After the world wars, there was widespread agreement in the West: national interest should bow to universal rights and the equality of all peoples. But Tongdong Bai, Chair of Philosophy at Fudan University in China, argues that this ideal rests on fantasy psychology: the belief that human beings can love and care about everybody equally. Real love grows from intimate bonds. Extended equally across all humanity, it becomes a bloodless, rationalistic simulacrum. Instead, we must accept we are self-interested and that we love our kin more than we do outsiders. But that does not mean that anyone who is not us, is against us. We must care for all, only, unequally.

Globalization is in crisis, and this should come as no surprise at all. For globalization has been led by nation-states. A nation-state, by definition, will do whatever it takes for its own national interest. Globalization, in contrast, means going beyond nation-states and national interests. But if globalization is led by nation-states, it can only be maintained for as long as national leaders consider it beneficial to their states’ interests. When they lose faith in this, globalization will be in peril. When the Cold War ended, the United States became the leader of globalization. When it thought that it benefited from this leadership position, it was happy to offer the service of leadership. However, in the past decade or more, the US has lost faith in this, and so has begun rejecting its leadership role and accusing other states of taking a free ride from its service and even stealing from it. This sudden change is almost comical, like when, in the movie Casablanca, the French police chief Captain Renault, who is involved in a gambling den, comes under pressure from some Nazi officers and says, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

If the world’s top economy refuses to maintain the global order, what about the second-top economy, China? If we consult the history of new national powers rising, it doesn’t give us confidence. For when a nation-state is rising, it tends to demand more for its own national interest. The rest of the world, consisting of nation-states as well, obviously doesn’t want to give in. The result is often war, including the First and Second World Wars.

The West, especially the “old Europe” or Western Europe, having learned the lesson from these wars, tried to go beyond nation-states by way of cosmopolitanism. A more aggressive form of the cosmopolitan attempt is guided by the idea that human rights override sovereignty, and it leads Western countries to intervene abroad, with many human rights violations and even crude oppressions and mass killings. Interventions in the past two decades, such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, however, seem to create new and even greater miseries than those they were intended to eliminate. To make things right seems to demand so much of Western countries that, often, they can only give lip-service to the principle that human rights override sovereignty, leading to skepticism and cynicism. A less aggressive form of cosmopolitanism, such as the formation of the European Union and the creation of a world market, doesn’t seem to do too well, either. For it leads to serious domestic problems, such as rising economic inequality, and political instability that is caused by the failure to assimilate a large group of people with different cultures and religions. All of this has led to the rise of right-wing populism in the West.