Is a united world possible?
The war on Ukraine is terrible. The horrors that Ukrainians and Russians are facing are inexcusable. But if there is one silver lining of Putin’s actions that the West has been celebrating, it is our unification. News articles hail the unification of Europe, the pause of culture wars in the US , even the mending of EU-British relations. And perhaps it is good that “we” are all united, that the countries of Europe are working together and that the US is maybe fractionally less polarised. But what does it really mean to be united? And is it really unity when we are just united against something? Or, perhaps, to be united against something is, in fact, the only way to be united. The metaphysics of “unitedness” necessitates an “againstness” at the heart of it.
Hegel, a founding father of Western philosophy, captured this idea in the Self-consciousness chapter of his most famous work The Phenomenology of Spirit. To put his complex thesis very crudely: you can only recognise yourself through someone else. At first there is one and the other, we can call them A and B. A recognises B and B recognises A. In recognising B, A recognises that B recognises A. Thus A recognises herself only by recognising B’s recognition of her. What this convoluted cycle of recognition ultimately shows is that, for the most basic act of self-recognition, we are inherently dependent on other people.
This might sound like the nonsensical philosophising of an irrelevant and long-dead man. But when you take down the curtains of jargon to see the kernel of what Hegel is arguing, it makes sense. Imagine being the only being in the universe. There is nothing else, no other beings, no other objects, no other space. You are the universe because there is nothing else. You are the whole of what exists. When you are all that there is, do you recognise yourself? Do you have any sense of identity when there is nothing that you are in relation to? How would you define yourself? Would it make sense to say “I am human” when there is nothing that is non-human? To say “I am young” when there is nothing that is any other age? To say “I am Emily” when there is nothing that is not Emily? All our concepts become obsolete when there are no oppositional concepts. Without anything different, without anything contrasting, there is no identity, no recognition.
So, if we extract from this basic level of phenomenological interdependence — that I cannot recognise my own identity without needing my opposite (you) — we can apply this Hegelian line to social groups. The “we” needs the “them” through which to gain and see their own identity. Without a “them” for the “we” to be different from, there is no “we” to recognise. So once everyone is included in the we, the we must disappear. When everyone is included and there is no one who is not included, no different group against whom our group can identify ourselves, then our singular group loses its identity.
To tie these abstract ideas back to my starting point, then, the unity of the West stems directly from its opposition to Russia, China and other regimes we consider to be oppressive. We are united because we consider our values to be different from their values. If all countries had the same values, and there were no opposing values, then our values would not be values anymore, they would just be.
So where does this leave us? It seems to mean that we can never have a united world as, for some parts of the world to be united, there must be other parts of the world that they are united against. Was the dream of globalisation uniting the world really just an unactualisable dream, then?
The acceleration of globalisation since the 18th century has done much to overcome the lottery of birth. Where people are born and to which people under what circumstances used to be a definitive factor in people’s lives. It would have been extremely rare to travel further than your own town or county. If you were born into unfortunate circumstances, there was little you could do to leave. Globalisation promised a different world, one where someone’s whole life wasn’t determined by the chance circumstances of their birthplace. In a connected, global world, growing up in one place does not mean staying in that place forever. It opens up possibilities and offers individuals greater agency in forming their lives just how they want them to be.
But what is the end goal of globalisation? If it is to have one united global world of shared values where every opportunity is available to everyone, such a world seems impossible. After all, we have just discovered that we cannot all be united because we need someone who is not with us against whom we are uniting. Furthermore, it is not clear that the unified one that globalism offers us is really something we want. The unification of globalism requires, to some extent, homogeneity. It requires, at the very least, homogenous basic values. Even the need for mutual communication in a globalised world means not only the loss of small languages but also the need for mutual understanding, not just in terms of language but also in terms of the underpinnings of language: assumptions, norms, unspoken expectations… In this pursuit of oneness, globalisation calls for assimilation and, in doing so, has the result of cultural erasure. So the impossible aims of globalisation may not even be that desirable.
But do we have any alternative? The divided world that came before the push for globalisation certainly was not any better. Globalisation has facilitated the sharing of essential technological and scientific developments that have improved lives all over the world. The situation now is far from perfect, but it is certainly better than it was 200 years ago. Today, in the country with the shortest life expectancy (Central African Republic) people can expect to live to around 53. In 1800, no country in the world had a life expectancy over 40 and in India and South Korea, the number was less than half of that in the Central African Republic today, at 25. Of course, life expectancy is not a determining metric and many other considerations, such as quality of life and GDP, to name only a couple in an immeasurably long list, are of great importance. Still, these numbers are telling of the general world-wide improvement of human lives. I do not suggest that this improvement is solely, or even mostly, to do with the rising value of globalisation since the 1800s. The world is complex with innumerable moving parts and will likely never be fully understood. However, it seems clear to me that if each country had kept to itself, with no communication, interdependence, mutual aid, travel, immigration, collaboration and so on, the world would be a very different place and the disparities in life expectancy and quality between countries would be even greater.
Whilst working together and being united certainly comes with its challenges, it seems better than the alternative. With the constraint of needing an oppositional other (pointed out by Hegel) and the wish to preserve cultural diversity and mutual respect, we are now in the hard position of figuring out how to be together but different. To preserve our differences in order to secure our unity. This is not an easy puzzle to solve, so I will leave the question here without aiming to answer it. And, if it turns out to be unsolvable, then I suppose the best we can hope for is an alien attack, which will provide us with the oppositional “other” we need to achieve earthly unity.
