Author: FRANCESCO SISCIVia Asia Times
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose.
The written rule is that the US president rules America, yet de facto the unwritten rule is that he rules the world. The world is made up of written and unwritten rules, and the latter are more important than the former.
To forget about the unwritten by sticking to the written is ignoring the large and being trapped in the small (皆以明小物而不明大物也), as an ancient Chinese proverb puts it.
Yet in the gap between de jure and de facto, there is a risky imbalance of representation. Americans vote for their president; non-Americans don’t vote for him but will suffer or enjoy the consequences of the American choice.
Still they do take part in the public debate, and can have some influence with ideas and money. Formalizing this foreign participation is tricky, and may upend American democracy with global consequences. But to ignore the yawning gap of representation would also be a gross mistake.
The controversy over Russian influence on US presidential elections is also about this. Hidden, stealthy participation is and should be forbidden. But is the open participation of foreign players so terrible? How can this happen in a more structured way?
An age-old issue
The issue is an old one for empires based on representation, like those of Athens or Rome. The Roman Senate chose to have leaders of some allied nations as members: Caesar brought in Gaul allies, and before that there were loyal socii.
There was the extension of Roman citizenship to the Italian peninsula (to the Italians south of the Po river in 90 BC and to those living south of the Alps 40 years later) and with Caracalla to the whole empire in 212 AD.
The issue of American representation of the world was blurred for decades, first by the fact that the US opposed the USSR, and therefore opposition to the communist onslaught itself gave Washington leadership.
Of course, the idea of “America First” had its own reasons and the many failures of the different US administrations in the Middle East didn’t help the world or America.
In sum, the US felt openly wronged by the world, the world came to realize there was not perfect alignment between the US and the world, the US might not be as powerful as people had thought, and thus US leadership needed different conditions.
De facto there is a move from a “natural global leadership” to what must become an “intentional global leadership.” That is, in the past, America didn’t need to explain itself to the world for its leadership; now it does.
China’s leadership
Central in the US and historical Western perception of leadership is the understanding of the concept of “representation.” It is different in China, but there is still the need to acquire social consensus.
After the 1989 crackdown on the student movement in Tiananmen, China set in motion political and social measures that de facto “bought the students’ consent.”
Before the protests, youngsters were subjected to enormous social control of private life. After 1989, their private lives were liberalized, sexual life once strictly controlled, was set free. Plus, they were encouraged to go into business. It was the beginning of rampant, widespread corruption that eventually, in two decades, brought down China’s old social fabric.
Moreover, with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the late 1990s, Americans accused China of stealing intellectual property (IPR). This controversy created a political welding which did not exist previously between this new class of former Tiananmen protesters and the government.
Those who stole IPR in the 1990s were the young people who a few years earlier were in Tiananmen revolting against the government.
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