Here is an interview of Prof. Richard Sakwa on Neutrality Studies, by Pascal Lottaz. And, of course, my comment at the bottom.
The warmongering is not a bug. It's a feature of the system
the Political West has built to dominate the world. How can we
change that?
At the East-West Forum in Istanbul, Professor Richard Sakwa joins
Pascal Lottaz to examine the political West, European
sovereignty, and the persistence of Cold War thinking. Sakwa
argues that Western triumphalism has weakened diplomacy and
narrowed political imagination. They discuss competing visions of
modernity, the risks of confrontation, and whether China offers
an alternative to bloc politics. The conversation concludes with
Sakwa's proposal for a Charter Order grounded in international
law, pluralism, and the unfulfilled promise of the United
Nations.
Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the
University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
Dr. Pascal Lottaz is an Associate Professor at Kyoto
University where he investigates neutrality in international
relations and directs the research network
neutralitystudies.com.
PASCAL- Welcome back everybody to Neutrality Studies.
Today, outside a conference in Istanbul where we just discussed
the East-West Forum and what is happening now in terms of the new
multipolarity arising and with me is one of the speakers of the
forum my friend and colleague Richard Sakwa. Richard welcome,
lovely to be with you again.
Well thank you so much for taking the time, Richard. Like, we
just discussed multipolarity basically for an entire day. What
are you making of the discussions that you've heard and of this
hopeful connection between East and West, you know, being also in
Istanbul, the political, imperial, and philosophical West?
RICHARD- I think it's been, this is the inaugural conference of what they hope to become a series and it really was a sort of meeting of East and West both politically in the sense of we're meeting in Istanbul which is the junction, if you like, of Europe and Asia.
But at the same time we talked more specifically about what is the West. My argument as some people may know, I've been arguing that since 1945, what was often called the transatlantic alliance, Euro-atlanticism, that we need to give it a very specific political content. Hence I call it the Political West. And this Political West is only a latest form of the West and not the best, because I would argue that there's other forms - the one which has dominated for 500 years has been the Imperial West, the Colonial West or you could maybe put it as one of our speakers argued, most I think fruitfully, the idea of it as the development of a type of modernity, European modernity, which now claims to be the universal model of how people should live.
This universalism or universal modernity. Whereas of course many other civilizations, cultures, some of our speakers in particular from China would very specifically argue that China is a civilizational state and therefore it has a different vision of modernity. The third West I've taken to calling the Philosophical West. And why is that? Because it's not just simply the Greco Roman, the Judeo-Christian tradition, but those ideas came and were in, they developed in interaction with the whole, what we now call West Asia, Persia later on Babylon, all the rest in fact, the idea philosophy itself. of thinking about society, came from Persia from ancient Persia so it was and in fact there was plenty of evidence of the influence of Indic cultures and so on. So in other words, this Philosophical West and they're not in succession, that today we have these three layers - this Philosophical West which includes the Enlightenment which includes a renaissance and many other moments, we have this Colonial Imperial West and we have this Political West which is a U.S.-dominated one - NATO, European Union, and it's the most impoverished one in intellectual terms, and just finally that what we were discussing today, and it was very heartening, is that we were discussing perhaps the fourth instantiation of the West and that is a Better West.
PASCAL- I wonder how we build toward that. But may I just run one of my ideas, not One West and Europe's lost sovereignty ideas or observations by you, because I have one more West that I kind of try to conceptualize and I call that the One West. And what I mean by that is this phenomenon that it seems at the moment that the Europeans have completely given up these and national priorities, subsumed them under the American priorities and the Americans seem to subsume their priorities under the Israelis and the Israelis seem to constantly, you know, there's this constant question like, oh how do the Israelis do what they do and so on, but at the same time they also get all of this support from the Europeans and with the One West I just try to conceptualize this idea that it's maybe a mistake to think of them as separate, the way that it would make little sense to think of a body as separate organs, right? They all interact. And asking is Israel guiding the United States or the US Israel, is like asking is the brain controlling the heart or the heart the brain? It's like they're part and parcel of the same organism and because they conceive of themselves as one unit, as you know, defending civilization defending being a democracy, the only democracy in the Middle East and everybody stands up and claps, also in the EU parliament and in the Senate and so on.
What do you think about that, this idea that it is one system and the idea that its nation states is actually just like kind of a camouflage on top of what is actually happening and that's the western civilization pushing against all the others as it has done for the last five, six hundred years.
RICHARD- Yeah, I like the idea, but I think I'm arguing a similar thing, just by calling it something else. But it is first of all, this Political West is homogenizing. As you say, it's one of the key features of the Political West since 1945 has been the desovereignization of the western European states. The only state which has kept its sovereignty relatively has been the United States which was the leader and shaping this West. It also has of course the wider west covering West Asia, Israel you mentioned and of course the West is the Political West would include South Korea, Japan and the Anglosphere. So but your point is an absolutely correct one that it's homogenizing, desovereignizing and that these states apart from the United States cannot understand and define their own national interest. Israel can, or in the way it does in its very strange sort of perverse manner, but the rest of the states we're talking about, the legacy European states, Germany, France, United Kingdom – the E3 as they called now that, their inability to define, you know, what is first of all the general national interest of the community itself and of the individuals making it up and they've lost this ability of having strategic thinking - it is homogenizing but at the same time there's always been tensions, what's paradoxical is that it became more homogeneous when it least, at least at the end of the Cold War, it actually became more radicalized by a whole set of philosophical, political, geopolitical challenges because it would as one of the speakers said, there is nothing worse than victory for destroying a state - the sense of impunity that all is permitted, this shamelessness of actions which has reached an absolute peak at the present time.
PASCAL- That's what is so weird about it right? I mean the people who believe that they won the Cold War even, and a lot of people will argue against that, including of course Jack Matlock and many others, is like there was no winning of the Cold War. It was wound down and then you had a proper moment in the 1990s which I still remember that was like super optimistic about the future, right, everything will be better everything will be good and now peace will spread right? Peace will break out and then it didn't and then it didn't and then like the warmongering continued and we now have data and research on all of the wars and all of the violent interventions that were done by the United States after '89 that are even more than between '45 and '89. And so this is the outcome of like constantly winning - if you win then you get addicted to your own, to the stuff...
RICHARD- If you're in self-importance and impunity and
you're standing above the law and so on. Yeah. Brown University
in Massachusetts has estimated that at the minimum in direct
deaths from the victory if you like, since the end of the Cold
War is nearly a million. It's 800,000. Of course in recent months
it's gone up massively as well. One way of looking at it are
direct consequences of the various conflicts and wars which have
started and been fought since the end of the Cold War and that
excludes the ones dying from sanctions and lack of medicine and
so on. Because that's half a million a year. Yeah.
(alternating "yeses" follow):
Yes. Yes. So the tally is quite a big one.
RICHARD- Yeah. It's a huge one. From the postwar era to a prewar world. Yes. Yeah. Can I say the way that I'm now beginning to try to conceptualize why after the end of the first Cold War we continued and perpetuated the logic of Cold War including the institutions of the Cold War: NATO above all, but even in its own way the European Union and the thinking of Cold Warfare and enemy distinction that we're the only universal model of civilization, of modernity, and so on, that false universalism again, one of the speakers talked about that, is the way I go back now, to Fernand Braudel and he divided, you know, visions and understanding of historical time in three different ways. The first one is the longue durée1 and the longue durée of course for us would be if you like democratic or industrial capitalism, that's the law, that's the historical epoch in which we live - capitalism, where the market and various types of capitalism - we've had social democratic inflection, we've had neoliberalism for the last 40 years, we had a different type of corporate capitalism in the late 19th century and in the 20th century and so on. So, but that's the longue durée.
Within that and I'm now seeing that we had a cycle, many cycles but the latest ones - 1914 to 1945, the cycle of European civil wars which sucked in colonial troops from many outsiders and United States of course. So, but that cycle then came in. We're now living in the tail end of the next cycle, which is the 1945 post-war cycle of Cold War, of the dominance of the Political West, of Euro-atlanticism, transatlanticism, a vision of European unity which is disintegrating in front of our eyes. So, this is the cycle we're living in. We're living at the end of that cycle. The last one ended in a massive world war.
This one we're living, this post-war years, we're now, it's gradually turning, if you like, into a pre-war situation. Yeah. Where everybody's preparing for war, warning of war, talking, arming for war, preparing populations for war, who don't seem to be enthusiastic for it, by the way. Yeah.
PASCAL- And yes, they shall just never ever call it again sleepwalking. I don't think it was sleepwalking in the First World War. They were doing it consciously. Yeah. Sleepwalking now.
RICHARD- Yes. Herman Brock did a marvelous novel called the Sleepwalkers and it's got the three stages. Christopher Clark used that title from which is [a] marvelous book. So it shows the spirit of the time that militarism, that sort of in a decay of a society, and so Germany in that case... PASCAL- but if I look at that I would actually argue, that in 1912, '13, '14 there was war euphoria.
RICHARD- Yes.
PASCAL- I especially in '14 in August once it broke, out everybody was like finally...
RICHARD- Absolutely.
PASCAL- I would say we don't have that now. It's more we luckily have war anxiety. I would say...
RICHARD- Yes.
PASCAL- rather than a fever.
RICHARD- Yes. PASCAL- Yeah. Rather than euphoria. It's not like "when is it going to start?" It's more like...
RICHARD- Oh, no it will start. And all the ideology at that time, of the cleansing power of war, the cleansing power of nations and people can't do that now because we've got nuclear weapons and people are knowing that's why this pre-war is like a, is why I use the word Cold War because a Cold War by definition can only happen in a nuclear age otherwise they turn into hot wars.
So this is an intensified second Cold War. Can I just say that the from Fernand Braudel, he talks about longue durée, he talks about the cycles and in, you know, different people can interpret them in their own way. But then the final one for him was the events event. Now what Fukuyama and the ideological trap is interesting and this was reflected in some of the discussions we had at the East-West conference today is that when Fukuyama talked about the end of history, he of course said there will always be events and specifically events. So today we have meaningless events, lots of events but precisely that end of history was that historical time in the Fernand Braudel concept of the longue durée and the cycles allegedly had ended. So all we are in this for, Fukuyama, the sub-Nietzschen endless events and event.
In other words the whole idea was time was frozen in that moment of alleged western victory, that it was the only vision of modernity. Of course he said later events will happen but only events and therefore he ignored the larger issues associated with a larger historical cycle and indeed the bigger issues about the nature of capitalism, equality, justice, the vision of what a human should be in modern civilization. So paradoxically that Kojèven [In the YouTube transcript, this was "coyovian" - see how long it takes you to fix this] version of Hegelianism is actually was more accurate. We all dismiss the "end of history" as nonsense, which of course it was, but in a profound philosophical sense, he put his finger on something. And that's why 30 years later, we're still talking about Fukuyama, but we've misinterpreted him.
PASCAL- Yeah. And I mean, to be fair to him, he said events is like, "Of course things aren't over, but the ideological struggle is done. We will not have ideological struggle anymore." And in a very weird way, what we're seeing now is that this school of thought, this liberal West, this liberalism is, has itself transformed into such an ideological beast, that it's really hard to see how this is not kind of now going to be another ideological struggle with those who are pragmatic. I mean I perceive the Russians and the Chinese and the global south in general as just pragmatic saying like, no I mean we want to do what's good for us and we will put a foot down when that needs to happen and you know in the global south even less militaristic, but the West conceives of itself as this one thing united under this liberal ideology.
RICHARD- That's right. There's a whole package of issues associated with that idea. One of them is that the West has become hermetic, closed, by that I mean is that it only talks to itself and it cannot engage with us, it even negotiates with itself to end the war in, that's right, this magnificent peace conference in Switzerland of all places, which was talk without the combatants involved, peace negotiations without one of the major combatants, yeah, yes, so absolutely so it's both sort of hermetic.
PASCAL- yeah it becomes hermetic.
RICHARD- And it can't do diplomacy. It can't do diplomacy. I'd go back of course, one of the other things is classic Schmittianism, this friend-foe distinction, very powerful dynamic which you know many people would say and what was fascinating because let me just say that China and an alternative to bloc politics, we're still talking about the West. I would have liked to have heard more today about the East and the vision of the East. We had a little bit about the BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization. We had some excellent Chinese scholar's participation, Indian participation. Fascinating. But there was no real substance of a vision. You know, if we're talking of a Political East, we can talk of a political, so a Political West, we can talk about a Political East. But a Political East is not simply the opposite of the Political West. It is exactly countering the logic which underpins it. So it isn't simply counter-hegemonic, doing the same thing from the other end. It is anti-hegemonic, anti-block politics and it's for pluralism like ASEAN for example.
PASCAL- But that's the question because people, brilliant minds like John Mearsheimer, might argue with you about this one because the assumption is that if the Chinese become top dog they will, out of the logic of great power and superpower competition, start acting exactly like the United States and like Great Britain. So that's a question is can it be anti-hegemonic? RICHARD- Yes. Yes, it can. And in fact one can say well, certainly the Chinese would argue that, but I actually do think it's not just the Chinese - many people are arguing China should be more active in international politics. It's refusing to do so. Yes, it's supporting international law, supporting United Nations in form and committed to international law but simply it's why aren't Russia and China for example establishing an anti-NATO? They don't and as he said China and Russia are moving in parallel, in other words they will never meet, and you know I can give many different examples that they repudiate block politics, they repudiate this logic of friend-enemy thesis - you know we all laugh, you know, win-win situations.
PASCAL- but you know I actually quite like it.
RICHARD- What's not to like about it, so there's a difference that we had this on a discussion with one of the participants that it's a different not just epistemology, how you study it, and that's a question for me as well, the methodology but it's also I would argue, sorry to use a fancy word, the ontology, the substance, the very thing itself is different and the ontology of the political is built on this 500 years of dominance, this arrogance, this civilizational setting, the standards and it's false universalism. Whereas the anthology is so very different. It hasn't emerged overnight. It's of course it's got long roots in Confucianism and so on. But it's now a conscious decision that of this leadership in China with Singapore with Philippines in a different sort of way. And I'm thinking of ASEAN, the spirit of ASEAN. Yes, says conflicts there. It's not ideal, but the logic of politics for de Mier is what they're trying to do [Fray Servando Teresa de Mier's patriotic cosmopolitanism]. So, it's not just the anti-West, it's post-West or simply non-West. Even let's not even refer to the West. It's actually something totally different.
PASCAL- The non-West like the "A Charter Order the promise of 1945" this is maybe the last question because I couldn't actually ask it in the forum like, you know, this idea of the liberal international order, right?
RICHARD- Yes.
PASCAL- And the politicians all over Europe and North America are saying, "Oh, China and Russia are challenging the liberal international order or they're rejecting the liberal international order." What they imply with that is, of course, that China and the Russia stand for illiberal order or illiberal disorder or illiberal anarchy or whatever it is. I mean, you automatically assume they stand for the opposite. Of course, that's not what they do. But if we had to give a word to that, like what order is the order that will emerge once we're done with the BS that we are currently going through? I mean, it's not going to be the liberal international order anymore, but what order will it be? What word would he give it?
RICHARD- Well, first of all, I don't think the liberal international order ever existed. I that's why I call it the Political West, that the Political West had two faces to it - a benign face, a commonwealth face, delivering public goods which was in conformity with the United Nations and international law. That's the best side of the Political West and it delivered genuine things, free trade to some degree but of course it was overlaid by neoliberal thing. And the other side was the imperial side of the Political West. So what you're saying that this alternative model of world order and it is an alternative model - what will it deliver? It will deliver the promise of 1945 - comity both of great powers working together and of the nations of the world working together?
PASCAL- What will we call it? What will be the name?
RICHARD- Well, let's call it the fulfillment of the promise of 1945. We'll call it the Charter International System based on the UN Charter finally beginning to work. The Charter Order. The Charter.
PASCAL- Ladies and gentlemen, it's getting dark over here and we actually have to run for dinner at 7:00. We are now heading towards the Charter Order and this was Professor Richard Sakwa. Links will be in the description box below. Richard, thank you so much.
RICHARD- Well, thank you.
PASCAL-Take care. Bye-bye.
§COMMENT: In this interview we have a high-level dialogue between two professors, dropping philosopher's names like bread crumbs, so this will be a tough nut to crack. But, "there is a crack in everything" (Leonard Cohen). This transcript has taken so long to fix that I'm not inserting many links here. Go-ogle if you need to look something up. There were time stamps about every six words, super-annoying.
Pascal mentions that the Liberal West has morphed into an ideological beast in a struggle with those who are pragmatic. Richard then says the West has become "hermetic," closed in, can only talk with itself. This is manifest in the G7 collapsing into dealing with only "like-minded" actors (insert odor emoji) and this G7 has a unified press-release system to maintain the hermetic seal. These leaders, such as Canada and the E3, have thus become non-rational actors on the world stage, consistently walling off discourse with the East, while cooperating with the Imperial forces trying to occupy and break the East.
Richard Sakwa mentions Schmittianism. That is both a big problem and a key. Various commentators have recently been referring to The West as the new Nazis. While it is becoming easier to see that playing out, is there any direct tether to reality here? Yes. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and provided legal justifications for authoritarian rule, earning the moniker "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich." Because of this, his ideas are heavily associated with authoritarianism and the collapse of democracies.
Before getting more deeply into that topic, insert the ideas of "The Logic of Political Survival" by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, which explores why leaders who provide peace and prosperity are sometimes voted out of office, while corrupt or ineffective leaders endure. Ring any bells? In systems with a small winning coalition, leaders can easily maintain power by distributing targeted private goods, rents, and corruption to their small group of essential cronies, regardless of how much the general public suffers. Sound familiar?
Back to Carl Schmitt. Schmitt introduced the concept of "friend" and "enemy" as the specific nature of politics; politics requires the readiness to fight or die for one's collective identity. This, I think, is a warping of the concept of "politics"; it doesn't jive with John Dewey's 1905 idea that "Politics is the shadow cast upon society by big business." In this macro-scale "othering," on an international scale, there are perpetual declinations of "friend" and "enemy," asserting that a political community must be homogenous and willing to eliminate external or internal threats. Herein lies the present political imperative of Canada and the other Euro-atlanticists, domestically and externally, perpetually issuing sanctions instead of diplomacy and mentally closing in on themselves.
Schmitt linked politics and theology (sound familiar?), relating political and legal concepts as theological ideas transformed as secular ones. Thus, a sovereign's power to declare an emergency is like God's ability to perform miracles. Sound familiar?
Just as God can break the laws of Nature to perform miracles (suspension of disbelief required here), the sovereign stands outside the normal legal system and sets aside legal order in his emergency. Crises and emergencies reveal who holds true sovereignty.
He defined the sovereign in his 1922 book "Political Theology" as "he who decides on the state of exception," and true power belongs to the leader who can suspend the normal legal order during a crisis (which he defines) to protect the state. And, of course, the primary goal of the state is its own survival. So you see tRump ignoring any regulation that stands in his way - and remember his German heritage! Schmitt called legislative debate as ineffective "talking shop" and liberal neutrality attempts to hide real political conflict behind endless procedural rules and consensus-seeking. The insufferable knot in actual Neutrality is outlined by Schmitt: he maintained that trying to wish away political antagonism is a utopian illusion. When a liberal order tries to deny the friend-enemy distinction, it only makes itself vulnerable to real-world conflict or collapse into a different form of state. But we're trying to create a new world order here, right?
Note that the "othering" on the international level by Canada and the other EU Elites (rising above the wishes of their electorates), coincides with the "Friend-Foe" ideas of Hitler's prime legal advisor (Schmitt). The Exceptionalism of the U.S. and isra3l mirrors the themes of the Third Reich's legal brain (Schmitt). tRump's regal grandeur and assuming the stature of God-on-Earth, as seen in his statements "I can make them great, or I can annihilate them," again mirror Carl Schmitt's politico-theological arguments. Therefore, they are all the nouveau-Nazis, every last one of them.
As Dr. Thomas W. Dodman, a professor at Columbia University, has said "We think of wars beginning and ending. But we should think that war is the default template, and there are beginnings and ends to peace. Wars live on because of their lingering effects. Often the reasons for the next conflict were not fully resolved in the last one."
True, the Nazi issue was never fully resolved, the entire West exhibits those traits now - certainly with not all of Hitler's tactics, but the main ideology rests undisturbed. The New World Order requires fully extinguishing these attitudes.
John Dewey's statement about politics in 1905 applies to the BEFORE; Carl Schmitt was only 17 years old. The Before was in the long duration of the union of business and government since around 1830, in the buildout of the Industrial Revolution - steel-making, etc. The American Empire began with the capture of the detritus of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1800s, beginning the next long duration. Although Operation Paperclip brought Nazi personnel into Western governance, the peri-nazi ideas crossed the ocean well before Hitler's rule, in the "Third Way," eugenics, and the beginnings of perceiving threats. In fact, Hitler borrowed some U.S. practices to enhance his regime, such as the treatment of Indigenous People, and more.
The greatest manifestation of U.S. Empire is its intolerance of anyone else being an equal. They CANNOT sit at the table of international relations and treat the other actors as equals. They MUST dominate, they MUST sit at the head of the table. This is why NATO was built, to allow the U.S. at the pinnacle of responsibility and direction, an end-run around the UN with its equal powers of veto in the Security Council and generalized membership in the General Assembly, instead of the U.S. sitting in the presiding officer's chair.
To get to a "new world order," this Empire must be not just defeated, but totally deconstructed to get its hands out of every other nation's business and get its hands off the world-reserve currency. Even while most analysists declare the U.S. defeated in Iran, it is still hard at work manipulating every part of the globe, trying to set up an economic trap for China, and the TRIPP (Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity) a 43-kilometer transport link through Armenia's Syunik province, connecting mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and, by extension, to Turkey. This is yet another attempt to encircle Russia with U.S. bases, and the double-whammy of completing the encirclement of Iran with new bases along their northern border. These imperial ventures continue on, non-stop, via every mode of action possible, whether it be economic, political, or by kinetic force. All this must cease, be taken down, every last U.S. base, every military Command (CENTCOM, etc.). All hate of and actions against the body of Asia by the Atlanticist West must cease. Then and only then is a pathway cleared for a new world order. The nations of Asia have their own functional civilizations and culture and DO NOT need Western help or control or domination.
As I have outlined in a couple previous posts, the United Nations needs some renovation to make it actually functional in the new world, which would enable ostracizing the two present rogue nations, the former USA and its accomplice in crime, that zionist settler colony.
1) La longue durée (the long duration) is a
historical concept created by French historian Fernand Braudel of
the Annales School. He first introduced it in his 1949 book, "The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II."
Instead of focusing only on short-term political events, Braudel
argued that history moves at three different speeds or temporal
layers: Braudel's Three Levels of Historical Time–
Core Meaning and Impact–
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