When Chinese President Hu Jintao comes to Washington this week, there aren’t likely to be many surprises: Hu and Barack Obama will probably keep their conversation to a fairly regulated script, focusing on trade and North Korea and offering the expected viewpoints on both. But seen from a different angle, everything in that conversation could be predicted, not from current events but from longstanding tribal patterns.
With China’s new prominence in global affairs, the Han race, which constitutes 90 percent of the Chinese population, is suddenly the most dominant cohesive ethnic group in the world — and it is seeking to remain that way through strategic alliances, aggressive trade policy, and attacks on racial minorities within the country’s boundaries. The less tribally cohesive, more fragmented West is, meanwhile, losing out.
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Tribes that sought to trace the role of ethnicity, race, and religion in economic and geopolitical affairs. At the time, there was some skepticism about the continuing influence of ethnicity; some considered the work, frankly, regressive and racist. Now, however, my thesis from 1992 has really come to fruition. We are living in the age of tribes — and China is just the start.
Such primitive racial instincts were supposed to be long ago passé: We’re supposed to be living in Thomas Friedman’s “flat” world or Kenichi Ohmae’s “borderless world.” By now, supposedly, everyone is increasingly interconnected and undifferentiated. Affairs should be managed neatly by deracinated professionals, working on their iPads from Brussels, Washington, or any of the other “global” capitals.
But most people do not really see themselves as members of a large multinational unit, global citizens, or “mass consumers.” Instead the drivers of history remain the essentials: the desire to feed one’s family, support the health of the tribe, and shape the immediate community. The particularistic continues to trump the universalistic.
This has only become more evident as our world becomes more multipolar. During the 19th and much of the 20th century, the world was dominated by a European capitalist mindset that glossed over many of the ethnic and racial differences simmering under the surface in the regions under its rule. Particular groups, including Chinese, Muslims, or Hindu Indians, might have harbored a sense of unique identity but, for the most part, either melded into the Euro-American mold, or, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, into the alternative Soviet one.
Today this has changed dramatically, as once suppressed racial and ethnic groups express their power on a global level. The rise of Chinese national identity, increasingly stripped of its socialist clothing, must be seen as the driving force behind the new tribalism. The country’s re-emergence as a great world power expresses the cultural ascendency not so much of Marxism or Maoism but of the Han race, which in only a few decades could control the world’s largest economy.
This represents a major shift in the identity of the Chinese tribe, a combination of political and economic power with a very homogeneous worldview. The best way to explain China’s economic and foreign policy is most accurately seen as a tribal expression of what Friedrich Nietzsche called a “will to power.” Essentially, the Han has become a tribal superpower that treats other groups — from China’s non-Han minority to much of the rest of the world — as a vast semi-colonial periphery. And with its growing economic and military might, Han China may soon be able to impose its will on some of these “lesser” cultures, should it desire.
China may be setting the underlying tone of our new world, but many other groups have responded in similarly tribal fashion. Like China, Russia has abandoned internationalist communism for a kind of Leninist state-capitalism with racial overtones, as evident both in the increasingly rough treatments of darker-skinned ethnic minorities such as Chechens and an aggressive ethnic Russian retro-imperialism — once disguised in socialist trappings — toward “near abroad” countries like Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The state-sponsored restoration of everything from the Orthodox Church to Stalin — as well as the consolidation of state ownership over the lucrative energy sector — reflects the deeply nationalist core of the modern Russian state, which, for historical, geographical, and cultural reasons, has, with few exceptions, always bent toward authoritarianism. The end of the Soviet Union, it turns out, did not usher in a wider embrace of universal capitalism so much as engender various forms of ethnicity-based irredentism and, in Russia itself, a renewed Slavic nationalism.
As they have modernized and globalized, other races — Persians, Arabs, Brazilians, for just a few examples — have turned out to be far less cosmopolitan and more tribal. These nationalisms, or tribalisms vary widely. Some, like China and Russia, are specifically racial in character. Others, such as Brazil, are remarkably multi-racial. In some cases historic resentments are at the base. But all are less interested in adopting globalized norms of free markets or capitalism than using state power (through sovereign wealth funds and state-controlled corporations) to increase their influence and wealth.
The new tribalism is also increasingly evident in Europe. Just a few years ago Europhiles like French eminence grise Jacques Attali or left-wing author Jeremy Rifkin could project a utopian future European Union that would stand both as a global role model and one of the world’s great powers. Today, Rifkin’s ideal of a universalistic “European dream” is collapsing — a process accelerated by the financial crisis — as the continent is torn apart by deep-seated historical and cultural rifts.
Europe today can best be seen as divided between three cultural tribes: Nordic-Germanic, Latin, and Slavonic. In the north, there is a vast region of prosperity, a zone of Nordic dynamism. Characterized by economies based on specialized exports, a still powerful Protestant ethic, and a culture that embraces authority, these countries — including Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, and, arguably, the Baltic states — are becoming ever more aware of the cultural, fiscal, and attitudinal gulf between them and the southern countries.
At the same time, the attempt to build a new European identity fused with immigrants appears to be failing. As Chancellor Angela Merkel noted, Germany has failed at “multi-culturalism.” Such sentiments may be reviled by the media, academics, and even business leaders in Northern Europe, but they are clearly popular at the grassroots. Once considered paragons of liberalism, countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands have incubated potent anti-immigration movements.
In a world dominated increasingly by Asia, northern Europe cannot be anything more than a peripheral global power, which may explain its new introversion. Instead these resilient cultures more accurately represent a revival of the old Hanseatic League, a network of opportunistic and prosperous trading states that ringed the North and Baltic seas during the 13th century. This new league increasingly battles over issues of trade and fiscal policy, often with ill-disguised contempt, with the southern European countries I call “the Olive Republics”: a region typified by dire straits, with rapidly aging populations, enormous budget deficits, and declining industrial might. Southern Europe now constitutes a zone of lassitude that extends from Portugal and Spain through the south of France, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria.
The last European tribe includes the Slavic countries, centered by Russia but extending to parts of the Balkans as well, places like Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, and Moldova that historically have looked east as well as west and are currently defined by shrinking populations and weak democratic institutions. A historic pattern of Russian domination is evident here, based in large part on a revived Slavic identity that embraces similarities in religion, culture, history, and language with countries living under Russia’s shield. In this sense the czars are back, not a great development for the rest of the world or for the fading chimera of a “common European home.”
What does this resurgence of tribalism mean to the foreign policy community? Clearly more attention needs to be played to such issues as cultural vibrancy, birthrates, and economic “animal spirits.” In some sense, we need to return to the perspectives of ancient writers like Herodotus and Ibn Khaldun, who attributed the rise and fall of nations to the vitality of what the latter called “group feeling.”
Tribalism will also threaten the efficacy of international organizations, which tend to assume common interests between groups. Instead we have to think of future international cooperation in more traditional terms, balancing distinct sets of tribal interest. As tribes continue to pursue their own interests ever more zealously, the idealistic rhetoric of multinational organizations will become ever more risible. The way China and other developing countries snarled up the Copenhagen climate conference reflects this shift.
Similarly, the problems with controlling trade to Iran have to do with long-standing economic relationships that are closely linked to cultural ties. Sanctions imposed from the West cannot compete with far more long-standing trade relations between Iran and places like Dubai. In the future, the best hope may lie in more temporary, ad hoc alliances based on the self-interest of individual tribes, such as how the U.S. and Russia may cooperate in space exploration as a means to preserve their hegemony in that field against newcomers such as China.
In essence, we need to shift from seeking labored, politically correct commonalities among cultures and work more on learning to reconcile and co-exist with people who always, inevitably, will remain strangers. This means, for example, throwing out the idea that any international model — say, the Anglo-American version — can be imposed or grafted onto other cultures.
“What about us?” Anglo-Americans may ask. In a globalized world that speaks and writes in English, the Anglosphere retains some natural advantages. This is where the most elite colleges and universities are located, and where the top financial firms are concentrated. Equally important, the Anglosphere also controls much of what the developing countries will most need in the future — food — through the unsurpassed fecundity of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Demographics and a unique ability to absorb a wide range of immigrants make the Anglosphere economically and demographically vibrant — a point often missed by political scientists like the late Samuel Huntington and some elements on the political right. By 2050, the Anglosphere will be home to upwards of 550 million people, the largest population grouping outside China and India. English-speakers may not straddle the world like the 19th century empire-makers, but they are likely to remain first among equals well into the current century.
Ultimately, this will depend on how the English-speaking world evolves and learns to embrace its multiracial population without losing its sense of a common identity. Ideally, the Anglosphere can offer an alternative that embraces not merely a language but a set of historically achieved values such as democracy and freedom of speech, religion, and markets. Already many of the English-speaking world’s exemplary writers, artists, industrialists, and entrepreneurs hail from a vast and ever expanding array of backgrounds. It is in the melding of many into one dynamic culture that the Anglosphere may retain a powerful influence over our emerging world of tribes.
This piece originally appeared in Foreign Policy.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History
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