Veiling ideology or enabling utopia? On the potentials and limitations of the debate about tianxia as a model for a new world order

150 years ago, Karl Marx characterized the specific dynamics that we have gotten used to call "globalization", as follows: "… capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices ..., as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted ... ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs ... and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.” The emergence of what has been called "Chimerica" as a main axis around which the global economy rotates in the early 21st century, and the increasingly nationalist rhetoric in China, in the USA, and elsewhere, that corresponds to the increasing centrifugal forces of this capitalist world order, may illustrate the actuality of Marx's above proposition. Yet, oscillating between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the debate on Confucian relational ethics as a foundation for an alternative world order too seems to rather reproduce than overcome the contradictions of capitalist modernity. In my paper I will discuss the question of what had to happen to really unleash the critical potentials of tianxia, and to prevent Zhao Tingyang's "world system" (tianxia tixi), or Hu Angang's "Cinese dream" (Zhonggou mengian) from remaining mere expressions of the alienated conditions under global capitalism, as did, for example, the attempts of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō to reinterpret Japan's war effort to bring "the world under a single roof" (hakkō ichiu) as an attempt to build a harmonious and co-operative "new world order" based of Eastern values.