrate that these strands could be separated—that the principles of the Holy Alliance were not needed to preserve order, that a new order could be built by conservatives’ appealing to nationalism, and that a concept of European order could be based entirely on an assessment of power.
The European order as seen in the eighteenth century, as a great Newtonian clockwork of interlocking parts, had been replaced by the Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest.
Disraeli called the unification of Germany in 1871 “a greater political event than the French Revolution” and concluded that “the balance of power has been entirely destroyed.” The Westphalian and the Vienna European orders had been based on a divided Central Europe whose competing pressures—between the plethora of German states in the Westphalian settlement, and Austria and Prussia in the Vienna outcome—would balance each other out. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together. The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power.
This consensus was not only a matter of decorum; it reflected the moral convictions of a common European outlook. Europe was never more united or more spontaneous than during what came to be perceived as the age of enlightenment. New triumphs in science and philosophy began to displace the fracturing European certainties of tradition and faith. The swift advance of the mind on multiple fronts—physics, chemistry, astronomy, history, archaeology, cartography, rationality—bolstered a new spirit of secular illumination auguring that the revelation of all of nature’s hidden mechanisms was only a question of time.
International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals. They represented a single elite society that spoke the same language (French), frequented the same salons, and pursued romantic liaisons in each other’s capitals. National interests of course varied, but in a world where a foreign minister could serve a monarch of another nationality (every Russian foreign minister until 1820 was recruited abroad), or when a territory could change its national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance, a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent. Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct.

What concepts of order exist?
- In building a world order, a key question inevitably concerns the substance of its unifying principles – in which resides a cardinal distinction between the Western and non-Western approaches to order. Since the Renaissance the West has been deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data – the more accurately the better – and that foreign policy success depends on assessing existing realities and trends. > mastering empirical reality [but hasn’t China learned this technique from the West? And applies it now on top of its Confucian world view?]
- The Westphalian Peace represented a judgment of reality – particular realities of power and territory – as a temporal ordering concept over the demands of religion.
- In the other great contemporary civilizations, reality was conceived as internal to the observer, defined by psychological, philosophical, or religious convictions.

a. Europe

China had its Emperor; Islam had its Caliph—the recognized leader of the lands of Islam. Europe had the Holy Roman Emperor. But the Holy Roman Emperor operated from a much weaker base than his confreres in other civilizations. He had no imperial bureaucracy at his disposal. His authority depended on his strength in the regions he governed in his dynastic capacity, essentially his family holdings. His position was not formally hereditary and depended on election by a franchise of seven, later nine, princes; these elections were generally decided by a mixture of political maneuvering, assessments of religious piety, and vast financial payoffs. The Emperor theoretically owed his authority to his investiture by the Pope, but political and logistical considerations often excluded it, leaving him to rule for years as “Emperor-Elect.” Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”
With the end of Roman rule, pluralism became the defining characteristic of the European order. […] Yet although it was comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single governance, or a united, fixed identity. […] For more than a thousand years, in the mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and identity from resistance to universal rule > Westphalian Peace and Balance of Power

b. China

Since the times [Han Dynasty 2nd century B.C.] when Europe was rules by the Roman Empire as a unity a different concept of order existed on the other end of the Eurasian landmass: it did not base itself on the sovereign equality of states but on the presumed boundlessness of the Emperor’s reach. In this concept, sovereignty in the European sense did not exist, because the Emperor held sway over “All Under Heaven”[天下].
China, in this view, would order the world primarily by awing other societies with its cultural magnificence and economic bounty, drawing them into relationships that could be managed to produce the aim of “harmony under heaven” [大同] > Confucianism.
Confucianism [Confucius is by some also called the founder of sociology] ordered the world into tributaries in a hierarchy defined by approximations of the Chinese culture. […] Thus China felt no need to go abroad to discover a world it considered already ordered, or best ordered by the cultivation of morality internally;

c. Islam

In much of the region between Europe and China, Islam’s different universal concept of world order - starting in the 7th century A.D. - held sway, with its own version of a single divinely sanctioned governance uniting and pacifying the world: expand over the “realm of war”, as it called all regions populated by unbelievers, until the whole world was a unitary system brought into harmony by the message of the Prophet Muhammad.
Islam divided the world order into a world of peace, that of Islam, and a world of war, inhabited by unbelievers. Islam could achieve the theoretical fulfillment of world order only by conquest or global proselytization, for which the objective conditions did not exist.

d. American Universal Democracy

American puritan version of world order being formed in the 17th century: inspire the world through the justness of its principles and the power of its example. Peace and balance would occur naturally, and ancient enmities would be set aside – once other nations were given the same principled say in their own governance that Americans had in theirs. The American version in effect became a defender of the European balance-of-power system, but had an additional aspiration to achieve peace through the spread of democratic principles.
Q: the spread of democratic principles, too, can be a fundamentalist objective – why forcing peoples to adhere to one single form of order concept? Life seems to be more complex as to be molded into one form.

e. Hinduism

Hinduism, which perceived cycles of history and metaphysical reality transcending temporal experience, treated its world of faith as a complete system not open to new entrants by either conquest or conversion.
Q: Can there be a single world order? Compare to the philosophical and psychological concepts of revolution and revolt – acquiring exterior order and acquiring interior order [Buddhism or Hinduism].

f. Socialism

Marxist-Leninist socialism failed, but claimed global reach, encompassing all mankind > revolution
The Soviet Union insisted on shaping a new international, social and political structure of Eastern Europe on a principle laid down by Stalin in 1945: Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.
[George Kennan] At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world, some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching out beyond the Party apparatus to the general public, which was immature and inexperienced, having never been permitted to develop an independent political sense. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be overnight changed from one of the strongest one to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” This prediction – essentially correct – was Wilsonian in the belief that at the end of the process democratic principles would prevail, that legitimacy would trump power.

- What are the reasons that an international order corrodes?

Every international order must sooner or later face the impact of two tendencies challenging its cohesion: either a redefinition of legitimacy or a significant shift in the balance of power >>> the world experiences currently both: 2008 GFC is by many observers considered as the failure of the American world order; China is ranked as the world’s largest economy in PPP since 2014 – ending 150 years of Western economic predominance. Asia is generally on the rise.
redefinition of legitimacy: values underlying international arrangements are fundamentally altered – abandoned by those charged with maintaining them or overturned by revolutionary imposition. E.g. ascendant West over non-Western world; Islam in its initial stages; French Revolution; Communist and fascist totalitarianism; Islamist fundamentalism in Middle East
The essence of such upheavals is that while they are ususally underpinned by force, their overriding thrust is psychological. Those under assault are challenged to defend not only their territory but the basic assumptions of their way of life, their moral right to exist and to act in a manner that, until the challenge, had been treated as beyond question.
Q: is a gradual proliferation of Western society with Chinese-Confucian values, in particular different standards of labor law to be seen as a gradual redefinition of legitimacy?
shift of power: international order proves unable to accommodate a major change in power relations. E.g. dissolution of Soviet Union; Germany’s emergence as dominant power in 20th century Europe; emergence of China in the 21st century as a dominant global power poses a comparable structural challenge

Kissinger explicitly compares here China with 20th century Germany; interesting because I have asked myself this question quite often: if not only individuals, but also societies live and develop in different time cycles [compare to the theory of German philosopher Karl Bloch] then it is to be asked if analogies between Europe’s history and Far East Asia’s development are possible?
- Geopoliticial Analogy: although such comparisons have been strongly rejected on the Chinese side, it is without doubt that China can regionally only be compared with Germany in terms of geopolitics and economic output. China overtook the US in 2014 in PPP as world largest economy; Germany threatened Britain’s leading position at the beginning of WWI. Moreover, Japan the hereto 2nd largest economy can only be compared by means of its racial and cultural proximity as well as its geographic peculiarity as what Great Britain is to Germany. In both situation, the US is somewhat protecting the nation which is challenged in its regional hegemony.
- Economic Analogy: although the industrial revolution started out in England already in the mid 18th century and took much longer than in Japan, both economies were the driving forces of economic development in their region; causing neighboring nations to aspire to its position. In the second half of the 19th century, Germany did catch up with Britain in terms of economic output as China did during the last 30 years.
- Differences: scale and development. The only differences that I see in between the two cases are the size of the involved economies and the accelerated development. Both factors imply a much more disastrous outcome if a war can’t be avoided. It is therefore paramount that the Far East Asian nations and those bordering the South Chinese Sea form a preventive partnership, which is comparable to the EU.
- Some people I talk to perceive China in a comparable situation to Germany before WWI, some in a comparable situation to Germany before WWII. I hold the opinion that it is a mix of both: In terms of regional geopolitics and accelerated industrialization [compare Stefan Zweig’s account of national hybris due to new technological power in Europe before WWI in Die Welt von gestern] we see a situation very similar to Europe before WWI, but in terms of a collective mental state some parallels with fascist governments before WWII are all too obvious. China’s technocrat and authoritarian regime which uses modern information technologies to divide the “Chinese mind” from all “foreign pollution” builds up a similar nationalism that was so typical for early Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. [compare Michael Ledeen: China's leaders believe they command a people, not merely a geographic entity. […] Just like Germany and Italy in the interwar period, China feels betrayed and humiliated, and seeks to avenge historic wounds. […] Fascism may well have been a potentially stable system, despite the frenzied energies of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. After all, fascism did not fall as the result of internal crisis; it was destroyed by superior force of arms.]

How is the current world order concept being threatened?
- Westphalian principles are being challenged on all sides, sometimes in the name of world order itself.
  - Islam: Proliferation of a new religious world order and disintegration of the nation state through radical Islam
  - Supranational Organizations: Disintegration of the nation state through pooled sovereignty of international entities like the EU or probably at a later stage ASEAN
  - China: Proliferation of a new cultural world order and corrosion of the existing international world order through a shift in power and the subversion of international mechanisms and institutions through setting up a similarily designed shadow system [compare MERICS report on shadow structure of international organizations set up by China to subvert the existing international order]
- Europe has set out to depart from the state system it designed and to transcend it through a concept of pooled sovereignty. […] And ironically, though Europe invented the balance-of-power concept, it has consciously and severely limited the element of power in its new institutions. Having downgraded its military capacities, Europe has little scope to respond when universal norms are flouted.
- Q: is Europe still a to be taken serious member of the international order – is economic might enough therefore?
- Q: is the disintegration of the nation-state a threat per se or only if forced by the spread of Islam? Compare “The Breakdown of Nations” by Leopold Kohr > the village community as ideal size for a human society.
- Q: does it really make a difference to the Western person whether its life style would gradually or abruptly change into a new religious or new cultural world order? To my mind, religion is part of culture. If a theocratic-totalitarian world order is declared in the name of religion it is set equal, with what is considered to be culture; in secular states though religion is only one facet of culture, with a nevertheless deeply ingrained nature, which differs from nation to nation and from region to region. [compare Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World; Niall Ferguson: Civilization; China: Turmoil and Triumph]

How does the current power relationship look like in East Asia?
- Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historical international system
- China, Korea, Japan, and the US, with Russia and Vietnam as peripheral participants, are approaching a balance of power
- But it differs from the historical balances of power in that one of the key participants, the US, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of East Asia and because China and the US, whose military forces conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues.
- The US is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China – a situation comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced by a treaty with Russia.
- The political and economic map of Asia illustrates the region’s complex tapestry. It comprises industrially and technologically advanced countries in Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore, with economies and standards of living rivaling those of Europe; three countries of continental scale in China, India, and Russia; two large archipelagoes (in addition to Japan), the Philippines and Indonesia, composed of thousands of islands and standing astride the main sea-lanes; three ancient nations with populations approximating those of France or Italy in Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar; huge Australia and pastoral New Zealand, with largely European-descended populations; and North Korea, a Stalinist family dictatorship bereft of industry and technology except for a nuclear weapons program. A large Muslim-majority population prevails across Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and sizeable Muslim minorities exist in India, China, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines.

How is the current international order maintained and peace secured?
- The current international order is clearly being undermined, but can be maintained if Western powers are smart enough to accommodate and integrate China as a new equal player who is entitled to a considerable vote in the joint reshaping of the existing international order
- Regional EU like partnership between CN, JP, KR and ASEAN
- Reunification of North and South Korea
- Peaceful global superpower partnership between US and CN
- United EU defense policy and structure to counter the shift in power balance and make up for the shrinking American advantages.

Japan will conduct this analysis in terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance; adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy. Which of them will emerge as dominant, or whether the choice is for a mix of them, depends on Japan’s calculations of the global balance of power—not formal American assurances—and how it perceives underlying trends. Should Japan perceive a new configuration of power unfolding in its region or the world, it will base its security on its judgment of reality, not on traditional alignments. The outcome therefore depends on how credible the Japanese establishment judges American policy in Asia to be and how they assess the overall balance of forces. The long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy is as much at issue as Japan’s analysis.

What leitmotiv is the foundation of the current world and its challenges?
- Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age. They have brought about advances in human well-being unprecedented in history. Their evolution transcends traditional cultural constraints. Yet they have also produced weapons capable of destroying mankind.
- I can not agree to this simplified application of leitmotifs, which is based on an entirely Western perception. Science and Technology are already a leitmotif in the Western hemisphere since the 18th century, but this leitmotif is nowadays also accessible to the broad masses. All nations that did not experience the industrial revolution in its Western beginnings “the so called developing world” [what a term as we are all constantly developing and implying that industrialized nations have stopped to develop] have to catch up in regard to this development – some of them as it is the case with China did nevertheless “great-leap-forward” without experiencing the leitmotif of enlightenment and reason. China in particular is struggling, because it finds itself torn apart amidst all of the above mentioned leitmotifs and its government answers with nationalism.
- Thus China has to be viewed as a nation-continent with the power to shape the world order. But it is trying to shape the world order with its own society’s outlook: a society that has not yet experienced some important sociological development steps. Similar to the psychological development of a human being, it possibly causes for the sociological development of a society severe traumas, if development steps are omitted. It is quite certain that a society can’t grow mature if certain steps are omitted.

How do new technologies affect world order?
- New technologies transcend political borders – Kissinger discusses two explicitly as: nuclear proliferation and cyber technology

Nuclear Proliferation
- Three hurdles have to be overcome in acquiring a deployable nuclear weapons capability: the acquisition of delivery systems, the production of fissile material, and the building of warheads.
- It seems obvious that nuclear weapons are only means to keep the balance of power; its application would cause devastation which any country wants to avoid [even though Mao is quoted to having said, that even nuclear weapons don’t instill fear to the Chinese people, because in case of a nuclear war the multitude of the Chinese population would give him the upper hand in an eventual outcome].
- China actively engages in international diplomacy with objectives that are counterproductive to keeping “nuclear Islam” at bay [compare The Diplomat: How China Complicates the Iranian Nuclear Talks]
- China pushes similar strategies in regard to North Korea: instead of allowing and supporting a reunification of the sister nations, it calls a delinquent North Korean government - bereft of technology except for a nuclear weapons program - its ally, similar to the UdSSR’s relationship with Cuba during the Bay of Pigs crisis in the 60ies. Kissinger is therefore surely on the right track when he assumes that working out a collaborative strategy for a denuclearized, unified Korea between China and the US would leave all parties more secure and more free.
- Bismark: We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity. The existence of nuclear weapons in North Korea provide an incentive for Japan and Sought Korea to create a nuclear military capability.
- For China, North Korea embodies complex legacies. In many Chinese eyes, the Korean War is seen as a symbol of China’s determination to end its “century of humiliation” and “stand up” on the world stage, but also as a warning against becoming involved in wars whose origins China does not control and whose repercussions may have serious long-range, unintended consequences. This is why China and the US have taken parallel positions in the UN Security Council in demanding North Korea abandon – not curtail – its nuclear program.

Cyberspace Technology
- Cyber technology though is a means suiting the Chinese negotiation style: gradual assimilation of the non-Chinese world to the realm of the Chinese cultural hemisphere. In terms of e-business such a tendency is already visible. The sheer size of the Chinese market pooled with the autocratic government made it possible that Alibaba outgrew Ebay, Baidu outgrew Google and Huawei Oracle.
- International trade, in particular e-commerce, corrodes an important factor of national sovereignty: taxation authority over its subjects (natural and legal persons)
- China applies IT technology to separate China from the rest: If China can not shape the internet, the internet will shape China [compare my own essay and the Sinica podcast on the Wuzhen internet conference]
- In the virtual world a new world order is about to be formed and will come into full force within the next years. There already is a virtual world of freedom and Chinese censorship: one virtual world created and approved by a central government reigning over 1.3 billion people, tailored to the “ideal” Han Chinese mind and many virtual realities not approved by the Chinese government and kept at bay by a Great Chinese Firewall. And with the shaping of the WWW structure China will as strongest contender for the supremacy in this virtual international order gain the upper hand. All the other nations perceive the WWW as a space defined by freedom, so governments have hitherto abstained from regulating it purposefully.
- The strategic separation of Chinese contents from non-Chinese contents is on a big scale comparable to book burnings under Nazi Germany.

Can the US lead Western international order still be proposed as a system worth being sustained?
- all societies need to resolve domestic issue first, then put attention on foreign tasks. America has failed to do so. its society ha not only produced legalized organized crime which infested the global financial system, but also a dysfunctional public infrastructure and healthcare. how can a superpower be taken serious in the light o such immense failures?
- in the 80ies when well paid middle class blue collar jobs were still available in America such a visit would have been possible. nowadays it is not. a communist leader would be horrified to see the difference between laborers and capitalists. the US system is failing as did the socialist some 30 years earlier.

What speaks against the assumption that China will fully join and stay in the current international system?
- considering china's unchanged self understanding, a society 5 time as populous as the US will ultimately seek supremacy. The present concubine economy and all forms of bi- or multilateral political cooperation serve in the minds of the Chinese elite the ultimate purpose of reestablishing Chinese hegemony. in such a respect China is equally dangerous to the present world order as is Islam, but differs in an essential aspect: religious fundamentalism is substituted with the determination of cultural superiority. both these phenomena serve as an ideological explanation why the present world order must be overthrown.
- it must as well be asked if religion is not just one aspect of culture. thus Islam and sinocentrism differ solely in its theoretically egalitarian approach. Islam claims that adherents are equal before the Quran no matter which race or ethnicity. Han Chinese though will always be superior to other races similar to German thinking in the 20th century.
- practically both Islam and China are not egalitarian. People in or closer to the respective power centers will always be considered more civilized. Whether tribute is paid to the respective hierarchy by means of a hadj to Mecca or a kowtow to Beijing, it fulfills the same purpose: submission to god impersonated by an imam or a paramount – divinely sanctioned - leader.
- it is a mistake to assume that the Chinese president and the former emperor differ in status. Chinese dynastical cycles extend into the present.
- in term of prowess china as a technocracy clearly poses a bigger threat to the west as Islam could ever in the foreseeable future.
- china moreover has already started to establish a new international order by setting up a shadow system of international institutions.

Which questions need to be discussed by participants of an international order?
- What do we seek to prevent, no matter how it happens, and if necessary alone? The answer defines the minimum condition of the survival of the society.
- What do we seek to achieve, even if no supported by any multilateral effort? These goals define the minimum objectives of the national strategy.
- What do we seek to achieve, or prevent, only if supported by an alliance? This defines the outer limits of the country’s strategic aspirations as part of a global system.
- What should we not engage in, even if urged by a multilateral group or an alliance? This defines the limiting condition of the [American] participation in the world.
- Above all, what is the nature of the values that we seek to advance? What application depend in part on circumstance?
- For the US, the quest of world order functions on two levels: the celebration of universal principles needs to be paired with a recognition of the reality of other regions’ histories and cultures. But is it possible to translate divergent cultures into a common system?
- the indispensable element of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful analysis of all relevant factors.

Which recommendations gives Kissinger as “the grand old man of foreign policy” to his afterworld?
- In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever more complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Communication technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertip encourages the mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader.
Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values.

Does foreign policy have a destination, or is it a process of never-completed fulfillment?

Is liberal democracy the final state of a nation’s development? Probably not. Syncretic, non ideological, system theory based parties might be the next step in the development, but this thought might also turn out to be just too idealistic.
What is democracy all about? Balance between participation and leadership
Kissinger gives no answer to this question but somewhat implies that democracy is the final destination.

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Book Review: World Order by Henry Kissinger

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