World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  The United States has alternated between defending the Westphalian system and castigating its premises of balance of power and noninterference in domestic affairs as immoral and outmoded, and sometimes both at once. It continues to assert the universal relevance of its values in building a peaceful world order and reserves the right to support them globally. Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.

  All of the major centers of power practice elements of Westphalian order to some degree, but none considers itself the natural defender of the system. All are undergoing significant internal shifts. Can regions with such divergent cultures, histories, and traditional theories of order vindicate the legitimacy of any common system?

  Success in such an effort will require an approach that respects both the multifariousness of the human condition and the ingrained human quest for freedom. Order in this sense must be cultivated; it cannot be imposed. This is particularly so in an age of instantaneous communication and revolutionary political flux. Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today’s leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?

  LEGITIMACY AND POWER

  An answer to these questions must deal with three levels of order. World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world. An international order is the practical application of these concepts to a substantial part of the globe—large enough to affect the global balance of power. Regional orders involve the same principles applied to a defined geographic area.

  Any one of these systems of order bases itself on two components: a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit from subjugating all others. A consensus on the legitimacy of existing arrangements does not—now or in the past—foreclose competitions or confrontations, but it helps ensure that they will occur as adjustments within the existing order rather than as fundamental challenges to it. A balance of forces does not in itself secure peace, but if thoughtfully assembled and invoked, it can limit the scope and frequency of fundamental challenges and curtail their chance of succeeding when they do occur.

  No book can hope to address every historic approach to international order or every country now active in shaping world affairs. This volume attempts to deal with the regions whose concepts of order have most shaped the evolution of the modern era.

  The balance between legitimacy and power is extremely complex; the smaller the geographic area to which it applies and the more coherent the cultural convictions within it, the easier it is to distill a workable consensus. But in the modern world the need is for a global world order. An array of entities unrelated to each other by history or values (except at arm’s length), and defining themselves essentially by the limit of their capabilities, is likely to generate conflict, not order.

  During my first visit to Beijing, undertaken in 1971 to reestablish contact with China after two decades of hostility, I mentioned that to the American delegation, China was a “land of mystery.” Premier Zhou Enlai responded, “You will find it not mysterious. When you have become familiar with it, it will not seem so mysterious as before.” There were 900 million Chinese, he observed, and it seemed perfectly normal to them. In our time, the quest for world order will require relating the perceptions of societies whose realities have largely been self-contained. The mystery to be overcome is one all peoples share—how divergent historic experiences and values can be shaped into a common order.

  CHAPTER 1

  Europe: The Pluralistic International Order

  THE UNIQUENESS OF THE EUROPEAN ORDER

  The history of most civilizations is a tale of the rise and fall of empires. Order was established by their internal governance, not through an equilibrium among states: strong when the central authority was cohesive, more haphazard under weaker rulers. In imperial systems, wars generally took place at the frontiers of the empire or as civil wars. Peace was identified with the reach of imperial power.

  In China and Islam, political contests were fought for control of an established framework of order. Dynasties changed, but each new ruling group portrayed itself as restoring a legitimate system that had fallen into disrepair. In Europe, no such evolution took hold. With the end of Roman rule, pluralism became the defining characteristic of the European order. The idea of Europe loomed as a geographic designation, as an expression of Christianity or of court society, or as the center of enlightenment of a community of the educated and of modernity. Yet although it was comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single governance, or a united, fixed identity. It changed the principles in the name of which its various units governed themselves at frequent intervals, experimenting with a new concept of political legitimacy or international order.

  In other regions of the world, a period of competing rulers came by posterity to be regarded as a “time of troubles,” a civil war, or a “warlord period”—a lamented interlude of disunity that had been transcended. Europe thrived on fragmentation and embraced its own divisions. Distinct competing dynasties and nationalities were perceived not as a form of “chaos” to be expunged but, in the idealized view of Europe’s statesmen—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—as an intricate mechanism tending toward a balance that preserved each people’s interests, integrity, and autonomy. For more than a thousand years, in the mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and identity from resistance to universal rule. It is not that European monarchs were more immune to the glories of conquest than their counterparts in other civilizations or more committed to an ideal of diversity in the abstract. Rather, they lacked the strength to impose their will on each other decisively. In time, pluralism took on the characteristics of a model of world order. Has Europe in our time transcended this pluralistic tendency—or do the internal struggles of the European Union affirm it?

  For five hundred years, Rome’s imperial rule had ensured a single set of laws, a common defense, and an extraordinary level of civilization. With the fall of Rome, conventionally dated in 476, the empire disintegrated. In what historians have called the Dark Ages, nostalgia for the lost universality flourished. The vision of harmony and unity focused increasingly on the Church. In that worldview, Christendom was a single society administered by two complementary authorities: civil government, the “successors of Caesar” maintaining order in the temporal sphere; and the Church, the successors of Peter tending to universal and absolute principles of salvation. Augustine of Hippo, writing in North Africa as Roman rule crumbled, theologically concluded that temporal political authority was legitimate to the extent that it furthered the pursuit of a God-fearing life and with it man’s salvation. “There are two systems,” Pope Gelasius I wrote to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius in A.D. 494, “under which this world is governed, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these, the greater weight is with the priests in so far as they will answer to the Lord, even for kings, in the Last Judgment.” The real world order was in this sense not in this world.

  This all-encompassing concept of world order had to contend with an anomaly from the start: in the post–Roman Europe, dozens of political rulers exercised sovereignty with no clear hierarchy among them; all invoked fealty to Christ,
but their link to the Church and its authority was ambiguous. Fierce debates attended the delineation of Church authority, while kingdoms with separate militaries and independent policies maneuvered for advantage in a manner that bore no apparent relationship to Augustine’s City of God.

  Aspirations to unity were briefly realized on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, the Frankish King and conqueror of much of present-day France and Germany, as Imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans), and awarded him theoretical title to the former eastern half of the erstwhile Roman Empire, at that point the lands of Byzantium. The Emperor pledged to the Pope “to defend on all sides the holy church of Christ from pagan incursion and infidel devastation abroad, and within to add strength to the Catholic faith by our recognition of it.”

  But Charlemagne’s empire did not fulfill its aspirations: in fact it began to crumble almost as soon as it was inaugurated. Charlemagne, beset by tasks closer to home, never attempted to rule the lands of the erstwhile Eastern Roman Empire the Pope had allotted him. In the west, he made little progress in recapturing Spain from its Moorish conquerors. After Charlemagne’s death, his successors sought to reinforce his position by appeal to tradition, by naming his possessions the Holy Roman Empire. But debilitated by civil wars, less than a century after its founding, Charlemagne’s empire passed from the scene as a coherent political entity (though its name remained in use throughout a shifting series of territories until 1806).

  China had its Emperor; Islam had its Caliph—the recognized leader of the lands of Islam. Europe had the Holy Roman Emperor. But the Holy Roman Emperor operated from a much weaker base than his confreres in other civilizations. He had no imperial bureaucracy at his disposal. His authority depended on his strength in the regions he governed in his dynastic capacity, essentially his family holdings. His position was not formally hereditary and depended on election by a franchise of seven, later nine, princes; these elections were generally decided by a mixture of political maneuvering, assessments of religious piety, and vast financial payoffs. The Emperor theoretically owed his authority to his investiture by the Pope, but political and logistical considerations often excluded it, leaving him to rule for years as “Emperor-Elect.” Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” Medieval Europe’s concept of international order reflected a case-by-case accommodation between the Pope and the Emperor and a host of other feudal rulers. A universal order based on the possibility of a single reign and a single set of legitimating principles was increasingly drained of any practicality.

  A full flowering of the medieval concept of world order was envisioned only briefly with the rise of the sixteenth-century Habsburg prince Charles (1500–1558); his rule also ushered in its irrevocable decay. The stern and pious Flemish-born prince was born to rule; except for a widely noted taste for spiced food, he was generally perceived to be without vices and immune to distraction. He inherited the crown of the Netherlands as a child and that of Spain—with its vast and expanding array of colonies in Asia and the Americas—at sixteen. Shortly after, in 1519, he prevailed in the election for the post of Holy Roman Emperor, making him Charlemagne’s formal successor. The coincidence of these titles meant that the medieval vision seemed poised to be fulfilled. A single, pious ruler now governed territories approximately equivalent to today’s Austria, Germany, northern Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, eastern France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, and much of the Americas. (This massive agglomeration of political power was accomplished almost entirely through strategic marriages and gave rise to the Habsburg saying “Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube!”—“Leave the waging of wars to others; you, happy Austria, marry!”) Spanish explorers and conquistadores—Magellan and Cortés sailed under Charles’s auspices—were in the process of destroying the ancient empires of the Americas and carrying the sacraments together with European political power across the New World. Charles’s armies and navies were engaged in the defense of Christendom against a new wave of invasions, by the Ottoman Turks and their surrogates in southeastern Europe and North Africa. Charles personally led a counterattack in Tunisia, with a fleet funded by gold from the New World. Caught up in these heady developments, Charles was hailed by his contemporaries as the “greatest emperor since the division of the empire in 843,” destined to return the world to “a single shepherd.”

  In the tradition of Charlemagne, at his coronation Charles vowed to be “the protector and defender of the Holy Roman Church,” and crowds paid him obeisance as “Caesare” and “Imperio”; Pope Clement affirmed Charles as the temporal force for “seeing peace and order reestablished” in Christendom.

  A Chinese or Turkish visitor to Europe at that time might well have perceived a seemingly familiar political system: a continent presided over by a single dynasty imbued with a sense of divine mandate. If Charles had been able to consolidate his authority and manage an orderly succession in the vast Habsburg territorial conglomerate, Europe would have been shaped by a dominant central authority like the Chinese Empire or the Islamic caliphate.

  It did not happen; nor did Charles try. In the end, he was satisfied to base order on equilibrium. Hegemony might be his inheritance but not his objective, as he proved when, after capturing his temporal political rival the French King Francis I in the Battle of Pavia in 1525, he released him—freeing France to resume a separate and adversarial foreign policy at the heart of Europe. The French King repudiated Charles’s grand gesture by taking the remarkable step—so at odds with the medieval concept of Christian statecraft—of proposing military cooperation to the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman, who was then invading Eastern Europe and challenging Habsburg power from the east.

  The universality of the Church Charles sought to vindicate was not to be had. He proved unable to prevent the new doctrine of Protestantism from spreading through the lands that were the principal base of his power. Both religious and political unity were fracturing. The effort to fulfill his aspirations inherent in his office was beyond the capabilities of a single individual. A haunting portrait by Titian from 1548 at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek reveals the torment of an eminence who cannot reach spiritual fulfillment or manipulate the, to him, ultimately secondary levers of hegemonic rule. Charles resolved to abdicate his dynastic titles and divide his vast empire, and did so in a manner reflecting the pluralism that had defeated his quest for unity. To his son Philip, he bequeathed the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, then the crown of Spain and its global empire. In an emotional 1555 ceremony in Brussels, he reviewed the record of his reign, attested to the diligence with which he had fulfilled his duties, and in the process handed the States-General of the Netherlands to Philip as well. The same year, Charles concluded a landmark treaty, the Peace of Augsburg, which recognized Protestantism within the Holy Roman Empire. Abandoning the spiritual foundation of his empire, Charles afforded princes the right to choose the confessional orientation of their territory. Shortly afterward, he resigned his title as Holy Roman Emperor, passing responsibility for the empire, its upheavals, and its external challenges to his brother Ferdinand. Charles retired to a monastery in a rural region of Spain, to a life of seclusion. He spent his last days in the company of his confessor and of an Italian clock maker, whose works lined the walls and whose trade Charles attempted to learn. When Charles died in 1558, his will expressed regret for the fracturing of doctrine that had taken place during his reign and charged his son to redouble the Inquisition.

  Three events completed the disintegration of the old ideal of unity. By the time Charles V died, revolutionary changes had raised Europe’s sights from a regional to a global enterprise while fragmenting the medieval political and religious order: the beginning of the age of discovery, the invention of printing, and the schism in the Church.

  A map depicting the universe, as comprehended by educated Europeans in the medieval age, would h
ave shown Northern and Southern Hemispheres stretching from India in the east to Iberia and the islands of Britain in the west, with Jerusalem in the center. In the medieval perception, this was not a map for travelers but a stage divinely ordained for the drama of human redemption. The world, it was believed on biblical authority, was six-sevenths land and one-seventh water. Because the principles of salvation were fixed and could be cultivated through efforts in the lands known to Christendom, there was no reward for venturing past the fringes of civilization. In the Inferno, Dante described Ulysses’ sailing out through the Pillars of Hercules (the Rock of Gibraltar and the adjacent heights of North Africa, at the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea) in search of knowledge, and being punished for his transgression against God’s plan by a whirlwind that dooms his ship and all its crew.

  The modern era announced itself when enterprising societies sought glory and wealth by exploring the oceans and whatever lay beyond them. In the fifteenth century, Europe and China ventured forth almost contemporaneously. Chinese ships, then the world’s largest and technologically most advanced, undertook journeys of exploration reaching Southeast Asia, India, and the east coast of Africa. They exchanged presents with local dignitaries, enrolled princes in China’s imperial “tribute system,” and brought home with them cultural and zoological curiosities. Yet following the head navigator Zheng He’s death in 1433, the Chinese Emperor put an end to overseas adventures, and the fleet was abandoned. China continued to insist on the universal relevance of its principles of world order, but it would henceforth cultivate them at home and with the peoples along its borders. It never again attempted a comparable naval effort—until perhaps our own time.