The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order is a fascinating analysis of the shifting geopolitical landscape. The author, a former Secretary of State for European Affairs for Portugal, mixes a travelogue with discussions of history, literature, and economics. Eurasia is not just a geographical entity, but rather a “descriptive term for a certain way of thinking about a new moment in political history”. It expresses a world order that is the integration of two ideas often seen as contradictory being brought together into a single word.

The rise of the east

Many people wrongly assume that the world will converge on a social organization that is based on western ideals. Instead different societies are adapting and iterating based on their own historical experiences and present circumstances. The dominant cultures of the future may be organized in a very different manner than what we are used to:

On the one hand, it conveys the sense that the European order has come to an end. This moment, so often announced, has been, on the contrary, persistently evaded. When European countries abandoned their imperial dreams, they did so under the illusion that the rest of the world no longer needed guidance because it had voluntarily embraced European rules and ideas. It was an illusion, but an illusion that only now is being revealed as such. On the other hand, this should not be confused with the belief that Europe’s legacy has likewise been abandoned. What we see is that those who are more actively working to replace the old world order with something are just the heirs of the European scientific and revolutionary traditions,. When competing with the European model, they try to present an alternative that is more modern, more rational, better able to lead the transformations of the future. Theirs are new an alternative visions of what a modern society looks like.

The west is merely a reference point:

Experimentation is a human but also a scientific ideal. But the faith in an endless power to transform reality can now be found on every corner of the planet. The process has a certain negative character: the attempt is made to free oneself from the existing model only to realize this model has been replaced by a broader but still limited set of possibilities which in turn need to be over come and so on in an iterative process. More importantly, perhaps, each society has its own modernization path. Each society starts from a traditional model and creates new abstractions from that starting point. As the whole world becomes modern, we should expect different or multiple modernities to develop, rather than the cultural programme of modernity as it developed in Europe to become universal,. That programme may enjoy a certain historical precedence, and continue to be a reference point, but it is no more than one path.

Regulatory imperialism

The delineation between “hard power” and “soft power” may not be the most useful for understanding how countries come to dominate. In reality power is more nuanced. If a country has a large market, or other bargaining power, other countries may be forced to make changes to suit them, without a single shot being fired.. This has huge implications considering China’s increasing clout, and America’s disengagement from alliances.

We here a lot about the distinction between hard and soft power, and usually the former is identified with the use of military force; but some forms of power are unilateral even if they have nothing to do with military force. They probably deserve to be part of what one would call hard power because they do not depend on the willingness of the other side to play along. When it comes to the rules being applied in a given jurisdiction, or jurisdictions, it is obviously possible for states to influence what others do through an international agreement where their respective interests are the object of negotiation and bargaining. That is one way. Then we have the way the European Union exercises power, which is completely independent of what the other side wants to do, and more intriguing, equally independent of anything like a European Conscious Plan.

China is now becoming expert at using this type of diplomatic coercion to influence policy in Eurasian countries. Direct and forceful actions risk disrupting and severing economic ties that are critical for china. Economic power is embedded within economy, provides Chinese with ambiguity and deniability. Basically china marshals privates sector for its own goals. Not just its own private sector, but the private sector of One Belt One Road countries, and really all allies. Of course, there is a reason to be skeptical about One Belt One Road:

There can be no land segment of the Belt and Road without Xinjiang , but at the same time it is difficult to see how China will be able to solve the contradiction between the desire to facilitate trade and movement while closing borders and subjecting everyone to permanent surveillance. You inevitably ask yourself whether the Belt and Road initiative might not be a concept far ahead of what social and political reality can deliver. A kind of utopianism, in this sense.

Systems thinking

Interesting quote on how different vantage points can lead to different conclusions. Shifting perspectives is critical:

The whole is only a whole in relation to the parts and the parts are only parts in relation to a whole. When it comes to world politics, this means that what views we have of the whole will always color our understanding of the parts. If your view of the global order is one where Europe is at the center, then the rest of the world will be organized in radiating circles of distance from the centre. Even the traveler will find nothing but distant echoes and pale reflections of the place he started from , and any genuine comprehension of different regions and cultures will be rendered impossible. The goal should not be to look at the whole from the point of view of one part, but to look at each part from the point of view of the whole. We learn this mental habit from the study of atlases and maps, where each point is defined and located by reference to all other points and where we are made to acquire an external, more detached and more objective perspective. At the same time, a map is only complete after we return from the places it depicts and can interpret the full meaning behind every detail and project upon the flat surface the images stored in our memory.

History shows that there is no natural way for the parts of the world system to be organized. Neither has the system any inbuilt propensity to remain static, nor for the parts to settle in a particular pattern. Many times in the past the pendulum of power was exactly balanced between two poles in the system and no inherent historical necessity dictated that one would acquire a hegemonic position.

Rules vs. strategy

Tension between rules based and strategic approach are a key feature of a Eurasian world order. Here is an interesting metaphor discussing this dichotomy:

If we think of the European Union as a computer program, the question arises of how universal that program truly is. Algorithms operate in a controlled environment and perform a set of limited tasks. Inputs coming from the external environment have to be recognized by the program and thus the environment needs to be shaped and organized in order to provide those inputs in the right format. A computer program works by itself, it doesn’t really matter who is using it as opposed to traditional crafts or ever creative endeavor. That is the universal ism of the code, but there is another sense in which it may not be universal at all. Is the system of automated rules able to deal with all the contingent and unpredictable events coming from the outside, from an environment which the code is not prepared and to which it cannot respond? Can it respond to new inputs that are not precisely like those for which it has been designed. And how does the system respond when some of its parts have been destroyed, degraded, or when they are overloaded by a chaotic environment. One could say that even a computer program needs a foreign policy- a key challenge in advanced robotics is to design control algorithms that allow robots to function adaptively in unstructured, dynamic, only partially observable and uncertain environments– but more fundamentally the realization that the world outside Europe works according to different rules reopens the question of history and may force us to abandon the faith in autonomous rules.

… the new dichotomy between systems and environments replicates almost exactly the old one between a supposedly rational and orderly European civilization and the chaos of the Asian steppes.

Chinese acquisitions of German company highlight this. The book quotes a German official:

Think of Eurasia as a field of forces. The question of different political and economic models is one that only power, influence and leverage will be able to decide. It is not enough for the European Union to uphold its rules and way of life. It needs to create a wider environment where they can work effectively.