The turbulence reshaping global politics today can no longer be explained by traditional notions of power balancing or geopolitical rivalry. The tensions among the US, China and Russia are not fundamentally ideological, but deeper: a clash among three distinct civilizational understandings of order.
Institutions can be copied and rules can be learned, but the value structures beneath them resist imitation. British historian Arnold Toynbee said civilizations rise or fall according to how they respond to challenges. The current disorder is the result of three such responses colliding under the pressures of globalization.
The US represents an institutional civilization. Its strength lies not in the specific architecture of its political system but in the values that sustain it — individual agency, the supremacy of law and the belief that universal norms can be transplanted. The Marshall Plan embodied this civilizational confidence, rebuilding former enemies rather than punishing them. This approach helped stabilize the postwar order and made institutional civilization a defining feature of modernity.
China’s civilizational logic is rooted in ethnic orthodoxy, historical narrative and centralized authority. In this worldview, rules are not universal principles but instruments crafted by the powerful. China’s approach to globalization has been one of selective absorption: importing technology and institutional form while preserving a pre-modern civilizational core.
This allows Beijing to benefit from the global system without embracing its normative foundations, turning globalization from a cooperative mechanism into an arbitrage mechanism that erodes institutional legitimacy.
Russia’s response is shaped by historical trauma and geopolitical insecurity. Its instinct is not to build order but to disrupt it. Power is asserted through destruction rather than construction, making Russia a chronic source of instability in the international system.
In this three-way contest, Taiwan is not a bystander. It is a society compelled to choose a direction. US political theorist Samuel Huntington predicted that post-Cold War conflict would increasingly take the form of civilizational clashes. Taiwan is an example of that thesis. Yet domestic debate has long been consumed by partisanship, identity politics and the binary of unification versus independence — obscuring the more consequential question of which civilizational level Taiwan intends to stand upon.
The notion of a “Chinese nationalism” (Zhonghua minzu, 中華民族) is not a modern civic identity but an extension of imperial logic. It defines political loyalty through bloodline and cultural orthodoxy, reducing individuals to members of an ethnic collective rather than rights-bearing citizens. Beijing’s claims over Taiwan rest on this civilizational frame, seeking to replace institutional choice with an ethnic narrative. This is not merely a sovereignty dispute; it is an attempt by one civilization to subsume another.
Once politics is reduced to ethnic belonging, institutions and rights lose their primacy. An ethnicity-based civilization cannot sustain a modern economy. Semiconductors, supply chains and global finance depend on institutional credibility, legal predictability and individual dignity. Taiwan’s real challenge is not a matter of political labels but of civilizational alignment: whether to uphold institutional civilization or retreat into a system defined by ethnicity and power.
That choice is going to determine Taiwan’s place — and its prospects — in the world that is emerging.
Joshua Tin is an economist.
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