South China Morning Post
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A woman draws water from her well after a Russian aerial bomb exploded outside her farm, severely damaging her home, in the village of Yakovlivka outside Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 2. Photo: Reuters
Opinion
Lanxin Xiang
Lanxin Xiang

Ukraine war: failure of the West’s ‘ecumenical peace’ could spill over to Taiwan

  • The war in Ukraine reflects a breakdown of the Western management of ecumenical peace in Europe since the end of the Cold War
  • Now the West is focusing its attention on China and treating Taiwan as the Ukraine of the East, raising the prospect of another damaging war
Lanxin Xiang
Lanxin Xiang
Why you can trust SCMP
Ecumenical peace is a powerful Christian movement emphasising Christian unity all over the world. As part of Christian civilisation, Russia deserves a place in it. Unfortunately, today’s ecumenical peace has been replaced by a “democratic peace” that Russia is in effect excluded from.

China, of course, was never part of it. Thus, China has good reason to see the war in Ukraine as an internecine conflict as its cause has nothing to do with Chinese history and culture.

Western civilisation has seen far more war than peace throughout its history. Not only is the war in Ukraine a tragic conflict between Slavic brothers, it is a failure of Western management of ecumenical peace since the end of the Cold War. Few in Western countries are able to read this event as such because they are misled by the faulty theory of a “rules-based order”.

Russia’s behaviour actually follows the basic rules of the international system founded by Europe in 1648 and enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia. Two principles are at the core of this system – the sovereign rights of the state and the balance-of-power logic for state security. The Western accusations against Russia only focus on the first but entirely neglect the second.

But the West has imposed an ecumenical peace in Europe since the end of the Cold War with a set of “universal values” derived from the West alone. It is not surprising that peace cannot be maintained if Russian concerns over state security in a Westphalian context are consistently dismissed during Nato expansion.
Nevertheless, the collateral damage to China from this war should not be underestimated. This damage is not so much economic as political. In the recent summit between the European Union and China, European leaders warned that the relationship between the two is at a tipping point if China does not support the Western position against Russia.

Chinese leaders have refused to comply with this demand. The danger is that as the ecumenical peace has failed in Europe, politicians in the West might want to focus on the rivalry with China.

The medieval and early modern mindset in Europe often connected the ecumenical peace in Europe with the need for holy war against the real enemy of Christianity – the infidels. The West today seems increasingly keen on imposing a global ecumenical peace beyond democracies.

The risk is most obvious in its relationship with China, which has already been designated the leading rival to the United States in every dimension, whether it is religion, culture, politics, history and even race, to the theologians of democratic peace.

Transatlantic solidarity and the bipartisan consensus in Washington on China could eventually entail a shift of the “one China policy” to a “one China, one Taiwan” policy. Taiwan is now widely seen as the Ukraine of the East, as the current Western debate shows.
The idea of abandoning “strategic ambiguity” in favour of “strategic clarity” suggests the possibility of promoting Taiwan’s international status, but it could also lead to miscalculations on the part of Beijing, Washington or Taipei. Cross-strait war will become more likely than ever.

The Russian invasion can be seen as a prelude to something far more ominous to come. As one leading Western analyst recently explained, the Russian war in Ukraine is just bad weather while deadly climate change will be caused by Beijing.

This is a recipe for war. As the US is increasing its military deterrence against China, the prevailing mood of no longer tolerating “appeasement” could further intensify diplomatic, economic and military confrontations.

We are living in a pre-1914 situation. The only possible venue to promote true global ecumenical peace might be the BRICS bloc, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, rather than the Group of 7 consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The West should consider promoting real ecumenical peace that crosses civilisations. Give that the West has failed to manage the peace within its own civilisation, how can China trust it to manage “inter-civilisational” peace?

Lanxin Xiang is professor emeritus of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence

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