A Political World Philosophy in terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia)1
Zhao Tingyang
1. A non-world or a failed world
Our supposed world is still a non-world. This side of creation, our globe, has not yetbecome a world of oneness, but remains a Hobbesian chaos, since there is no trulycoherent world society governed by a universally-accepted political institution.
Politically abandoned, the world we live in, in a geographical sense, is the only onewe have. A lack of political unity means that a universal political identity is still nowhere to be found. Such a world is impossible unless it is organized and controlled by a worldwide institution, itself based upon a global political philosophy.
People have tried in vain to unify the world, either by means of worldwide .empires or alliances between nations (fundamentally unsuccessful due to the unsolved problem of stable cooperation), or of the Kantian idea of perpetual peace, or (from a Chinese perspective) universal harmony between all peoples.2 Instead of habitually-mentioned historical mishaps and limitations, the failure of such attempts should be ascribed to the lack of a global political philosophy. The political concept of ‘nation’ is familiar to all, since we all know what needs to be done for the nationstate.
However, it is not so for the political notion of ‘world’, since people are unaware of what should be done for the latter. The key problem today is that of a failed world as opposed to that of so-called failed states. No country could possibly be successful in a failed world.
An interesting question put forward by Martin Wight (1966: 17) was ‘why is there no international theory?’ Forty years later, it is relevant to the issue discussed here.
Wight argued that instead of suitable international theories, there were but so-called ‘political theories’ based merely on the domestic politics of states, and embellished with inadequate parerga concerning the international ‘balance of power’. He implied that people did not really know what internationality was. I think that Wight would have changed his mind, had he known of the Chinese philosophy of world politics
……
