China, war and the civilizational state

China, war and civilizational states

Christopher Coker: Nation states have a history and very few date before the 19th century. Civilizations go back thousands of years, and in the case of China, of course, 5,000 years or so, the government likes to claim.

Sue Windebank: Welcome to LSE iQ, the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I’m Sue Windebank from the iQ team where we work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas, and talk to people affected by the issues we explore.

Why do some countries, such as China and Russia, stand outside of the liberal international order and oppose values that the West takes for granted – values such as liberty and democracy? For the late Professor Christopher Coker, who we’ve just heard, the answer lay in the rise of a new political entity, the civilisational state. In an episode of LSE iQ which explored China’s position in the world in the coming century, Professor Coker talked about this, the potential for war between the United States and China and what that might look like.

Christopher Coker, was Professor of International Relations at LSE for almost four decades, and co-Director of LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank. He was a scholar of war and warfare. This episode of LSE iQ is a lightly edited version of our 2019 interview recorded before the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is dedicated to his memory.

SW: In your book, the Rise of the Civilizational State, you talk about how the liberal world order and the idea that liberal values would conquer the world is being stopped in its tracks by the rise of what you call the civilizational state. What do you mean by that?

CC: A civilizational state is a state that claims to be more than a nation state….

A civilizational state…..

has a value system that spans the modern and the postmodern eras and is not susceptible in the eyes of those who believe in its existence to a liberal world order that stems from 200 years ago and very largely from the history of one continent, Europe.

…… it's also, I think about people. The idea is that a people are genetically Chinese or genetically Russians, and that they are not open to foreign ideas, and that any attempt to introduce them to such ideas is likely to be ruinous for themselves and everyone else.

So in Russia, which is another civilizational state, Vladimir Putin has called Russia by that term since 2013 officially, there is a move to change the Russian Constitution and to put in a clause that the Russians are genetically predisposed to Russian values. Now, that's the language of social Darwinism. It's the language that we began to hear in the second half of the 19th century. It became very common in the 1930s when genetics was politicized. And that I think is extremely dangerous.

….that language of social Darwinism did, of course, partly help produce the Second World War.

SW: The West has at least historically, been in the business of trying to export its values, of course, rule of law, human rights, press freedoms. Is China interested in exporting its values in the same way? Or is this promotion of China as a unique civilization more a vanguard against western liberal democracy?

CC: Well, one feature of a civilizational state is that it claims to cite Xi Jinping's own phrase that he uses over and over again, "Harmony with coexistence." In other words, every civilization should respect the values of every other civilization and they're not there to export their values or their way of life.

Xi Jinping would also argue that civilizational states like China have never done imperialism. They have no civilizing mission. They have no human rights agenda, for example, which they want to impose on the world often by force, by regime change and nation building, which as we've seen has had disastrous results in parts of the world like Iraq.

So that is very much a principle in their case, "Don't interfere in our internal affairs and we won't interfere in yours," based on what they would claim to be mutual respect for each other value systems. So they're not going around saying that liberalism is wrong for the West, but they're saying that it has no place in China and a great many other countries as well.

SW: And the idea that China is exceptional, how is that being manifested and nurtured by the Chinese Communist Party?

CC: The Chinese Communist Party is facing the dilemma that it has achieved a remarkable economic growth, but that nobody actually believes in communism. That there is, in other words, a moral vacuum at the heart of Chinese society. That young people need something in order not to be rapacious, to screw each other over for a percentage, to forge ahead, creating economic and social inequalities that would be very difficult for any state to deal with, even the present one in China.

And so they have gone back to Confucianism, which dates back at least over 2,000 years, and is the oldest moral value philosophical system in Chinese history. So China is now, according to Xi Jinping, it's leader, a Leninist Confucian state, and he spends every year going to Confucius's birthplace to pay his respects. He insists the party members read Confucian texts. Confucian texts, which used to, of course, be denounced by Mao Tse-tung communists back in 1949, as having set back the country for centuries are now actually required reading in schools.

So that is the extent to which China is tapping into its human capital, and it has more human capital in its eyes than any other country in the world because that country, it's a civilizational state that represents the oldest surviving civilization.

SW: Now your 2015 book is entitled The Improbable War: China, the United States and The Logic Of Great Power Conflict. Is war between the US and China improbable?

Interviewee:

War between great powers we thought was improbable since 1910 when a famous book was published by Norman Angel called The Great Illusion, in which he argued that the great powers would not go to war against each other in the future, but they would be very foolish to do so since none of them would come out of it the richer. In fact, many would come out of it, the poorer.

And in fact, if you look at 20th century history, you'll see that with a single exception of the United States that did extremely well out of the Second World War and emerged the superpower that it still is today, every other power was pretty much ruined financially and economically more generally by war. That argument hasn't gone away. In fact, we've heard it since the 1850s. Political economists arguing that free trade is the best way to enrich yourself. War is the quickest route to financial and economic ruin.

Most people subscribe, I think, to that idea. And so they think that on the basis of rationality, neither China nor the United States would wish to go to war against each other.

Tariff wars are something quite different of course. But the problem is, as I try to show in my book, human rationality is very faulty and we are all subject to certain social psychological flaws, one of which we academics call cognitive dissonance. That you always perhaps misunderstand or misread other people's intentions.

And in fact, history suggests that it's safer to misread them and to think that they have some rather nasty intentions against you than it is to deceive yourself into thinking that they're nice and find out the hard way when it's too late that they're not.

Confirmation bias is another social psychological flaw. That means that because you can't find evidence of someone's bad intentions, you just know that they've hidden them more successfully than you had at first thought.

In other words, we are a species that tries to get into the minds of other people and read their motives. We have a theory of the mind as biologists tell us, but we often misread motives. We're not quite as clever as we think. And therefore, yes, you could have a war between the United States and China and it would probably be occasioned by mischance, mishappens, accident perhaps, an incident between two warships at sea, which could easily escalate. Escalation being another factor of course, which explains why great powers go to war against each other.

But above all, I think the important thing with a great power, unlike a small power, is it has a reputation to protect. We call this credibility. And when credibility is on the line, countries come out firing. When the United States credibility was on the line in 911, the US spent three and a half trillion dollars getting its credibility back. It's called the War on Terror, and it's still going on almost 20 years later.

SW: How likely is it that any war would be a conventional war?

CC: Well, we've told ourselves since 1945, the two nuclear powers can't go to war against each other. And in the Cold War they didn't although we came quite close, as we now know, on at least two occasions within perhaps a matter of hours to a nuclear exchange.

China has a much smaller nuclear force than the Soviet Union, doesn't seek parity with the Americans. It just seeks the ability to damage American cities sufficiently to deter the United States from damaging theirs.

So I think that the Chinese have made it pretty clear that they don't intend if there is a war between the two countries, that there should be a nuclear exchange. The point about weapons is that when you discover that you can't use them, you don't actually say, "Right, war is no longer an option, so let's sit down and let's talk peace." You actually try to find other weapons that you can use and that will enable you to get around what we call the nuclear taboo, the idea that you shouldn't be the next country to use nuclear weapons.

And we have now such a theater of operations, which was not there in the Cold War. It wasn't open to the Soviet Union or the United States before the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's cyberspace. And in terms of intellectual property theft, stealing the secrets of the most expensive weapons system that the United States has ever produced, an airplane called the F-35, whether it is shutting down pipelines or shutting down installations, or just hacking into systems and getting secrets.

This is going on on an extensive scale, and I would argue that the United States and China have effectively been at war with each other in cyberspace since 2014. The problem is that the rules and conventions that we applied in the Cold War to nuclear weapons, that is deterrence and the idea of mutual assured destruction, that an attack by one would be automatically followed by a response by the other, no longer apply in cyberspace because there's no necessary attribution.

You don't know who's attacked you. You can't prove it's necessarily the Chinese, though you may have your suspicions and you can't therefore deter the Chinese from attacking you. And likewise, the Chinese can't deter the Americans from attacking them. So there are no rules, there's no code of conduct that we have in cyberspace, and we've tried very hard to find those rules, but we haven't been successful. That is why I think it's quite a dangerous situation at the moment.

SW: And China has, at least in terms of personnel, the biggest military in the world, I think. This isn't surely just a defensive force.

CC: No, it's there to keep the regime in power. The Chinese Army is not much shakes, quite frankly. If you are looking at the most impressive part of the Chinese military, it's the navy, and they will get their second aircraft carrier quite soon. They intend to show the flag as Western navys have been doing for a couple of centuries. They can, I think, successfully contest American naval power west of Hawaii.

I think the intention is to drive the American Navy back to Hawaii, where of course it was when the Japanese arrived in 1941 and Pearl Harbor. Their intention is to shut down American military bases in East Asia. Their intention is to break the American alliance systems with countries like South Korea and the Philippines. In the case of the Philippines, they may already have done that in fact. And to do this peacefully, of course, through diplomacy, through economic diplomacy, through loans, massive infrastructure projects, et cetera, et cetera.

The army is essentially a police force and a very corrupt force as well. Generals make a lot of money out of, for example, having trade fairs. If you have a weapons system and you want to bring your possible clients to see it in action in a war game, for example, you can hire the Chinese Army to do that. Xi Jinping has tried quite significantly to cut down on this degree of corruption but he has to be very careful because, of course, the army has an ability to remove him from power.

Very unlikely I think, because it's not that kind of society or system, but it's always a probability in this case. Bonapartism as we call it. A general who decides he would actually like to be president of the country. So I don't think the army is important.

The space command is extremely important because of antisatellite systems. The cyber warriors are extremely important. The Chinese are probably the best people at cyber warfare in the world today. The other country will probably be Russia and the United States would be third on the list.

And economic, of course, warfare as well, which would put tariffs that we see today in the shade.

There are many forms of economic warfare and information warfare as well. So interfering in elections, undermining your own credibility in the eyes of your own people, et cetera, et cetera. I think the Chinese have much more chance of being successful there against the United States than the Americans have of being successful against them, precisely because China is now a surveillance social totalitarian society where it's very, very difficult for citizens to get information.

SW: …. the Belt and Road Initiative has been characterized as a trade initiative, a means to stimulate China's economy and a soft power initiative. Is there a military aspect to China's ambitions there?

SW: China’s Belt and Road Initiative is sometimes describes as a modern-day ‘silk road’. It is a network of infrastructure projects such as roads, railways ports and airports which aims to boost China’s trade with the rest of the world.

CC: Well, I think there's always a military aspect to much soft power. Soft power is often underwritten by military power, or if soft power could lead to military power. So for example, the Chinese were or indeed are building a base in a port, I should say, in Sri Lanka, which is costing the Sri Lankan government about 73% of all government revenue every year simply to pay back the debt. It's called debt entrapment.

That you persuade people to sign contracts and then they find that they're completely committed and unable to get out of the contracts that they've signed, and that you actually then can repossess much of the equipment that you've sold and the port is yours. It's no longer Sri Lanka's. A similar port's in Gwadar in Pakistan, which is in a sense, I think a naval base that's been mothballed for the moment because the Pakistanis also beginning to question their close embrace with China as many other countries are. Malaysia is another.

So yes, the great Belt and Road Initiative is indeed soft power, but it has an hard edge to it. If you default on your loans, the Chinese will come in and own what they've built for you, and a port can become a naval base pretty quickly.

SW: I asked Professor Coker if he thought this century would be dominated by China

SW: ….I don't think any country, even China is large enough to dominate the 21st century. And it may well be that no nation state is going to dominate. It may well be that corporations dominate. It may be that the kind of companies we see like Apple and others on a much, much bigger scale, when we get into the trillion dollars and not the billion dollars. I mean, we're about to create our first trillionaire quite soon. The first in history.

These people may be, and these organizations may be far more powerful than nation states. But we must remember one thing that only for the foreseeable future can the nation state or the civilization state produce another great power war. And we have seen the problems associated with the War on Terror, the cost of it in human life and in treasure. But that is nothing compared to another great power war that can do infinitely more damage.

Every great power war in the last 200 years has been worse than the last. And it is quite possible that if you had a war between the United States and China, which ended with attack on one's satellite systems in order to blind one's forces, which are now totally reliant on them, you would see the creation of so much space debris out there in space that it would become commercially unviable for the next 100 years, which means setting back the world economy back to the 1950s, if you are lucky.

And that is not a very happy prospect. That would actually do greater economic damage than any world war ever has. It's only taken us four years to bounce back from each world war back to where were before economically, because we're very resilient and very robust. But if the satellites go down, that's a completely different situation.

SW: Okay. Well, I started the interview feeling quite reassured, and now I'm terrified.

CC: I have to justify the book sales. and also, in the old days, when I still taught to get the students to do the course.

[Laughter]

This episode was produced by me, Sue Windebank and edited by Anna Bevan. If you’d like to find out more about the research in this episode, head to the show note notes. And if you enjoy iQ, please leave us a review.

Coming next on LSE iQ, I’ll be asking, ‘Will the United States remain the world’s superpower?’