And How Can We Now Secure the Peace?

The Normative Paradigms that Underpin a Global Order That is Now Under Existential Challenge

On the 10th of August I delivered this lecture to The 152nd Chautauqua Summer Assembly as part of their 2026 Interfaith Lecture Series - an outline of how the current global rules based order emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War - and how gravely that order is now under challenge.

My remarks are below, edited for clarity. Watch the full video here.

This coming Friday, it will be 90 years to the day since America’s 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, delivered his historic address “I Hate War” to the 1936 Chautauqua Summer Assembly.

In preparing this lecture for the 152nd Assembly, I watched once again that grainy, black and white footage of FDR as he stood before his audience for twenty agonising minutes as one who had been struck down by polio fifteen years before.

It is as if FDR, a great American President, was speaking to us afresh. FDR said way back then that ‘in the hurly-burly of domestic politics it is important that our people should not overlook problems and issues which, though they lie beyond our borders, may, and probably will, have a vital influence on the United States of the future.’

FDR continued:

“I am more concerned and less cheerful about international conditions than about our immediate domestic prospects. I say this to you not as a confirmed pessimist but as one who still hopes that envy, hatred and malice among Nations have reached their peak and will be succeeded by a new tide of peace and good-will. And I say this as one who has participated in many of the decisions of peace and war before, during and after the World War; one who has traveled much; and one who has spent a goodly portion of every twenty-four hours in the study of foreign relations.”

In 1936, FDR was right to be less than cheerful. His ‘I Hate War’ speech was delivered only three years after Hitler came to power in 1933. It was delivered less than a year before the full-scale Japanese invasion of China in 1937. And barely five years before that ‘day of infamy’, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. For FDR, his hopes for America were noble, while the international political realities he faced were dismal.

FDR delivers his iconic “I Hate War” address at Chautauqua in 1936

Both his hopes and his fears had been shaped by his experience as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Great War under President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson himself had been an idealist who wished the Great War to be indeed the war to end all wars. FDR, his presidential successor, despite having seen Wilson’s hopes for American membership of the League of Nations dashed, still hoped for the same. As FDR famously told this gathering all those years ago:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

The world then had emerged from the combined horrors of the Great War and then, barely a decade later, the Great Depression. FDR, forever looking for the best in humanity rather than the worst, confronted a world infinitely more difficult, dangerous and complex than our present and more pampered age. It caused him to reflect on why men routinely chose to destroy one another. And what might be done about it. As he argued at the time:

“Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the “legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago.” There are new-born fanaticisms, convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right. A dark old world was devastated by wars between conflicting religions. A dark modern world faces wars between conflicting economic and political fanaticisms in which are intertwined race hatreds.”

FDR could just as easily have been speaking of our own age as of the state of the world nearly a century ago. To apply FDR’s words to today, we too can see ancient hatreds and turbulent frontiers, as in Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. We also see ‘new born fanaticisms’ of our modern age. Just as we see those, both at home and abroad, who believe their convictions ‘have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.’

The Emergence of the Post-War Global Order

FDR and Churchill had outlined the principles of the post-war international order in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, several months before the US entered the war. Their objective was to agree on ‘certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world’. Importantly, the Charter also agreed that ‘they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.’ It stated that they wished ‘to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’. And it also stated that ‘after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hoped to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.’

Over the next seven years, these bilateral arrangements would become reflected in a new set of universal norms, principles and institutions for the wider international community:

• First, the UN Charter, concluded at the San Francisco conference in 1945 , created the United Nations, agreed on the rights of sovereign states to be free from the ancient fear of foreign invasion through wars of aggression, and empowered the Security Council to give effect to these principles.

• Second, the Bretton Woods Agreements, concluded in 1944, established the World Bank, the IMF, and then the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, gave collective effect to the international community’s common economic agenda;

• Third, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, voted into effect in 1948, enshrined the international legal principles of the intrinsic dignity of the human person, the universal right of individual freedom and the right of peoples to choose their own governments.

Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s Vice President, would take over the task when FDR finally went to meet his maker in April of 1945. American officials, in partnership with US allies including my own country, had painstakingly worked their way through these founding documents to frame the institutional, procedural and normative underpinnings of the post-war international order. FDR’s widow, the formidable Eleanor Roosevelt, who also spoke here at Chautauqua on many occasions including her remarkable 1933 address on the New Responsibility of Women, would go on to chair the UN working group that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is hard for a modern audience to understand how revolutionary this new global, rules-based order was for the time. States for the first time were to be constrained in the external behaviour against other states, particularly in the arbitrary use of force. States were also to be constrained in their internal behaviour towards their citizens, as universal political and economic rights became entrenched in international instruments - instruments which authoritarian governments have sought to unravel ever since.

But these new provisions of international statutory law and the normative and institutional principles embodied in each of them would not be sufficient in themselves. To constrain the actions of the Soviet Union militarily occupied Eastern Europe between 1945-47, and then North Korea in its military invasion of the South in 1950, the United States under Truman then resolved to establish a network of bilateral and plurilateral mutual defence treaties. These were designed to respond to the core questions of hard security, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific.

In other words, the United States in framing the new global, rules-based order, embraced simultaneously three core principles:

• First, after two world wars had ravaged the planet within the space of a quarter of a century, it was time for the United States to lead this new global order. Not to ignore it. Nor to isolate itself from it. In the end, Americans finally agreed with John Donne that no man was an island. Nor, for that matter, was any country an island. And that included America. We were all connected, one to the other.

• Second, this new global rules-based order would be predicated on a new set of normative principles - both the inalienable and universal rights of the individual, as well as the sovereign rights of states to be protected against armed attack.

• Third, to bolster the soft security offered by this new international political system, the US was also sufficiently principled and pragmatic to engage in the business of hard security - to confront authoritarian states which, in many cases, had sought to undermine the new international system from the get-go.

These then became the essential features of the post-war order. By no means perfect. But demonstrably better than what had preceded it. Even if only measured by the fact that there has been no global war in the 80 years since then, although at times we came close.

The Ethical Underpinnings of the Post-War Order

So what were the ethical underpinnings of what some have called this liberal international order? How are they under challenge? And can they hold for the future? This is not the place for a granular exposition of the theological, intellectual and ethical forces that were at work in the post-war world that shaped the norms and institutions of our post-war order. Instead, I will offer some general observations on a number of the critical forces that were at work.

First, at its most elemental level, the visceral, global revulsion at the orgy of orchestrated violence that the war had delivered to all humankind became a moral force in its own right. C. S. Lewis’s wartime reflections, first delivered as radio broadcasts and later collected in Mere Christianity, offer a remarkable insight here. He points to universal moral norms, whose cogency extends well beyond the constraints of national cultures, and which the peoples of the world knew in their collective conscience had been fundamentally violated. The war had violated individuals. It had violated states. And it had systematically violated races, as seen in the horrors of the Holocaust.

The world’s conscience had been assaulted and it demanded something better. So when the UN Charter speaks eloquently of the galvanizing imperative of avoiding once again the ‘scourge of war’, it speaks to the depths of this post-war moral anguish. This reflected a profound moral impulse proceeding from the deepest awareness that our consciences had not only been violated. They had been deracinated in their entirety. And this in turn produced a the call to some form of spiritual and secular repentance, reconciliation and resolve.

In other words, the war had created the moral shock and therefore the moral capital to construct an entirely new order.

Second, the notion of the intrinsic, inalienable and universal dignity of the human person, and the resulting obligation of states to protect the rights of such persons, comes from two sources. These sources are often seen as being in conflict with each other rather than as reinforcing each other. But this should not be the case.

One of course is the secular Enlightenment and the various declarations of ‘the rights of man’ that proceeded from it. But on closer inspection there is also a second source as well: and that is the cumulative contribution of millennia of Christian belief, as well as parallel forms of religious belief that reach well beyond the Christian communion, concerning the intrinsic dignity of the human person.

Christianity teaches that individual human beings have an intrinsic human dignity that proceeds from the belief that each person carries with them the divine spark of the creator God. As a result, Christianity also teaches the sanctity of all human life. On this question, if not on others, Christian teaching has positively shaped the conclusions of the Enlightenment project on the inalienable rights of man.

This is seen, for example, in the animating principle behind Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on the impact of artificial intelligence on the dignity of the human person. On human consciousness. On human conscience. On human agency rather than the agency of machines. On dignified human relationships. And on the dignity of human work.

After all, for scholars of the Enlightenment, beyond simply asserting that human beings possess an intrinsic dignity which should be respected and protected, where does this secular conviction actually come from?

Marxist materialists have traditionally approached this question differently, treating human beings primarily as matter rather than spirit. Furthermore, Marxism teaches that the historical significance of a human being derives from the social and economic class to which they belong. This marks a fundamental divide between a Marxist-materialist view of the human person on the one hand, and the combined Judaeo-Christian and liberal-democratic Enlightenment tradition on the other.

Within the UN system, we see this idea of an intrinsic human dignity, as opposed to one that is socially constructed through the agency of class, alive in the following international instruments:

• the UN Charter itself,

• the UN Declaration on Human Rights,

• the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,

• the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and

• in a range of other UN conventions providing normative and institutional structures for protecting the rights of women, children, persons with disabilities, as well as conventions against human slavery.

So while the sons of the Enlightenment may have fought the fathers of the church for over 350 years over the proper relationship between crown and altar, or between church and state, I argue that Christian belief in the inalienable dignity of the human person has, in reality, been translated into the Enlightenment belief in the inalienable rights of the individual.

A third factor that has shaped the moral foundations of the global rules-based order is to be found in the social and economic covenants of the UN Charter. These too come from both the Christian and Enlightenment traditions. They are also reflected in FDR’s ‘four freedoms’ when he spoke of “freedom from want”.

In the Christian tradition, these principles proceed from the ethical imperatives outlined in the Gospels. We see this in the Sermon on the Mount. The Parable of the Rich Young Man. The teaching in Matthew on the final judgment, and whether we have fed the hungry and clothed the naked. Also the prophetic traditions of Micah and the injunction to ‘do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’. And the constant preferencing of the poor and the powerless across all the scriptures. The concept of freedom from want proceeds from all of these new testament principles.

So too with the most basic precepts of social and economic equality. In the history of the Catholic Church, we see this with Pope Leo XIII’s great encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 as the church finally caught up with the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. We see it one hundred years later with Pope John Paul the Great’s Centesimus Annus.

In secular politics, we see it in the birth of Labor Unions, Labor Parties and Social Democratic parties around the world. Social Democrats over the last 150 years have sought to thread the needle between both Christian and Enlightenment traditions of social justice. The Australian Labor Party is one such party.

And in the post-war international order, we see it in the economic and social chapters of the UN Charter, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and in the poverty reduction missions of the World Bank. Once again, there is both a Christian and an Enlightenment thread running through all of these.

Fourth, there is the creation itself, our common environment, our responsibility to other living things and the kind of planet we would bequeath to those who come after us as a matter of intergenerational justice. Here the Christian tradition is richer than the Old Testament traditions that preceded it. Christians would argue that our mission is not simply to ‘subdue the earth’. Rather, it is to steward the earth.

This principle is not simply to be found in some misty-eyed rendition of Saint Francis’ “Canticle of the Creatures”, his hymns to Brother Sun and Sister and Mother Earth, or his preaching to the birds. While I am a great admirer of Saint Francis, there is a much deeper biblical tradition underpinning our concern for the environmental commons. It goes to the fact that the earth is God’s creation, not man’s. That we are tenants, not owners of the planet. And therefore as stewards, our responsibility is to nurture the planet for all, not to exhaust it.

In the last half century, these ethical imperatives have combined with the findings of environmental science on the mounting dangers of ecological devastation and the need instead for sustainable development. This extends not just to climate change where the science is clear. But also across the other eight planetary boundaries which cover the land, our waterways, the oceans, and the quality of the air we all breathe, right across the entire global environmental commons.

Within the institutions of global governance, what has emerged has been the IPCC on climate science, the UNFCCC on climate policy, as well as a number of individual global agreements covering everything from Ozone, Antarctica to endangered species.

Finally, among the ethical factors shaping the modern global order, there is the more vexed question of national and international security. Historically, the Christian church has often had a troubled relationship with the institutions of the state in this most complex of policy domain - whether it is security within states or security between states.

Even after the Edict of Milan in AD 313 established the official tolerance of Christianity, and then with Christianity eventually became the religious orthodoxy of the late Roman Empire some decades later, these problems of church and state have persisted. The Roman state had once sought to eliminate the threat from Christian belief. Then later it became a militant defender of the Christian faith, at times relying on the coercive power of the state to do so.

Those familiar with the writings of the great protestant theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr will be aware of structural tensions in this church-state relationship, particularly when it falls to the church to insert a spoke in the wheel of the state, by whatever means, to overcome an existential evil.

This certainly was the case with Bonhoeffer who paid for this with his life at the hands of the Nazi state.

On the question of Christian belief, ethics and practice as they relate to external threats to the security of the state, the Catholic tradition offers us the deep teachings of what is called the Just War. Offensive war, as the Pope recently reminded the international community, does not fall within the scope of a Just War.

By contrast, a defensive war, if your country is attacked, does.

That is why, for example, Christian and other faith traditions support chaplaincy services for the defence forces in our collective democracies. And that is why developing our defence capabilities to act as an effective deterrent against potential aggressors is, in my argument, entirely compatible with conventional Christian teaching. There is a world of difference between that approach on the one hand, and the perverse and simplistic theologies of ‘Gott Mitt Uns’ or “God King and Empire” on the other.

In all this, we are also mindful of the injunction in the Beatitudes of ‘Blessed be the Peacemakers’. The place, therefore, for diplomacy, for effective arms control, and for international law remains. But in the brutal and unstable world of what is now the second quarter of the 21st century, these instruments offered through the UN system may be necessary, but of themselves they are not sufficient, to sustain a just peace.

Again, we cannot simply wish away the military capabilities of authoritarian states.

They exist. History tells us that authoritarian states respect strength. They are contemptuous of weakness. And appeasement can be fatal. The history of the 1930s reminds us what happens when dictators see, smell and feel the policies of appeasement being applied in response to aggression.

For those of faith, these are often uncomfortable questions. But we cannot walk away from them. Nor could FDR. Not that long after he first proclaimed from this very place ‘I hate war”, FDR declared war on Japan and Germany.

These, then, are some of the core ethical considerations that flow, however imperfectly, from the community of faith, together with the fellowship of reason, into the global rules based order we have painfully constructed together since FDR helped lead the Allies to victory in 1945. Faith and reason, not as adversaries. But in creative partnership, as envisaged by Saint Thomas Aquinas, with one tempering and reinforcing the other.

In summary therefore, our moral impulses have been as follows:

• First, the visceral horror of war and the resulting moral determination to defend the peace.

• Second, the intrinsic dignity, inalienable rights and personal freedom of each human being.

• Third, the social justice owed to the weak, the poor and the oppressed.

• Fourth, our stewardship of the global commons.

• And fifth, our resolve to deter and defend against armed attacks upon our peoples by aggressors.

And So What of the Future?

What we have been discussing so far is the ethical and institutional architecture of the global and regional rules-based orders that were built out of the ashes of the Second World War. As I’ve noted earlier in this lecture, while there may have been many imperfections in the design of this order, it was infinitely better than the one that preceded it. It may not have produced perfection. But politics is the art of the possible. And for reformists, the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

It is true, however, that many countries, both large and small, have sought to violate its norms, rules and institutional arrangements. It is true that after 80 years, the institutions that support the order are now weaker than ever before. Let us take stock for a moment.

First, the UN Security Council is increasingly deadlocked, as we see with the rolling crisis over Iran.

Second, the UN General Assembly has become a place of performative posturing for the record, rather than a substantive chamber for political debate and policy resolution, in the face of the great challenges the world now confronts.

Third, it is decades since we have seen a UN Secretary General with the political courage of Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish Lutheran whose writings reflect a profoundly Christian spirituality and ethical framework, and who was killed in the Congo while trying desperately to resolve a civil war. Or a Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian Methodist, who had the courage to caution against the invasion of Iraq because UN Weapons Inspectors had concluded there were no weapons of mass destruction there in the first place.

Fourth, since the Global Financial Crisis, the IMF has become marginal to global financial stability. It is true, however, that the World Bank is undergoing a revival under its current leadership in its contribution to global development for the world’s poorest countries. Meanwhile the World Trade Organisation has never been weaker, in part because China has ignored the rules on industrial subsidy, and in part because the United States, with its bipartisan addiction to tariffs, has now left the institution altogether.

Fifth, ten years into the Sustainable Development Goals, they have largely failed and no longer constitute an effective framework for eliminating global poverty and lifting prosperity for the most marginalised.

Sixth, the UN humanitarian agencies including UNICEF, the WFP and UNHCR are now experiencing funding cuts of more than 25% and are finding it impossible to do their basic job in saving the lives of women in the children in the face of natural and man-made disasters.

Seventh, the WHO failed spectacularly to both prevent and then to effectively manage COVID. It failed too to conclude what caused it. And now the US once again has withdrawn.

Eighth, on climate change, despite the inconvenient truth that now dare not speak its name in Washington for fear of being labelled “woke”, much of the planet is now literally on fire. The US has now left the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change for the second time. And now the International Panel of Climate Change Scientists, that body of 2000 nerdy scientists who for decades have delivered regular, brutally factual reports on the state of global temperature increases, extreme weather events and species eradication, is itself under threat.

Finally, as for the UN Human Rights Council, the normative structure we the international community established to give effect to the normative structure that Eleanor Roosevelt helped establish back in 1948, it too is under existential assault. China has it in its sights. And once again the United States has withdrawn.

Against these simple measures, the report card on the global rules-based order is therefore increasingly grim.

As I wrote in a review of the UN multilateral system a decade ago, it’s not as if the UN will be formally abolished any time soon. Rather, as I warned back then, the risk is that the world increasingly walks around the rules-based order that together we have so painstakingly created.

We see this for example in its failed efforts to produce the beginnings of an effective regulatory regime for AI. This is despite the real world threats of frontier models, both in China with Kimi K3, and the US with Hugging Face, escaping their respective sandboxes. And while escaping a sandbox may sound exotic, the potential autonomous destruction of cyber protections around the world by both state and non state actors is a real and present danger to our most basic infrastructure and therefore to our peoples.

The UN multilateral system, rather than being abolished, is increasingly simply fading away. It is dying the death of a thousand cuts. And looks increasingly like the League of Nations during its later years.

I remarked earlier in this lecture that notwithstanding the near-death experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the one thing for which we must be grateful is that for all these flaws, so far we have avoided World War III. This is no small thing. But the risks of global war remain stark as the habits of dialogue weaken and the temptations of appeasement grow.

Alternatives to the Current Order: China’s Challenge to US Global Leadership

So what about the second quarter of the 21^st Century?

If the trajectories we see at present for the global rules-based order continue, there is a grave risk that it degenerates into inertia and then entropy. The UN multilateral system could fade into obscurity, much as the institutions of the Holy Roman Empire did before the Empire was formally dissolved in 1806. In other words, the machinery might formally remain but increasingly becomes a Potemkin Village, while real decisions in the real world are taken elsewhere.

Apart from what is left of the multilateral order, there is also the question for America itself on what role it sees for itself as a global leader of what remains of the international order. I am not an American. I am not here to preach to you. That would not be appropriate. But it is clear to all of us who are longstanding friends and allies of this country that there is a visceral debate emerging in the depths of the American political soul about your future role in the world.

The parameters of this debate range from avoiding “foreign entanglements” altogether, as some of the Founding Fathers warned, to a much broader retreat into a form of splendid isolationism. Another tenet in the debate is whether America retreats from the world and seeks only to be a hegemon within its own hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere. There is a third fault line which says, beyond the Western hemisphere, America cannot retreat from the Pacific where its island states and territories by definition mean that America remains a quintessentially ‘Pacific power’. A fourth thread in this rolling national debate is about America’s future in Europe, and the burdens and obligations it took upon itself on the beaches of Normandy and at the birth of NATO. And finally there is a discourse that America might still in the future breathe life back into the institutions of the same global rules-based system which were largely the product of American diplomatic handiwork in the first place.

None of us know how these debates will land. That is a matter for your own domestic and constitutional processes. And we wish you well in them.

But the news for America is that there is now a challenger to an American-led world order, and that is the People’s Republic of China. This is not just the product of China’s enhanced military power, given that it now boasts the largest surface fleet in the world and is now, according to the Pentagon, America’s single pacing challenge. It is not just because China is now the second largest economy in the world, while also being the world’s largest trading country, the world’s largest exporter, as well as the world’s largest manufacturer now representing nearly a third of all global manufacturing output. Nor is it simply because China, as of a decade ago, entered formally into the race to catch up with the US and the rest in cutting edge technologies. And that a decade later they have in large part done so (indeed there are only two AI powers in the world today: the US and China).

It is not just because of these accumulations of national power that China’s leadership now senses that its time in the sun has come. It is also because they have internally concluded that America is increasingly a spent force. For example, when China speaks of the rise of the East and the decline of the West, that is his reference to China’s rise and America’s decline. And this is not seen as a long-term, historical aspiration. It has now been translated by China’s Marxist-Leninist leadership into what they see now as unfolding in real historic time.

And within that frame, they see artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear fusion, their priorities in technology and innovation over the next ten years, as turbocharging China’s relentless progress – not just catching up with the US and the West but, in their own literature, ‘leapfrogging’ them. And then bringing about a ‘paradigm shift” through which China’s state capitalist model, aided by the allocative mechanisms of AI algorithms, breaks through the traditional dominance of market economies. China’s internal Party literature is redolent with these themes.

For these reasons, for some years now, Xi Jinping has been rolling out a series of ‘Global Initiatives’ whose medium- to long-term objective is to change both the institutional and normative structure of the international system. We’ve seen this through five major initiatives announced over the last ten years:

• The Belt and Road Initiative (the BRI), which is a trillion-dollar-plus investment initiative across the Global South;

• The Global Civilization Initiative (the GCI);

• The Global Development Initiative (the GDI);

• The Global Security Initiative (the GSI); and now

• The Global Governance Initiative (the GGI).

Within the Chinese system domestically, these five initiatives are described as the product of a new ideological initiative for the Chinese Communist Party called Xi Jinping Thought. Xi Jinping Thought is now treated with the same priority as Mao Zedong Thought. And in Marxist-Leninist China, ideology still matters, although most Americans have concluded that it no longer does.

If you were to sit down with each of these initiatives and work through their at times impenetrable language, you will not, at first blush, find anything particularly offensive. The concepts are deliberately vague. They are vague in order to maximise political constituencies of support across the Global South. And then, over time, these concepts are populated with sharper meaning.

They also have the added advantage of how they are sold in the world as being expressly supportive of the existing institutions of the UN multilateral system. This of course is where China has the additional national advantage of being one of the Permanent Five member states of the UN Security Council.

On closer inspection, however, what China is seeking to do gradually over time is not replace the system but to redefine its normative structure from within. We see this, for example, in the Global Security Initiative, where the primacy of state security needs over the rights of individuals becomes paramount. We see it also in the Global Development Initiative and the centrality of states rather than the market in driving development forward. We see it too in the Global Civilizational Initiative where the goal is to find commonalities across civilizations, particularly in the most ancient systems, in order to find common ground. China’s contributions to these debates is to offer the hierarchical precepts of state Confucianism as a civilizational offering to the world – a system in which social harmony is achieved as a consequence of everyone knowing their place within a pre-existing hierarchy, rather than each individual being free to exercise their inalienable rights under the law.

Then there is the Global Governance Initiative, reinforced by multiple draft UN resolutions over the last decade, which seeks bit by bit to chip away at the human rights infrastructure anchored in the Universal Declaration of 1948. As well as the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966. And the UN Human Rights Council that seeks to give these covenants practical effect. It is in this area that the contrast between the pre-existing global rules-based order, and what Xi Jinping envisages for its replacement, has now become the sharpest.

The Future of Human Rights as a Pillar of the Global Rules-based Order.

Xi Jinping’s most definitive statement on what China means by ‘human rights’ was delivered in December 2018 on the 70^th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s handiwork, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, back in 1948. Xi Jinping stated that “the paramount human right was the happiness of the people’. The term the people reflected in this statement has been chosen explicitly to contrast it with liberal democratic concepts of the inalienable rights of the individual. Put more bluntly, the Party represents the people within the Chinese conceptual universe, and it is therefore for the Party to determine the happiness of the people.

Xi Jinping has also said that the rights to subsistence and development are basic human rights of paramount importance. Of course, this is clear in the content of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Although Xi is nowhere on record providing a parallel endorsement for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At the UN General Assembly in 2021, Xi stated ‘we should protect and promote human rights through development’ which is directly connected to ‘people’s happiness, benefit and security as well as their well-rounded development’.

Furthermore, in China’s internal political discourse, Document No. 9 released by the Party in 2013 makes it absolutely clear that the Chinese system is fundamentally opposed to what it describes as ‘Western concepts of human rights’.

There is, therefore, a clear fault line in all of this. Between Xi’s concept of the rights of the people represented by the Party on the one hand, versus the inalienable rights of the individual as outlined in the Universal Declaration on the other.

What is important, particularly with a gathering such as this, is to understand what the seminal debates were within the UN system between 1946 and 1948. This was when the working group which Eleanor Roosevelt led had lengthy internal deliberations on the origins and content of the concept of universal human rights. And the results of these deliberations would finally be embraced within the 1948 declaration itself.

China’s representative at the time (albeit Republican China, not Communist China) was Ambassador P.C. Chang. Chang was not a Christian. He was, in anything, a classical Confucian. But as he explored the notion of rights within the Chinese classical tradition, he concluded that individuals did have universal rights. And that these were balanced by universal responsibilities.

Chang’s legal and philosophical advisor was John C.H. Wu who was a Chinese Catholic and a frequent correspondent with the great American contemplative Thomas Merton. John Wu’s writings at the time very much reflect his view that in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. The universal rights of which they were speaking during their negotiations of the Universal Declaration were, in his view, the product of Divine Providence. They reflected the intrinsic dignity of the individual human being. And these in turn were reflected in the principles of natural law.

The reason I am making these lengthy reference to Chinese participation in Eleanor Roosevelt’s working group between 1946 and 1948 is that contrary to some Chinese assertions, there was in fact an extensive civilisational debate held within that group on the precise meaning of the term human rights.

Furthermore, this working group was also made up of many other representatives of the Global South. The idea that the Western tradition of human rights, as defined by Judeo-Christianity and Enlightenment traditions, was somehow unilaterally imposed on the emerging countries of Asia is not based in fact. The final text of the Declaration was the product of extensive internal debates and multiple drafts from the working group’s leading participants, including an extensive consideration of comparative philosophy, comparative religion and the translation of values from the language of one culture to that of another.

Finally, when the PRC finally acceded to Republican China’s seat at the UN in 1971, Beijing did not enter in any formal reservations about Republican China’s previous adoption of the UN Human Rights Declaration. China voted for its adoption on 10 December 1948. P.C. Chang in fact served as Vice Chair of the Inaugural UN Commission on Human Rights. And at no subsequent stage did the People’s Republic of China register any formal objection to the Universal Declaration.

The important thing for us all to understand here is that the language and concepts embedded in the Universal Declaration transcended traditional divides between East and West. It was not a Western implant. And neither the then Soviet Union, nor later the People’s Republic of China, formally opposed it.

This is an important debate. The Human Rights pillar is one of the UN’s three pillars overall. The other two are Peace & Security and Economic Development. It is the Human Rights pillar, however, which Chinese diplomats over the last decade plus have been seeking most particularly to redefine.

So What Then Is To Be Done?

The purpose of this lecture has been to outline how the current global rules based order emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War.

It has also been to outline the broad ethical foundations of the UN’s founding documents.

It has also sought to describe America’s broader role in upholding strategic stability against the challenges posed by post-war authoritarian states, well beyond the powers of the UN system itself.

I’ve also sought to describe how gravely the current global order is under challenge.

And finally, I have examined where the current fault lines in global governance are likely to proceed over the next quarter century, and how China is actively seeking to construct an alternative order, albeit one based on the formal framework of the current UN multilateral system.

To conclude this lecture, I should offer several ideas on how the free peoples of the world might profitably respond to these current challenges.

First, it’s important for the democratic world to rediscover the overwhelming power of the virtues, values and ideals for which we stand. In doing so, liberal democracies need to embrace both the traditions of Judeo-Christianity and those of the secular Enlightenment in breathing life back into our underlying belief structure. For secularists, the idea that the deeply human values represented by the community of faith are somehow irrelevant to the current framing of debates about intrinsic human dignity, inalienable human rights and freedoms, as well as freedom from want, is an ahistoric absurdity. Similarly, the Judeo-Christian tradition needs to have about itself an appropriate intellectual modesty about how slow the church has been in modern history to embrace political reform, the extension of the democratic franchise, the abolition of slavery as well as the broader imperatives of social justice. In other words, both secular and religious traditions which have emerged in the democratic world over the last several centuries need to get beyond the barricades and start working together in a fundamental way. The bonds between them are now rich. And the common authoritarian adversaries we now face who would happily extinguish both traditions are real.

Second, in this country, the United States, I would encourage Americans both of the left and the right, to re-embrace the imperative of American leadership in the world. Nature abhors a vacuum. And if a vacuum is left, others will fill it. However, I am not politically naïve about such things. It will take skill of the type that FDR was most able to deploy in this forum all those years ago, to marshal a political argument for the American domestic body politic for America once again to become the light on the hill. This is not just political idealism. It is anchored in economic realism for the simple reason that America now needs the rest of the free world as much as the free world needs America. The simple mathematics of global economics and market scale underscores this reality.

Third, if America continues to remain ‘out to lunch’ on the question of the UN multilateral system, the very system that America itself crafted in 1944-48, then the other democracies of both Asia and Europe, as well as those of Africa and Latin America, will need to work together to re-strengthen the normative values and operational cogency of the UN system. Prime Minister Carney delivered a speech in Davos in January about the future role of Middle Powers. I can think of no better answer to his challenge than to say that the other leading democracies should join Canada in not only defending the UN multilateral system, but also advancing the UN’s mission through the resources that UN institutions now so desperately need.

Fourth, both the United States and the collective democratic world also need to reflect long and hard on the continued ethical imperatives of military deterrence. We cannot simply push these difficult subjects to one side. It is imperative if we are to sustain strategic stability for the world to double down on deterrence in all its forms. This applies as much to the future of Ukraine and NATO in Europe as it does to the challenges we increasingly face through deterrence in Asia. We should all remember the lessons of Munich and appeasement. It always ends badly.

Finally, the international community of faith, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, as well as other faith traditions, need to engage in all these debates. They are not the province of secular politicians alone. These are hard questions about which religious leaders also need to determine their positions. The hour is late. The harvest is rich. But, at present, the workers are few. Let us all become labourers afresh in bringing in the harvest.

Conclusion

Recently, I spent several weeks in Ireland on holiday with my wife. I rediscovered Yeats as we drove around Sligo, Mayo and Galway, reading from an anthology of his verse. This gathering will be familiar with his extraordinary contribution to our literary canon.

Easter 1916. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. And then, most troubling of all, The Second Coming, written in 1919 and published in 1920, in the immediate aftermath of the great global eruptions of his time. These included the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Irish War of Independence and the global flu pandemic.

The most bewitching of his verses is as follows:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I feel that Yeats, like FDR, is speaking afresh to our current age. Let us rediscover the passion which threw all of us in the democratic world together into the collective defence of freedom in freedom’s darkest hour in the Second World War. And then in the program of systematic decolonisation that followed as old empires collapsed. And then in building and rebuilding a global rules-based order anchored in the continuing principles of universal human rights, freedom from want, and the deterrence of those who would seek to lay waste to it all.

All this lies within our grasp, if we have the imagination to see it, the moral fortitude to grasp it, and then the courage to act.