Global policymakers hotly debate the extent to which the Western-led global order will survive the 21st century.
To some, the West is indispensable when it comes to international security and prosperity, its current woes merely a passing phase. Others view Western supremacy as not only the source of much ill, but also inevitably transient.
Amitav Acharya’s “The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West” is an accessible and sober contribution to this often abstruse and partisan debate. His book serves as both a guide to global politics and a history for the interested nonexpert.
Why We Wrote This
Many Westerners think democracy was born in Greece and culminated in the U.S.-led global world order. But democratic principles were practiced in other parts of the world and across many cultures throughout history.
“World order” sounds abstract, but it alludes to something very simple: a worldview and attendant ways to arrange politics within and among nations. World orders have framed how nations and cultures have thought of rights and responsibilities, sovereignty and territory, war and peace. Acharya writes, “Every major nation is the creator or aspiring creator of world order,” trying to shape the world in its own image.
The contemporary “liberal international order” – as some experts like to call it – is often viewed as largely an American creation, reflecting American priorities and beliefs. With its focus on individual rights, capitalism, democracy, rules-based trade, and freedom of the commons, the order, at least in the minds of its champions, is the best of America writ large. To critics, the United States-led order is nothing but a cover for self-interested American actions.
Acharya argues that the world order we see today “is not the West’s monopoly but a shared creation of multiple civilizations over a span of history.”
While it is common to insist on Greece as the birthplace of democracy, Acharya points out that northern India circa 600 B.C.E. had 16 polities, out of which five were republics. These “people’s assemblies” developed the earliest notions of a social contract, long before 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One such Indian republic around 500 B.C.E. gave the world Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha.
Buddhists, Acharya writes, developed a view of society that would be consonant with Enlightenment-era Rousseau, rather than with 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose grim assumptions about human nature resonated with many Hindus. And the Hobbesian view and its correlated emphasis on balance-of-power arrangements would find its first expression in a remarkable ancient Indian text on statecraft. The “Arthashastra” was authored by Kautilya, the principal adviser of Chandragupta, the founder of the vast ancient-Indian Maurya Empire. Roger Boesche, whom Barack Obama credits with sparking his interest in politics, called the text “a classic of unsparing political realism.”
Indian monks and Buddhism would also be leveraged by Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history. In one of the many anecdotes, Acharya tells us how Wu – who reigned between A.D. 690 and 705 – took imagery from Indian Buddhism to legitimize her claim to the Tang dynasty throne.
Noting that “Chinese ideas about the world order were not uniform,” Acharya speaks of a tradition of statecraft that was sophisticated and brutal, relying on trade, as well as on imperial conquest.
“The Once and Future World Order” is not without faults. Acharya’s exasperation at Western appropriation of ideas from the rest of the world can be repetitive. But on the whole, the book is a tour de force. As the geopolitical becomes personal – through wars and turmoil – it is a palliative to news-cycle noise and social media hype.
