“Lord Acton” by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Himmelfarb stated that her goal was to write an intellectual biography. This was a difficult task for Acton, whose most notable claim to history is perhaps the greatest book never written, his “History of Liberty.” Nonetheless, Himmelfarb has combed through his extensive notes, lectures, periodical pieces, and letters to sketch a rough outline of the evolution of Acton’s thoughts. He was a voracious reader in four modern languages, as well as Latin and Greek, who moved in the most exalted circles both in England and on the Continent, yet he was not admitted to Cambridge because of his Catholicism. Ironically, he would end his days as a Professor of History there. Instead, Acton studied in Munich with their austere theologians, who would have a lasting impact on his life. He was a layman, who was admitted to the Vatican Council where he fought a rearguard battle to defeat the Papal claim of infallibility. To him, the Inquisition and the St. Bartholomew Massacre were atrocities and everlasting stains on the Catholic Church. Those who tried to sanctify infallibility were apologetics, as guilty as the original perpetrators of these crimes. Despite much acrimony, Acton escaped being excommunicated. This was no idle speculation in a period where many of his countrymen were struggling everyday with their own faith, some leaving the Church of England for deism or atheism and others “going over to Rome.” Both could be traumatic experiences, severing lifelong ties with family and friends, ending marriages, and cutting off inheritances. Throughout Acton's life, he tried to reconcile his faith with his belief in liberty, both political and religious tolerance, as well as with modern science, philosophy, and logic. He strode the balance, as a man of religion and a man of reason. Acton was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, though he feared the mob and democratic tendencies. He favored organic institutions, the balancing of interests, and worried that the masses would express the will of the majority at the expense of minorities. Still, he supported the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 to enlarge the franchise. “It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.”

“An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” by David Hume

This is a big book in the traditional sense. It aims to solve the biggest problems in life- the very nature of humanity. Hume’s first distinction is the relationship between impressions and ideas in the mind. He states that simple impressions always precede simple ideas. “All our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses.” Furthermore, “our authority over our sentiments and passions is much weaker than that over our ideas.” Hume also separates knowledge between that derived from reason and that derived from experience. He states that although two plus two must always equal four, even the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow is just a strong probability derived from past experience and custom and not an a priori fact. Not only adult humans adjust their lives based on custom, but so do animals and small children, who are not capable of higher-ordered reasoning. Beliefs are gathered from observations or innate instincts, but not through abstract thought.

Hume proceeds to dismantle religious belief in the most obtuse ways possible, to avoid either giving offense or being branded an atheist himself. First, he picks apart the miracles of the Bible by saying that any reasonable person would have to declare that the probability of their actually happening was slim. In fact, he notes that were this not the case these phenomena would not be, by definition, miracles, but would just accord with the common laws of nature. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

Hume ends with a defense of moderate Cartesian doubt, “this species of scepticism, when more moderate, may be understood in a very reasonable sense, and is a necessary preparative to the study of philosophy, by preserving a proper impartiality in our judgements, and weaning our mind from all those prejudices, which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion. To begin with clear and self-evident principles, to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently our conclusions, and examine accurately all their consequences; though by these means we shall make both slow and a short progress in our systems; are the only methods, by which we can ever hope to reach truth, and attain a proper stability and certainty in our determinations.” However, he warns against a too fervent Pyrrhonism, where doubt cripples any human action and everyday commonsense.

“The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

In many ways this is a book of philosophy disguised as a novel. “The heart is the main thing, the rest is nonsense. Brains are also necessary, of course…. maybe brains are the main thing. Don’t smile, Aglaya, I’m not contradicting myself: a fool with a heart and no brains is as unhappy a fool as a fool with brains but no heart. An old truth. I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.” At the center of the story is a superficially simple-minded man, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, the Idiot. “All those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?… Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness…. “Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!””

Prince Myshkin has returned to St. Petersburg after years in Switzerland, trying to cure his affliction. “You have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot.” What makes this story so much like life is that all the characters are actually quite complicated. “Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such a simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation.” There is no one who is easy to root for or wholeheartedly identify with. “Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of own’s own.” Prince Myshkin, upon returning to Russia, goes from knowing not a soul to, in quick succession, becoming acquainted with some distant, well-off relatives, getting pushed into the edges of polite society, and coming into his own sizable inheritance. His life becomes a whirlwind. He also almost immediately falls in love with a mysterious lady of dubious origins, even before he meets her in the flesh. “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” The story is on the surface a love triangle, or perhaps, more aptly, a love polygon. “It made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who this lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty.” It is also a story about Russia, its personality, its people, its religion, and what makes it unique and great. “But I am not saying anything against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin; it is a necessary part of the whole, which without it would fall apart or atrophy; liberalism has the same right to exist as the most well-mannered conservatism; what I am attacking is Russian liberalism, and I repeat again that I attack it essentially because a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal, but is a non-Russian liberal. Give me a Russian liberal and I’ll kiss him at once right in front of you.”

“Belt and Road- A Chinese World Order” by Bruno Macaes

Macaes has written the definitive book on China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy. It dovetails nicely with his previous book, “The Dawn of Eurasia.” He begins, “The new Eurasian century is not one where different regions of the world converge towards a single model. For the first time in many centuries, we are forced to live with cultural contradictions.” Macaes defines Eurasia as a landmass stretching from Portugal to Indonesia, containing about two thirds of the world’s population and its global output. Belt and Road is China’s attempt to dictate the terms that will define this entire region and even beyond. Macaes states, “Belt and Road is already in its fundamental traits the map of the world to come—as China imagines it…. China is the only country that can genuinely be said to be universal, to over-step its boundaries, extending its presence to distant geographies.” Of course, in the map of the world that is, that distinction belongs to the United States, for now.

Chinese strategic policy has the long game in mind for Belt and Road. “The timeline for its realization [has] been fixed at more than thirty years, with the first phase of the project to be concluded in 2021 and the project as a whole realized by 2049.” But what exactly is Belt and Road? China sees the policy as a realization beyond a mere transportation network or a neo-Silk Road. Instead, Xi and the Chinese Communist Party intend that “an interconnected system of transport, energy and digital infrastructure would gradually develop into industrial clusters and free trade zones and then an economic corridor spanning construction, logistics, energy, manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, culminating in the birth of a large Eurasian common market.” It is nothing less than the reshaping of world trade and power structures.

China realizes that it can no longer just transform its domestic economy. It is now fully embedded in the world economy, with its flow of goods and services. Thus, China now seeks to exert control abroad and attempt to manage the world economy, as well. China survives on a cycle of imports of commodities and exports of finished manufactured goods to sustain its breakneck growth. “China’s predicament [is] having “two heads abroad” (“liangtou zai haiwai”). [It is] critically dependent on accessing commodities, energy and raw materials while needing to find constantly growing markets for its exports…. The realization that China was now highly dependent on foreign markets made it clear that some level of political influence over the latter would have to be developed.”

China’s guiding principal is Tianxia- All-under-Heaven. In China’s hegemonic heyday, in practicality, that meant “a specific legal and institutional form: the tributary system. Under this hierarchical order, foreign states, attracted by the splendor of Chinese civilization, voluntarily submitted to the Chinese court and became vassals…. Instead of territorial boundaries, relations between states were expressed by the aforementioned hierarchical relationship…. The ambiguity of the system—its units were simultaneously part of a single order and left alone to govern their affairs—meant that ritual and symbol became more important than legal status…. It is precisely in this informality that the initiative [Belt and Road] most obviously differs from the existing Western order which emphasizes legal and institutionalized procedures…. Because it is based on relations of dependence, it cannot but reproduce relations of power.” Belt and Road is, in its very nature, personality-based and anti-rule of law.

The Chinese Communist Party’s tool for steering Belt and Road is finance. “Beijing regards financing mechanisms as a critical part of the initiative, the motor of the engine…. The giant state banks—Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and China Construction Bank—will retain a dominant role…. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, founded on December 25, 2015 with its headquarters in Beijing and an authorized capital of $100 billion—about half that of the World Bank—considers Belt and Road projects as one of its investment priorities…. The Silk Road Fund is a development and investment fund established in Beijing on December 29, 2014 with an investment of $40 billion from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, China Investment Corporation, Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank…. China Development Bank set up a Belt and Road project pool involving over 900 projects from over sixty countries…. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the largest bank in the world by assets, is already taking part in 212 projects related to Belt and Road, with credit facilities exceeding $67 billion.” This constitutes State control of public and “private” financial assets on a massive scale. “Central Huijin—a subsidiary of China’s sovereign wealth fund—has become the largest shareholder in the main commercial banks.… The Chinese state has “refashioned itself a shareholder and institutional investor in the economy and resorted to financial means to manage its ownership, assets, and public investments.”” Belt and Road is the tool for projecting Chinese power onto the world stage.

Structurally, Belt and Road primarily refers to land and sea transport networks, respectively. “China has proposed a framework including six corridors, six means of communication, multiple countries, and multiple ports.” The Belt portion refers to the fact that these land corridors (as opposed to the sea “roads”) are not just destinations, but conveyor belts of industry. “The economic corridor concept deliberately considers the whole space…. to build an expanded “factory floor” along the full economic corridor and across national boundaries.” In sea transport, China is developing a “Ports-Park-City” model, where new ports are being built in conjunction with new (free trade) industrial zones, and residential units for workers. These are fully integrated industrial hubs built from scratch, not just transport routes. Chinese strategic goals are well developed and patiently executed. As the Pacific Journal, a Mandarin-language newspaper, puts it, the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy is to “select locations meticulously, make deployments discreetly, give priority to cooperative activities and penetrate gradually.”

One aim of Belt and Road is to put China on top of a new global commercial order. “Belt and Road is the first example of “transnational” industrial policy.” To succeed China must dominate the new manufacturing value chains. “When China develops a policy toward important commodity producers, it is less interested in securing access to commodity markets than in building highly efficient value chains where it can occupy the top segment.” This requires disrupting Western supremacy at the coordinating rung of trade. “The strategic task of transforming Chinese manufacturing “from large to strong” will be realized with the transformation from Made in China to Created in China, from China Speed to China Quality, and from Chinese Products to Chinese Brands.” China is seeking nothing less than to create the new international standards on which the rest of the world must rely and adopt in fields such as construction, container shipping, high-speed rail, finance, satellite global positioning, electric car batteries, and mobile communications networks. “International industrial capacity cooperation” is China’s way of exporting State guidance beyond its own borders. “Under the Belt and Road, countries open their policy-making processes to other countries before and above opening their economies to foreign companies.” It is left unsaid that “the initiative and final strategic vision always lies with Beijing.”

Belt and Road will fully transform the geographic landscape and population centers of the many countries that become connected to it. “The best image of the Belt and Road is not trains crossing the Eurasian supercontinent, or the ports and industrial parks opening along the way. It’s the cities being built up from scratch…. It’s really about ecosystems: collections of companies, workers and consumers—clusters of culture, social life and economic activity.” Brahma Chellaney cautions, “By integrating its foreign, economic, and security policies, China is advancing its goals of fashioning a hegemonic sphere of trade, communication, transportation, and security links. If states are saddled with onerous levels of debt as a result, their financial woes only aid China’s neocolonial designs.”

Macaes goes into detail describing China’s burgeoning relationships with many countries. One of the most important, most fully developed, and most fully integrated into Belt and Road is its relations with Pakistan. “If Kazakhstan serves as China’s gateway to Europe, Pakistan is its gateway to the Indian Ocean.” This is a cohesively planned endeavor. “International business cooperation with Pakistan should be conducted mainly with the government as a support, the banks as intermediary agents and enterprises as the mainstay.” Cooperation with Pakistan on Belt and Road was also the first time explicit military “security guarantees” were made public. Of course, transport and access to markets is always integral, if not all important. China’s goal is to construct and control ports that can serve dual purposes- both commercial and military. Pakistan also serves China’s mission of “liangtou zai haiwai,” being both rich in natural resources to exploit and having a large population, an ideal market for finished goods. “The Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a development corridor covering Xinjiang province and the entire territory of Pakistan. Its spatial layout is described as comprising one belt, three axes and several passages.” Its crown jewel is Gwadar Port. Macaes makes the bold claim, “Gwadar lies in a privileged position, with a claim to becoming a new Chinese coastal city.” The question remains how Pakistani Gwadar will remain or whether China will come to own it and, in fact, become de facto rulers. “Debt diplomacy may turn out to be extraordinarily successful as China obtains majority ownership in some of the critical infrastructure of the future world economy.” This is not just idle speculation, but reality on the ground. “In December 2017 Sri Lanka formally handed control of Hambantota port to China in exchange for writing down the country’s debt. Under a $1.1 billion deal, Chinese firms now hold a 70 percent stake in the port and a 99-year lease agreement to operate it.” The signs for Pakistan are not promising. “Pakistan’s [Chinese manufacturing] imports are set to top $27 billion by 2021. Pakistan can pay for Chinese machinery with Chinese loans, but unfortunately these loans are due before the economic gains that will be used to pay for them are accrued.” More generally, “nearly two-thirds of the world’s top sixty container ports…. received some degree of Chinese investment by 2015…. Ports such as Gwadar and Kyaukpyu are meant to connect the Indian Ocean with China via overland transport corridors…. Using overland pipelines connected to Gwadar will reduce the distance from the Persian Gulf to just 2,500 km…. While ports such as Hambantota are close to existing shipping lines, others such as Gwadar presuppose a significant redrawing of those lines in the future.” China’s ambitions are bold and will have repercussions felt throughout the world. “Antwerp, Hamburg, London, and Rotterdam are the main ports where containers are discharged today and the cargo distributed all over Europe. With [China’s] engagement in Mediterranean ports like Piraeus and potentially Trieste, Venice or Istanbul, China may hope to start changing the spatial pattern of the container shipping system.”

A more revolutionary geo-political development might be China’s proposed canal project in southern Thailand. “Bypassing the Malacca strait by building a canal through the Kra Isthmus in Thailand—around 100km long and 25 meters deep, it would take ten years to build—could be an even greater game changer…. [because it would allow] deployment of the Chinese navy to the Indian Ocean.” China is fully integrating commercial and military assets into a single strategy. “China passed a law in 2016 creating a legal framework for the use of civilian assets to support military logistics operations and requiring all Chinese industries that conduct international transportation to provide supplies and aid to the Chinese navy as needed.”

Macaes ends his book by speculating on options for China’s continued rise in the world order. He suggests that “it is possible to argue that, by creating a parallel structure of institutions, China is not setting out to destroy the Western-led order. Its initiatives in the realms of finance, currency, infrastructure, trade and security—most of them now subsumed under the Belt and Road—are meant to provide China with alternatives, to reduce its dependency on the existing order and limit risks, without thereby reducing its support for the current order.” However, Macaes himself suggests that it is much more likely that China is seeking to upend the neoliberal status quo. “On a wide range of issues from the Internet to human rights and sovereignty claims in the South China Sea or global trade, China is putting forth a clear challenge to the existing liberal order.” He quotes Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens, “China’s Belt and Road will be the new World Trade Organization—whether we like it or not.” Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, also asserts, “China will actively explore a way of resolving hotspot issues with Chinese characteristics and play a bigger and more constructive role in upholding world stability.” As Macaes points out, “it can no longer be said that the Chinese are indifferent to how other people govern themselves.” Xi Jinping, himself, stated that China is “blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization [providing] a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up development.”

Whatever the case, it seems clear that the Whig theory of history, where every country progresses ever-forward towards a predetermined endpoint, is not in the cards.The age of a single global hegemon seems to have passed rather quickly, as we have drifted back into a realist world of competing State interests and alliances.  “A multipolar world system would be based on different spheres of influence, as different actors pursue independent paths, even if they are also able—in limited areas—to influence and shape each other’s system of norms.” Macaes concludes, “The Belt and Road may never become universal—just as the West never became universal—but in some areas it will rule unimpeded and different shades of influence will be felt everywhere.”