Historical task of realising a global human community has just begun

By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge Malaysia, 23-29 December 2024. From the column “Picking on the Present”

NEW FRONTIERS facing the world today are, firstly, tantamount to a historical crossroads for humanity. They are that significant. Secondly, they are most cogently considered as philosophical and anthropological, as well as geopolitical and geo-economic. And by that, I mean to denote more than merely the tensions between the US and China, or those between the West and the rest, or the Global North and the Global South.

The Chinese are often accused of having too long a memory. They continue to talk about its “Century of Humiliation” and so on and so forth. As a historian, I tend to think that, in fact, a long memory is what every country and people should strive to have. This allows for better historical analysis. History is largely about periodisation, and about identifying the time span that can provide interesting and relevant insights on any occasion. Having a long memory provides choices within which one can search for maximal epistemic benefit.

Let me bring into discussion certain time spans of time that I think we should consider in order to understand what the “New Frontiers” are that we face as we enter 2025, the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential period.

• Firstly, we should consider the beginning of trans-oceanic travel also as the beginning of modern globalisation. As Prof Wang Gungwu likes to say: “The Modern is Maritime”.

• Secondly, the Enlightenment in Europe fostered powerful ways for societies to relate to religion, to power, to the state, to nature, and to human agency. This led to ideational and industrial revolutions, and to disruptions on a broad front. In our times, that series of disruptions and the opening of a Pandora’s box of rationality and scientific thinking has left us facing technological leaps — semiconductor enhancement, energy harnessing and AI development. These now format today’s New Frontier in all areas, be this regarding human organisation, the natural environment, peace on Earth or Armageddon.

•  Thirdly, we should consider the coming of nation-states and of republicanism, which led to the forming of national empires as the main drivers of globalisation. The colonial process this initiated destroyed all dynastic empires, and transfigured all territories on Earth into nation-states. We all live in nation-states now. Most vitally, a world of nation-states has not proven to be a harmonious system, and regionalism and multilateralism have had to be resorted to in order to remedy its weaknesses. This multilateralism has been civil, military or economic, in general.

    Furthermore, we have to deal with the residual effects of past conflicts, remnants of the militant globalisation of the last two centuries, as well as the ad hoc processes of decolonisation. Building a harmonious international system today will require us to consider the recent past, and to deconstruct the rough language of the internationalism we have inherited from colonialism, from the world wars, and from the Cold War.

•  Fourthly, we should consider modern globalisation as the gradual creation of a global economy, and a proper international trading system. Out of all the human suffering, we now have the promise of a global economy that can help stop future wars.

•  Lastly, the capacity to harness nature’s sources of energy for human benefit has led to extreme environmental degradation, and this now threatens to undermine all human achievement and progress. This matter may be as urgent as the avoidance of nuclear war.

Today, at the end of the year 2024, when sabre-rattling by nuclear powers can be heard again, it is imperative that we take a step back, stop being reactive actors in history, and rethink — re-present — what humanity has been going through, and where it can positively go from here.

I suggest that we seek to change our perspective of the last 200 to 300 years. If we consider that period as a time when humanity was discovering itself, and a time when humanity realised the fullness of its diversity and, in the process, was badly traumatised, then we can consider the coming century as a time of remedial, curative and therapeutic development.

The phenomenon of international trade has been costly to build, and we should now make full use of it to help humanity accept its diversity and the need for peoples and governments to be tolerant, mutualistic and humble.

The national platform between the local, the regional and the global

The processes listed above are not comprehensive in any way, and are instead meant to indicate how revolutionary the recent centuries have been. The world has “shrunk” in all possible ways, meaning also that the struggle for civilisational, political and economic space among different peoples and polities has become unavoidably acute.

There is therefore good reason why the anti-colonial movement evolved into mainly being about the creation of nation-states. These are in most cases, basically fortresses, final defences. Securing national space — often demarcated by how far the colonial powers had gone in creating the colonies they now had to withdraw from — was most effectively managed through adoption of the Westphalian Model, while the subsequent membership of all nation-states in the United Nations Organisation signalled international recognition of nationhood as a tentative damage-control platform. Peoples who did not manage that process, such as the Kurds, Native Americans or Tibetans, thus failed to gain the status of modern nationhood, and continue to grieve the absence of an ethnic fortress.

The Cold War forced regionalism to be responses to the bipolar geopolitical standoff, and it was only after 1990 that other reasons for regional collaboration became possible. How Asean developed before 1990 in contrast to the period after 1990 is a clear example of this geopolitical dynamic. Before 1990, Asean was an anti-communism bastion. Only after 1990 did regionalism become a properly serious undertaking.

Thus, the post-colonial world of nation-states, instead of simply settling into a multipolar situation already in years following the World War II, had to go through a bipolar period, followed by a unipolar period. The consequences of that, geopolitically, intellectually and emotionally, are worth considering very deeply today. Without that process, the Global South cannot really say they have properly undergone decolonisation.

America’s future: Will multipolarity bury the age of empires for good?

Throughout the 20th century, all empires fell — the dynastic ones first, and then the national ones, including the British Empire.

What appears most interesting within this process is the changing role of the US. Being one of the earliest liberated colonies, it had since the 1770s been undergoing a twin process of fighting external wars (with the British, Mexico, Spain, Japan and so on) and internal consolidation (which often meant genocidal and civil wars).

By the 20th century, this first postcolonial nation-state had allowed itself to be drawn into the death throes of the European empires, rising after 1945 to take their place, turning the US into a schizophrenic entity. It became a national empire like the European maritime nations before it could stabilise itself as a postcolonial nation-state.

The comfort that nation-states offered had not been properly secured before the US was drawn (by its East Coast elite, arguably) into becoming the apparent “heir” and ostensive and able rearguard for European (read British, imperialist, or global capitalist) imperialism, as this booby-trapped its retreat from the world.

In fact, I am drawn to suggest that the Trump phenomenon be considered a deep-society (in contrast to “deep-state”) response to the excesses and irrationalities of American imperialism, in favour of some desire for a robust and enduring (even Westphalian) American nationhood.

To the extent that this is the case, there would be greater probability for multipolar globality to gain ground and become the natural world order of the next century. This would signal that the imperial period of globalisation is finally dying away.