Seeking a Mutualist Foundation for International Relations

By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge Weekly on December 29, 2025 – January 4, 2026

How are nations — and poles of power — to relate sustainably to each other once the hegemonic basis for globalisation exercised over several hundred years by Western powers becomes untenable? What will be the rationale for international relations? What will schoolbooks in a multipolar world be teaching in fields like International Relations, Global Studies, International Law and Diplomacy?

Before transoceanic travel began in a serious way after the 15th century, trade ties were often between neighbouring communities and polities. Learning about distant regions as a social science is a surprisingly recent development as is the discipline of international relations.

Pre-modern Europe considered the world outside its constantly warring polities to be “The Orient” or “Africa”. “The Far East” were the vast regions beyond the traditional “Orient”. Such vague terms sufficed despite their level of generality and the lack of defining details. The Orient largely signified the Middle East, often extending to include India. All these places lay to the east of Europe and it was from the east that the biggest and most sustained threat to European powers would come.

Islam’s rise quickly became an existential and military threat to Christendom and Southern Europe. The Iberian Peninsula was successively occupied by Muslim forces from the eighth century onwards. Crusades began to be organised by European kings and popes against the Muslim world, lasting from 1095 until 1270. In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks.

The transoceanic trip that Columbus made in 1492 to reach India thus took place when Christendom was in a miserable and defensive state of mind. In many ways, Columbus’ trip was an act of desperation.

His unexpected discovery of civilisations, polities and peoples in America and the eventual decimation of polities and peoples initiated global relations. Not a promising start.

Colonialism as the genesis of international relations

Thus began the first stage of colonisation — the search for fast fortunes and free territories. Most European countries quickly got into the act, often in conflict among themselves, instigating what one may call the era of “multipolar colonisation”.

International relations from then on were largely about colonialist infighting. Piracy and land-grabbing characterised these relations, spreading across those once-unreachable regions traditionally known in Europe as “Africa”, “India”, “The Orient” and “The Far East”.

Knowledge about these places became critical. In the universities of Europe, minting new disciplines for studying the world became necessary. The maintenance of imperialism and colonialism required it. This was the beginning of “Area Studies”. Subjects like “Arabology”, “Sinology”, “Indology” or “Japanology” were the pioneering disciplines of this epistemic endeavour.

The beginning of the end for multipolar colonialism came with the end of the Second World War; thus arose the Age of Nations across the world to replace the Age of Colonies. Area Studies in Western universities now shifted to high gear.

The bipolar world that then emerged required a bifurcation of all polities and in that comprehensive struggle, strategical theories flourished to feed one or the other’s propaganda machinery.

Today, Area Studies remains deeply stained by its prejudiced origins. The tools of Western hegemony, developed over centuries but most refined since 1945 to direct the emerging Cold War, determined its purpose. (What these tools are and how they work are questions for another discussion.)

Now that the world is globalised and all its territories and civilisations are known to all humans on Earth, the critical question to ponder today is: Can “International Relations” and “Area Studies” be revised into a form that is not partisan but mutualistic?

United humans instead of nations

For this to begin to happen, those most served by the old approach will have to descend from their self-serving viewing point. They will need to be convinced, coaxed and coerced to come to their senses, so to speak.

For all its weaknesses, the founding of the United Nations Organization (UNO) was definitely a step in the right direction. What underpins the organisation’s ineffectuality in international representation, however, is the very notion of nationhood itself. Only nations can join, not clans, not subnational units, not territories without the status of nationhood.

However, this level of human organisation — the nation — though effective and intuitive, is an artificial one. Individuals organise themselves organically and emotionally at many levels with some of them being more meaningful to them than nationhood. Groupings such as family, clanship, class, religion and provincialism all play a deep emotional role in the life of a person. To be sure, a modern country is more often than not a de facto federation. And modern countries coming together into alliances such as the European Union are in effect practising federalism at a higher level. Acknowledging this layered nature in human sociality and embracing the fact that these essentially define the individual, could be a promising conception upon which to construct new theories in Area Studies and International Relations.

In this context, Asean, a regional organisation that does not — and cannot — wish to be too ambitious in political integration and cultural assimilation, can potentially contribute in concepts and in practice to this futurist endeavour. The patience and the mutual respect evident in their practice of inter-communal “foreign relations” can be an inspiration and a model for global interactions.

Area Studies done without hegemonic considerations but on the terms of the region being studied would be a good start upon which international relations can be reconstructed.