Tianxia 2.0: how China can help shape the next world order
Davos signalled the collapse of the post-war order but not what will replace it. China can play a role in preventing a descent into anarchy
The first signal is the collapse of the post-World War II order shaped by the West – and the West’s own unravelling with it. The West has used its dominance over global discourse to construct and impose concepts it favours on the non-Western world. Yet the West itself is a Western construct, an ideological fiction whose imagined unity conceals deep internal differences.
Its identity depends on the existence of a “non-West” and the continual production of an external “other”, especially an enemy. However, this framework is collapsing for two reasons: internal differences outweigh commonalities, and growing ties between Western and non-Western countries have blurred the boundary between them.
Second, a new world has already arrived, but a new world order has not. At Davos, more Western countries appeared ready to bid farewell to the old world. The question, however, is that no one knows what comes next.