Has Taiwan decided not to defend itself? Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a founding member of the US-China Policy Foundation, thinks so. Last month Freeman told a delegation of Chinese scholars and officials visiting Washington that "an ineluctable process of political integration" has taken hold in cross-strait relations.
He made two arguments, one theoretical, the other grounded in stark realpolitik. First, he maintained that growing economic interdependence across the Taiwan Strait virtually rules out armed Taiwanese resistance to China's policy of national unification. The likely cost to Taiwanese industry, that is, would be so steep as to make war unthinkable.
So, why go to the expense of maintaining armed forces qualitatively superior to those of China?
This is a variant of an argument familiar to globalization enthu-siasts. It had its origins a century ago, when the English intellectual Norman Angell maintained that economic interdependence would bring an end to power politics if only statesmen would abandon "the great illusion" that they could advance the national interest by resort to arms.
By this logic, the British Empire was better off ridding itself of its overseas possessions, while the powers then vying for naval supremacy -- Britain, the US, Germany and Japan -- were better off halting expensive shipbuilding efforts. European leaders didn't embrace Angell's logic -- he doubted they would -- and the bloodletting of World War I ensued.
Clearly, national leaders have a say in whether globalization fulfills its peacemaking potential. Interconnectedness isn't some vast, impersonal force sweeping the world inexorably to peace and prosperity.
A new generation of globalization theorists has emerged since the end of the Cold War to put an end to superpower competition. Their advocacy strongly resembles that of Angell, but, unlike Angell, they believe their vision is about to be realized -- if indeed it hasn't already come to fruition among the advanced nations.
There's a confidence in their writings that's missing from Norman Angell's idealistic yet clear-eyed works.
For Americans, proclaim Ivo Daalder, a veteran of the Clinton administration, and James Lindsay, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, the "age of geopolitics has ended and the age of global politics has begun." The hard power brandished by nation-states, they say, has given way to the "age of the microchip," dominated by commercial imperatives.
Thomas Barnett, a former Naval War College professor and the author of The Pentagon's New Map, goes even further. Barnett declares that "we have achieved something awfully close" to the "perpetual peace" espoused by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant two centuries ago -- a realm, that is, which has transcended the use of force.
Barnett specifically includes China in his near-utopian world order. But Kant claimed that it was interdependence among constitutional republics accountable to their citizens -- not interdependence among nation-states, regardless of the type of regime -- that would make for perpetual peace. China's authoritarian regime manifestly does not meet this test.
Whether perpetual peace is really at hand depends in large part on whether Beijing subscribes to the theories put forward by the likes of Daalder, Lindsay and Barnett. This remains to be seen.
RSS