When it comes to a ‘civilisational state' is there really such a thing?
The notion of a civilisational state has always intrigued me because it seems to be a contradiction in terms. And yet, it has been in vogue for decades. In varying guises, it's being promoted and encouraged in such diverse and even hostile countries as China and India, Iran and Israel.
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When you have such a long glorious civilisation or religion, and sometimes they are indistinguishable – the West, for example, used to be called Christendom – it's inevitable the state will incorporate that history into its ideology to legitimise itself.
On the other hand, 'youth' can also be an ideology. The once-young United States thought of itself as the vanguard of 'the new world' as opposed to the corrupt 'old world' in Europe. The US is the opposite of a civilisational state, in terms of their contrasting ideologies.
It strikes me that civilisation – or being 'civilised' into a particular way of life – is the pervasive background to how you think, speak, live your life, and accept or fear death. It's quiet and semi-conscious.
However, ideology is loud and in your face; it's about mobilising and controlling others, and being mobilised and controlled willingly. It's about power – that of being acted on or acting on someone.
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Also, civilisations throughout history often learned and mixed with each other. Unfortunately, Samuel Huntington turned them into practically enemy states!
What led me to revisit this idea is a new post on X by Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit and one of the original 'PayPal Mafia' that includes such controversial billionaires as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
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Asia Times
15-05-2025
- Asia Times
Asia without America, part 2: Japan's Tang renaissance
Skip to content A Tang Dynasty-period market recreated as part of an enormous mock Tang city in the northwest Hubei town of Xiangyang. The Tang Dynasty had a profound impact on all facets of Japanese culture, from aesthetics to language to religion to government. Photo: Orphaned Nation Tokyo girl, Tokyo girlYou've got the moves to rule the worldThat cute inscrutability Tokyo girl, you're a mystery Ace of base The liberal democracies of Northeast Asia – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – have survived and even thrived in a purgatorial equilibrium where their fate is dependent on: an America in Asia but not of Asia (see here) and Asia but not Asia (see here) and a China gathering its strength and biding its time. There are costs associated with this equilibrium, this status quo, this interminable present – costs not just of treasure and strategic risk but of civilizational stagnation and national incoherence. While Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have avoided the American dumpster fires of crime, drugs and obesity, they have not been able to dodge the nihilism and cultural anomie of end-state capitalism and liberal democracy. As much as this writer likes to bash Francis Fukuyama, the good professor did cover his rear on the pitfalls awaiting the Last Man at the End of History: Liberal democracy produced 'men without chests,' composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognized as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human. Image: Reddit / Jordan Peterson In liberal democratic Asia, men without chests are the product of political design more than they are naturally occurring Last Men at history's end. Postwar Japan is a concoction of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been in power almost exclusively since its founding in 1955. The dark but now open secret of the LDP is that it was founded by accused war criminals (including Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi) and had received financial and intelligence support from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for decades. While Germany went through a denazification program, the US 'reversed course' in Japan after Mao's communists won China's civil war in 1949. Japan's right-wing militarists, expecting to be purged and charged with war crimes, were instead rehabilitated to form a political bulwark against communist expansion. Cold War expediencies were certainly justifiable to many – but ultimately, for the Japanese, it meant that their country was less than sovereign, never adequately confronted its wartime past and never had a real say in its military occupation by the US. Japan became a bonsai nation – a well-tended miniature state denuded of thymos. When the Japanese absentmindedly forgot about their bonsai status and dared to challenge the US in the auto and semiconductor industries, sanctions on Toshiba, the Plaza Accord and 'voluntary' export quotas quickly reminded them of their place. Japan is sui generis – no economy has stagnated for so long after outperforming so spectacularly for even longer. That is the tragedy of a bonsai nation – men without chests are allowed to dream only so big. And so, Japan – once the land of samurai warriors and hardened salarymen – has been reduced to a theme park filled with kawaii anime, Pokémon, Super Mario and schoolgirl manga in not-so-hidden corners. In a future in which America's military is no longer tenable in the Western Pacific, Japan will have to find a new equilibrium. Japan's interminable bonsai present cannot be all that satisfying, hanging over the nation the way regret haunts a Murakami novel. Without America, Japan will be forced to grow up and wrestle with sovereignty, to break out of its bonsai pot and be liberated from creepy hentai, hikikomori and tentacle porn – to become men with chests again. Much of this will be very off-putting to many Japanese. Casting aside the comfort of a long-familiar equilibrium for an unknown future will be terrifying. Much of Asia has unfinished business with Japan. And not just any kind of unfinished business – but blood debt of the rawest, most impassioned kind, remembered for generations if not already immortalized in legend. Japan had little to fear from China for almost all of its history prior to World War II. Mongols from the Yuan Dynasty attempted to invade the Japanese islands twice and were defeated by inclement weather both times. (England and France, in comparison, fought 41 wars against each other since the Dark Ages.) This time, however, is different. A China with a military strong enough to muscle out the US (hypothetically, of course) and nursing deep historical grievances can be somewhat worrisome. Without the US military, much of Asia – from China to South Korea to Southeast Asia – will want to settle unfinished family business. World War II, however, was a long time ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge. Only a handful of Japanese war veterans are still alive. Few living Asians have memories of Japanese atrocities. It is difficult to imagine Asia demanding from Japan anything but 'symbolic' gestures of atonement. But in the land of thymos, symbolic gestures, like teaching war atrocities in Japan's schools or removing war criminals from the Yasukuni Shrine, are the most difficult to swallow. On November 25, 1970, novelist Yukio Mishima, aided by four disciples, stormed a military base in central Tokyo, tied up the commandant, barricaded the doors, donned a white headband, stepped onto the balcony and delivered a rousing speech to soldiers gathered below. Yukio Mishima at the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces' Eastern Region on the day of his death. Photo: AAP Meant to inspire a military coup d'état restoring direct rule to the emperor, the speech was met with puzzlement and jeers. Shortly after his speech, Mishima apologized to the tied-up commandant and committed hara-kiri (seppuku), disemboweling himself like samurai of yore before being decapitated by a disciple. Mishima spent all his adult life trying not to be a 'man without a chest.' In the hopeless last days of the war, Mishima avoided almost certain death by getting rejected from the army for an erroneous tuberculosis diagnosis, which he may or may not have faked. Cheated from or having cheated the glory of battlefield death, Mishima lifted weights obsessively, became a skilled kendo swordsman and lamented the emptiness of modern Japan. Mishima identified Japan's men without chests decades before Francis Fukuyama: Japan has lost its spiritual tradition, and instead has become infested with materialism. Japan is under the curse of a green snake now. The green snake is biting Japan's chest. There is no way to escape this curse. In 1959-1960, protests erupted across Japan in opposition to the United States-Japan Security Treaty, Anpo in abbreviated Japanese. The treaty would formally allow the United States to maintain military bases in Japan. Opposition was immense from both the left and the right. At its height, hundreds of thousands of protestors surrounded Japan's parliament in Tokyo. On June 15, 1960, students breached the building, resulting in violent clashes with police. The original Anpo contained egregious terms: no specific end date or means of abrogation, allowing the US military to use bases for any purpose without consulting the Japanese government, authorization for US troops to put down domestic protests. The 1959-1960 protests were in opposition to Anpo, even with those terms specifically removed. Despite the protests, the revised Anpo was ratified, but at the cost of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi's resignation and the cancellation of a celebratory visit by US President Dwight Eisenhower. The revised Anpo provided abrogation opportunities at 10-year intervals, with student protests erupting again in 1968-1969 but in much-attenuated form. Today, opposition to Anpo is largely confined to residents of Okinawa who bear the brunt of the environmental impact (noise pollution, chemical run-offs, live-fire exercises) and service member criminality of the US occupation. Yukio Mishima was radicalized by the Anpo protests. In 1961, Mishima wrote the short story 'Patriotism,' which was made into a popular 1966 short film in which he directed and starred. The film climaxed with Lieutenant Takeyama, unable to reconcile loyalty to the Emperor and loyalty to his comrade-in-arms, committing hara-kiri, with the strings of Wagner playing in the background. In an interview, Mishima explained: In samurai tradition, the sense of beauty was always connected with death. For instance if you commit hara-kiri, the samurai was requested to make-up his face by powder or lipstick in order to keep his face beautiful after his suffering death. Spiritually, I wanted to revive some samurai spirit through it… I don't want to revive hara-kiri itself but through the vision, very strong vision of hara-kiri, I want to inspire and stimulate younger people… I wanted to revive some traditional sense of honor or sense of very strong responsibility… a sense of death in honor. That's my purpose. Mishima's suicide at the prime of life was a political call to arms, a personal cri de cœur, an artistic expression of ultimate beauty, a reclamation of the glorified death that slipped through his fingers as a young man. This all proved too much for 1970 Japan. Just when the nation was coming into its cosmopolitan own, its most famous writer makes a feudal spectacle of himself, gratuitously conjuring up unpleasant memories. The stunt was certainly beyond the pale in neighboring China and both Koreas, whose inhabitants likely had had enough samurai swords, bushido and hara-kiri for a few centuries. Mishima was on a mission to Make Japan Great Again. Unfortunately, World War II survivor guilt bound him to the most objectionable period in Japan's history. After Commodore Perry and his black ships forced open Japan under threat of cannon fire, shattering 250 years of splendid seclusion, tumultuous changes swept through Japanese society, toppling centuries-old institutions like the shogunate and the samurai. The Meiji restoration overturned the isolationist Edo period, centralized government and industrialized the economy, but ultimately went down an unfortunate militarist path. The rest is, shall we say, history. Any hint of Meiji-Shōwa militarist revival surely would set off ear-piercing alarm bells across all of Asia. Fortunately, Japan's renaissance need not begin with Commodore Perry's black ships. Modern Japan has almost certainly retained more of the Tang Dynasty than modern China. Kimonos, geisha make-up and Kyoto-style architecture would look less out of place in the ancient Chinese city of Chang'an (present day Xi'an), capital of the Tang Dynasty, than anything in Beijing, Shanghai and even Shenzhen. Emperor Taizong (Li Shimin), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty, ruled from 626 to 649. A follower of Confucius and a rationalist, he saw himself as a servant of the people. Japan learned much from the Tang Dynasty. Photo: National Palace Museum via Wikimedia Commons The Tang Dynasty (605 to 907, minus a 690-705 interregnum) had a profound impact on all facets of Japanese culture, from aesthetics to language to religion to government. The Tang was perhaps the most cosmopolitan of China's dynasties, with 25,000 foreigners living in its capital. Japanese, Turks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Persians, Indians and Central Asians filled Chang'an's restaurants, wine-houses and temples (Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Zoroastrian). In this atmosphere, Tang China was in constant contact with Japan, receiving 19 official missions ( kentoshi ) of up to 600 people who made the two-year round-trip journey (some staying decades before returning). Japanese envoys and scholars who had completed kentoshi instituted Chinese-style laws, bureaucracy, calendars and measurements in their official capacity. In their unofficial capacity, they brought back Chinese fashion, literature, musical instruments and artistic taste. Fears of China collecting on Japanese blood debt in draconian fashion are highly misplaced. Without a barbarian military on China's maritime border, the Communist Party of China can relax into its Confucianism. While the political West swings left and right, political China swings between Legalism and Confucianism. In anxious times, Legalism and its authoritarian impulses prevail – there can be no fun and games when Qin Shi Huang is consolidating the Qin Dynasty. And only after Emperor Taizong defeated the Eastern and Western Turks could the Tang Dynasty relax, allowing Chang'an and Yangzhou to become cosmopolitan cities where commerce, poetry, painting, calligraphy, drunken parties and dancing girls flourished. President Xi Jinping has been battening down China's hatches along Legalist lines for over a decade, reining in the loosey-goosey free-for-all of the Hu-Wen era. China is no longer hiding its strength and biding its time. China's shipbuilding capacity is more than 200 times that of the US. It is only a matter of time. Without the US Navy Seventh Fleet stationed in Yokosuka, the Qin-esque Communist Party of China will mellow out and become Tang-esque – a version of China much more amenable to an anxious Japan. Abandoning a known equilibrium to wrestle with Japan's past and secure an unknown future is a high-risk/high-reward undertaking. Japan has everything to lose. Without US protection, an unforgiving China bent on vengeance would be the end of Japan. Japan, however, also has everything to gain. The presence of the US military has warped Japanese politics and society for decades. A forgiving China not interested (much) in settling scores is the only real future Japan has. The status quo has stunted Japan in a bonsai pot – purgatorial torture for its novelists. Mishima went out in a macabre blaze of glory. Murakami is perpetually wistful for what could have been. And Ryū (the other) Murakami wants to set it all on fire. In a hypothetical future undistorted by America's alien presence, Japan can finally exorcise the ghost of the Meiji-Shōwa era and let its Tang renaissance wash across Asia.
Asia Times
13-05-2025
- Asia Times
Asia without America, part 1: The cupboards are bare
Skip to content "Earth Map Without America." Imaginary map: Roderick Burgess / Reddit You can't always get what you wantBut if you try sometimeYou'll find You get what you need The rolling stones History has multiple equilibria. Seemingly stable arrangements can turn on a dime. 'There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,' Vladimir Lenin wrote in 2017, his last year in exile. Or, as President Xi Jinping said at the door of the Kremlin after a 2023 meeting with Vladimir Putin, 'Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven't seen for 100 years.' Within earshot of the press, President Xi slyly added, 'and we are the ones driving these changes together.' Let us not beat around the bush: We're talking to you, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The changes that President Xi was referring to are the collapse of America's alliance system and, along with it, the collapse of the rules-based international order. Every nation should be prepared. The savviest actors will front-run events. When President Xi said 'we are the ones driving these changes,' it was an open invitation to bet on and become part of the 'we.' Fast forward to 2025 and trends have only accelerated. President Trump, in his second term, has gratuitously insulted Europe, strong-armed Panama, threatened to annex Greenland and Canada and launched a chaotic trade war on the world. This is not 4D chess, people. This is President Trump using whatever is left of American power to kick over the chessboard, hoping the scattered pieces magically rearrange themselves in advantageous positions. It is also sheer madness. US President Franklin D Roosevelt responding to the Pearl Harbor attack. Photo: CBS News In his book And Tomorrow the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy , Stephen Wertheim tells the story of how, over just a few years preceding Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations and leaders such as President Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered America's global posture away from wariness over foreign entanglements and towards global primacy. Of course, none of this could be said out loud. As the new posture developed during and after World War II, it had to be buried in euphemisms like 'liberal international order' and administered through neutered institutions including the World Bank/IMF (1944), the United Nations (1945), NATO (1949) and even the US Congress. The Lansdowne portrait is an iconic life-size portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. It depicts the 64-year-old president of the United States during his final year in office. All of this runs counter to the legacy many founding fathers hoped to bequeath the young republic fortunately separated from a fractious Europe by the Atlantic Ocean. In his valedictory address, George Washington famously warned against involvement in foreign wars and entanglements: Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice? Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation?Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. According to Wertheim, the thinkers and leaders who planned American primacy were not acting in bad faith; these were not Pentagon paper pushers angling for a retirement gig at Lockheed Martin. These were men genuinely fearful of a world where fascists controlled the Eurasian landmass. Wertheim writes: Peace, however, came at an unprecedented price after Germany conquered France and briefly bestrode Europe. For the United States to maintain a hemispheric military posture could potentially leave Europe to the worst Europeans and Asia to the worst Asians – totalitarian dictatorships harnessing the tools of industrial modernity to achieve armed conquest and subjugation. After saving Europe and Asia from fascist domination in WWII (or at least joining mop-up operations in act four), the US lost no time declaring itself leader of the free world in the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union. George Kennan, in his famous long telegram, wrote: The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.… Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence. Primacy, it turns out, is a hard drug to quit. After the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union and China voluntarily joining the American led economic system, the US quickly appointed itself permanent world leader under the Wolfowitz doctrine: Paul Wolfowitz. Photo: Hoover Institution The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. It was around that time that 'liberal international order' morphed into 'rules-based international order.' After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the US updated the Wolfowitz doctrine with the Bush doctrine, an aggressive foreign policy posture that assumed the right to preemptively eliminate – through military means – nascent threats before they fully materialize. At West Point's 2002 graduation speech, George W Bush said: President George W Bush at West Point's 2002 graduation. Photo: Paul Morse / National Archives We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. Our security will require transforming the military you will lead – a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives. The hangover from botched military adventures under the Wolfowitz/Bush doctrines has ignited calls for a foreign policy closer to what the founding fathers had intended, now pejoratively labelled 'isolationism' by primacists. Some, like self-proclaimed realist Elbridge Colby, favor a husbanding of resources to specifically contain China – a Sino-only primacist, if you will. As with everything else, President Trump's foreign policy has been schizophrenic and incoherent. Let us not pretend there is a Trump doctrine. There is no plan. There is no strategy. There is no theory. He's just making it up as he goes along, driven by appetites and constrained by resources. American primacists deliberately reject that the purpose of regional hegemony is to not have to expend resources on the military. The nation had been amply warned and not just by George Washington. John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States, urged against searching for 'monsters to destroy' in an 1821 speech: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.… She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force . America first heard the term 'military industrial complex' from Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, in his 1961 farewell address: President Dwight Eisenhower delivers his farewell address. Photo: American Rhetoric This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Hegemonic dynasties coalesced in China specifically to divert resources away from fractious wars and towards public works projects (for example, the Dujiangyuan water diversion project, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall). Dujiangyuan water diversion project. Photo: Islamic China Travel The PRC dynasty is no different, spending less than 2% of its GDP on defense and getting the Three Gorges Dam, high speed rail, the South-North Water Transfer project and a national highway system in return. The 'freedom to roam,' popularized by John Mearsheimer, is demonstrably not a universal imperative of regional hegemons. Ming Dynasty China at the height of its power famously burned the imperial treasure fleet. The American impulse to roam is a legacy of European (mostly British) maritime imperialism which has long since outlived its utility, now incurring more costs than benefits. Russia is challenging NATO in Ukraine, China is challenging the US in East Asia, Iran is challenging the US in the Middle East and god knows what Kim Jong Un is doing in North Korea. The neglected home front is awash in drugs, obesity, crime and mental illness. America, spread thin after decades of mindless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, now maintains what's left of primacy though an alphabet soup of multilateral alliances (G7, NATO, AUKUS, the Quad). These alliances are inherently unstable – pitting free riding against buck passing. The US is trying to do global hegemony on the cheap through alliance partners. An overstretched America wants to pass the buck – to offload the costs of its rules-based international order onto partners. Meanwhile, alliance partners want to free ride – to enjoy benefits of the rules-based order without chipping in. For alliances to be stable, America must demonstrate that it is willing and able to shoulder all the costs – with or without partners. Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States. Washington, DC 20 January 1961. Photo: US Army Signal Corps / John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston / Wikimedia Commons The United States did this for most of the post-World War II era, as John F. Kennedy promised in his January 1961 inauguration speech: Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge – and more. While partners waxed and waned based on shifting domestic politics (for example, France, the Philippines, Thailand), America's resolve had long been assumed, even if erroneously (for example, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Vietnam 1973, Lebanon 1984, Somalia 1993, Iraq 2011, Afghanistan in 2021). But now, as President Trump abandons alliances and the capabilities of challengers grow, America's resolve can no longer be assumed. The US is not just trying to pass the buck, it is all but telling Europe that the buck does not stop here. Asia is left in a lurch unsure what President Trump will decide. It could be anything – from an honest-to-god strategic pivot to Asia to trading Taiwan for flattery and a ham sandwich to anything in between. We just do not know. What everyone does know is that China's capabilities are growing and, over time, the costs of maintaining America's position in Asia will rise. And if trends continue, buck passing will intensify and free riders will have uncomfortable decisions to make.
South China Morning Post
25-04-2025
- South China Morning Post
When it comes to a ‘civilisational state' is there really such a thing?
The notion of a civilisational state has always intrigued me because it seems to be a contradiction in terms. And yet, it has been in vogue for decades. In varying guises, it's being promoted and encouraged in such diverse and even hostile countries as China and India, Iran and Israel. Advertisement When you have such a long glorious civilisation or religion, and sometimes they are indistinguishable – the West, for example, used to be called Christendom – it's inevitable the state will incorporate that history into its ideology to legitimise itself. On the other hand, 'youth' can also be an ideology. The once-young United States thought of itself as the vanguard of 'the new world' as opposed to the corrupt 'old world' in Europe. The US is the opposite of a civilisational state, in terms of their contrasting ideologies. It strikes me that civilisation – or being 'civilised' into a particular way of life – is the pervasive background to how you think, speak, live your life, and accept or fear death. It's quiet and semi-conscious. However, ideology is loud and in your face; it's about mobilising and controlling others, and being mobilised and controlled willingly. It's about power – that of being acted on or acting on someone. Advertisement Also, civilisations throughout history often learned and mixed with each other. Unfortunately, Samuel Huntington turned them into practically enemy states! What led me to revisit this idea is a new post on X by Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit and one of the original 'PayPal Mafia' that includes such controversial billionaires as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
