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The liberal values of the West, with our more than 200 old legacies from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, are now openly challenged. The spiritual battle that rages is about the value of our values, writes Morten Strand.
AUTOCRATS IN ALL COUNTRIES …: Presidents of China and Russia, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. For the occasion in Moscow. Photo: AFP / NTB
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The new American Foreign Minister Antony Blinken did not blink much when he saw his Chinese colleagues in white last week and confronted them with the obvious, namely the universal character of human rights, and the Chinese’s human rights violations in Xinjiang province and Hong Kong, among other places. The meeting in Anchorage, Alaska was a strange piece of diplomacy, in which a brutal ideological battle was fought for open cameras and microphones. Both Blinken, his colleague Wang Yi, and politburo member Yang Jiechi, spoke primarily for their home audiences. Thus, the first high-level meeting between Joe Biden’s new team and China had to “fail” to succeed. It was a rioting meeting, and it is in any case a difficult starting point for dialogue.
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And what was he going to do – Blinken – blink for? He was obviously right. But then it only took a few days. And this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared in Beijing. He too had been subjected to a new series of coordinated sanctions from the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom due to the trial and the verdict against the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Now Foreign Ministers Wang and Lavrov stood together – literally – and harassed, condemning what they perceived as Western moralism and post-colonialism. And they came up with strong outcomes against what they perceive as Western lawless punitive expeditions.
“Countries should stand together in opposition to all forms of unilateral sanctions,” Wang said.
Lavrov in and Russia and China agreed that the United States relied on the Cold War military alliances to undermine “international legal architecture.” Just as for us in the West, criticism is about complying with – or not complying with – international law. For the West, the legislation is, among other things, to protect human rights. For China and Russia, the legislation is intergovernmental, and they require non-interference in their own affairs.
China did it for the occasion clear that a number of Western researchers and institutions are excluded from the country. Among other things, they have helped to reveal that one million Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang province – ten percent of this population – are in concentration camps to be retrained. That is, they are brainwashed to become “good” Chinese. The United States calls the treatment of the Uighurs “genocide,” that is, a deliberate attempt to exterminate a people and a culture.
We talk about something that is beginning to resemble the international of the autocracies in opposition to liberal values. Some of the countries have a relatively large democratic legitimacy, such as Erdogan’s Turkey, Duterte’s Philippines and Balsonaros’ Brazil, and to that extent also Putin’s Russia, and some are completely without, such as Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia. Even the EU countries Hungary and Poland can be included here. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s paradoxical and provocative concept – “illiberal democracy” – largely qualifies for support membership in the international autocracies. They all want to refrain from criticizing – and sanctions against – their harsh government.
It’s with one of course and complete absence of embarrassment that the universe of ideas that led to the development of democracy in the United States and Western Europe is now increasingly being challenged. In part, this is happening in the shadow of China’s formidable economic success, the authoritarian state capitalism that is a story that large parts of the world would like to copy. In that case, this is a kind of unintentional Marxism, namely that it is money – or capital – that creates ideology. But it is an autocratic – and not a liberating – ideology. After all, Marx was a born-again child of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
China strikes back against the latest sanctions with great confidence. It is no longer eye for eye, tooth for tooth, for China is raising, so there is now soon talk of two islands and two teeth for each eye and each tooth. This makes the leaders well aware that a trade war will probably affect the West more than China, as Donald Trump’s war ended. China has 18 percent of the world’s GDP and is the world’s production hall. And while the United States is the largest trading partner for 38 countries, China is the largest trading partner for 64 countries. The crisis with the pandemic also gives China great benefits, with an economy that already is over the worst corona kneika. A Western attempt to isolate China may end up isolating itself instead.
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That puts us facing very unpleasant questions. For how much are our universal democratic values really worth? It is the dramatic question that is being challenged by ever stronger and more coordinated forces in the world today.
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