Liu Xiaofeng, ​“The Historical Paradox of the Idea of the Great Atlantic Revolution” 

Liu Xiaofeng:  “The Historical Paradox of the Idea of the Great Atlantic Revolution”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Like his colleague and frequent collaborator Gan Yang, Liu Xiaofeng (b. 1956) is a complicated figure.  He studied German language and literature as an undergraduate before earning a Master’s degree in aesthetics at Peking University in 1985.  He subsequently received a scholarship to do doctoral work at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and graduated in 1993 with a Ph.D. in Christian theology, having worked on Max Scheler's phenomenology and critique of modernity. 
 
Returning to China, Liu came to be identified as a prominent figure among Chinese “cultural Christians,” a complex category that regroups those who feel an attraction to Christian values or aesthetics without necessarily practicing in religious terms, or who perhaps feel that Christian theology in China is too limited and superficial, constrained on the one hand by the political coloration of the officially sanctioned church and on the other by the intense fundamentalism of the house church movement.  I will not attempt to explain Liu’s attachment; a collection of his essays on the theme has been translated into English and is available for purchase here.  I might add that Liu the cultural Christian also praised Mao as the “father of the nation” (controversial because the title is usually reserved for Sun Yat-sen) and characterized the Cultural Revolution as a “popular movement.”
 
More recently, Liu has been  associated with Leo Strauss and the spread of Strauss’s ideas in China.  Liu’s attraction to Strauss is surely as complex as his enthusiasm for Christian theology, and is rooted in a fundamental rejection of Western modernity as a way of thinking and perhaps as a way of life.  As Liu himself put it in a text translated into French by the late French sinologist Joël Thoraval (I have translated Thoraval’s’ translation):
 
“It is impossible to call Strauss's ‘political philosophy’ ‘Straussism,’ because his ‘classical’ imperative is literally directed against the entire ‘discourse-ism’ of modernity. In any event, taken as a whole, the ‘political philosophy’ defended by Strauss demands, first, a complete reevaluation of the political philosophy of modern times (from Rousseau, Kant or Robespierre to Derrida, at the present moment) and, second, that we understand the classics in the light of the self-understanding of the Ancients themselves, meaning that we interpret modern political discourses from the perspective of the classics. If Strauss's intellectual position is not in vogue in Western academia, it is precisely because the various modern "discourse-isms" hold absolute supremacy in Western universities, so it would be somewhat laughable if European or American scholars were to ridicule the absolute dominance of Marxism in Chinese universities. Conversely, Strauss's positions provoke a certain uneasiness among Chinese intellectuals precisely because the various ‘discourse-isms’ that they ardently pursue (whether liberal or conservative) are thus subjected to a radical interrogation and challenge.”
 
Liu’s enthusiasm for Strauss and for the Western classics has produced an impressive body of work of translation and commentary, as ably described here by Reading the China Dream contributor Matt Dean.
 
The text translated here has little to do with Christian theology or Leo Strauss, but it is an attack on modernity as represented by the American revolution and other revolutions the American revolution inspired.  Liu’s basic argument is that the populism roiling Western politics in recent decades—which Liu equates both with identity politics and with the selfish urge of any two-year old to simply take what they want—can be traced back to contradictions at the heart of the “Atlantic Revolution,” specifically the contradiction between liberté and égalité on the one hand, and fraternité on the other.  In the absence of hierarchy or principled restraint—or brute force—the West “cycles between the logic of internationalism and the logic of populism,” as Liu puts it.  Evidence for this can be found in the Napoleonic Wars following the French revolution, when France “exported” its revolutionary principles through armed invasion, as well as American foreign policy, which has been imperialist—and not internationalist—from the very outset, even as it claims to spread “American values.”
 
Most of Liu’s essay is concerned with American foreign policy, and sounds themes that are broadly similar to other Chinese commentary on the state of Sino-American relations.  Liu’s framing is somewhat unique, however, in that he employs the concept of the “Atlantic Revolution,” a fairly recent development in Western historiography, which suggests the depth and breadth of his erudition.  Virtually all of his footnotes are to Chinese translations of quite recent works of Western scholarship.  I did not include the footnotes in my translation (if you read Chinese and are intrigued, the Chinese text is always available as a link in the first endnote), but tried to work the names of the authors Liu cites into his text, to convey the flavor of what he reads.
 
Liu’s ultimate argument is that the “progress” often identified with the Atlantic Revolution is a myth, and the only difference between the American empire of the 21st century and the Spanish empire of the 17th century is that the American empire is stronger.  He further argues that material progress without “moral progress” is a mirage, and that if Western progress is a myth, perhaps Chinese “stagnation” is too.  Where this leaves China and the world gets somewhat lost in the clouds of erudition.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“Over the course of more than two hundred years, ‘left’ and ‘right’ in world history have taken on numerous new identities, even as the antagonism between radicals and conservatives has remained the same, an irreconcilable struggle that continues to this day. Yet this is not the real reason why the idea of the Atlantic revolution has become a world-historical paradox; rather, the paradox comes from the latent energy of the chimeric freedom (in the words of the Hungarian writer and politician Árpád Göncz, 1922-2015) contained within the revolutionary idea itself.”
 
“Beginning in the 1990s, just when it was thought that the Atlantic revolutionary idea had achieved a universal victory, its ‘most valuable legacy,’ Western liberal democracy, has faced an acute and deadly threat ‘from within.’  To cite Winkler once again, this threat is embodied in:  ‘The populist movements and parties who claim that they are the true representatives of democracy because they, and they alone, speak for ‘the people.’”
　　
“The basic impetus for populism grows directly out of the liberal democratic concept of rights. In other words, the radical ideas of the ‘Atlantic Revolution’ threaten the very fruits of that revolution, or the very idea of liberal democracy threatens liberal democracy itself.  That is the paradox.”
 
“To date, the U.S. Western Pacific Defense Line, completed in 1951, remains the most ambitious and longest geopolitically divided defensive line in the history of the world. When viewed in conjunction with the papal meridian of 1494, a thought-provoking arc of political history stands out over nearly five hundred years of world history. The political-historical question that next arises is: What ‘Atlantic [political] character and the European [political] character’ does the United States represent? What was the ‘civilized virtue’ that allowed the United States to draw its own defense line on the continental edge of the West Coast of the Pacific?”
 
“Western political historians and historians of ideas have recognized that the fundamental crisis of the Atlantic revolutionary idea lies in the very notion of individual freedom and rights, which ultimately leads to the breakdown of social ethics and even sets the stage for the disintegration of the state. In fact, it was not until the early 1990s that ‘the debate within the Western world about whether to 'accept or reject the political ideas of 1776 and 1789' came to a temporary end,’ to cite Winkler again.  The rightness or wrongness of the "human rights" philosophy promoted by the Atlantic Revolution was always in dispute, and not long after the entire Western world celebrated its Cold War victory, a series of critical questions arose: ‘Where is America going?’ ‘Will the EU collapse?’ ‘Will the West split apart?’"
 
“The question is whether the future world community should be based on the natural interdependence of "independent nations working together" or on the Atlantic revolutionary ideal of a world ‘progressively moving toward a higher plane of human freedom.’ While the international principle that China contributes to the creation of a world community is ‘harmony without uniformity,’ American politicians continue to believe that their country, in carrying forward the idea of the Atlantic Revolution, has a ‘moral obligation to transcend [other countries'] national interests,’ even though this is nothing more than an excuse for pursuing American self interest. In any case, whether this ‘fundamental historical contest’ is conducted in a peaceful or military manner depends entirely on the political virtues of American civilization.  Since the beginning of reform and opening, we have continually questioned the limits of the path the new China has chosen, but we might turn this around and ask whether this questioning has its own limits.  Have we understood that the Atlantic revolutionary idea is a world-historical paradox?”
 
Links to other texts of the site
 
For texts on Sino-American relations, click here
 
Translation 
 
For the past half century, Western political historians have chosen to use the term "Atlantic Revolution," a revisionist idea in political history with multiple meanings. One of the most fundamental meanings of the term is to highlight the position of the United States in shaping world history, thus changing the long-standing historiographical habit of identifying the French Revolution as a more important indicator of the arrival of a new era in world history.  Although the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) were both signs of worldwide historical change, the immediate factor driving the French Revolution was not the French Enlightenment movement, but instead the "independence" revolution in the American colonies.
　　
In 2006, Jacques Solé (b. 1932), the political historian best known for his book La révolution en questions (1988), argued in a later work--Les révolutions de la fin du XVIIIe siècle aux Amériques et en Europe (1773-1804)—that
 
“In terms of dates, the American Revolution of 1776 was the first revolution of the late 18th century in the Atlantic world. That it occurred first allowed it to create a number of modes of action and foundational principles. The spread of this model provided numerous reference points for other revolutions, such as the Dutch and French revolutions of the 1780s.”
 
Solé even questioned whether a "revolutionary mentality" existed in France on the eve of the revolution in 1789.  Through 1787, French public opinion was still very limited in its political expression and was more concerned with other issues, which can hardly be equated with a revolutionary mentality. Because of internal divisions, while the people were dissatisfied with the government's inability to carry out reforms in response to social progress, they nonetheless made few specific demands. The British model, which had long enjoyed a reputation for being successful, was also unable to gain universal approval because of the huge impact of the American Revolution.
 
In 1756, the Seven Years' War broke out in Europe.  Winston Churchill called this "the first world war" in modern world history, or to put it more accurately, the international war that marked Britain's rise to world power.  The up and coming Whig MP William Pitt (1708-1778) was Secretary of State at the time, and his "plans and strategies were victorious from India in the east to America in the west," which "would have a profound effect on the history of North America,” in Churchill’s words.  
 
However, the real trigger for the war was the Anglo-French conflict in North America in 1754, so that some historians argue that the war should be called the "Nine Years' War," or even that the Anglo-French conflict should be considered as one continuous "War of Independence" in the American colonies, marking the coming of the "era of the Atlantic Revolution."  In the words of the American historian Thomas A. Bender, "In a dangerous world, an entirely new nation was born."
　　
France suffered major losses in this global struggle for supremacy against Britain, and when secessionist rebellions broke out in the American colonies, the French formed a volunteer army on their own initiative to support the rebellion in North America. It was this unexpected action that brought the ideals of the American Revolution from North America to the heart of Europe, which was France. A French duke who had fought in the American War of Independence, during his participation in the debate on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, declared:  "America has set a great example on the new continent; let’s share this example with the world.”[2] 
 
This duke, the French Count Saint-Simon (1760 - 1825) was 17 years old when he entered the Turin Infantry Regiment as a second lieutenant with the help of a relative, and two years later, in 1779, he volunteered to go to the American colonies, where he fought in five land battles and nine naval battles.  He was wounded twice, and was present when Washington and Lafayette jointly led the decisive battle of Yorktown (October 1781). The battle "marked an invisible frontier in his mental, moral, and political opinions."   As he later put it himself:
 
“While I was fighting for the interests of industry and commerce in America, how I wished to see such plants from this other world blossom and bear fruit in my native land; and this wish has haunted my thoughts ever since.”[3]
 
Saint-Simon later became a "utopian socialist" and established his own organization. After the Napoleonic Wars (1817), he told his followers that he had "long foreseen that the American Revolution marked the beginning of a new political era, which would inevitably determine the great progress of civilization as a whole, and would in a short time bring about great changes in the social system as it currently exists in Europe.” This was because "Americans followed their own path and not that of Europe," thus "establishing for themselves a much more liberal and democratic system than that practiced by Europeans," a system which, "even in 1789, the French people were far from being able to achieve."[4] If the United States was indeed the ideal political system that Saint-Simon had in mind, then his socialism was indeed utopian. In fact, even Saint-Simon's students did not unreservedly echo their patriarch's effusive praise of America: 
 
“But what has the United States, that wonderful country, which is said not to use the needs of its government as a vulgar excuse, finally done? To its shame, I should say, it has signed a treaty with the Turks to supply them with arms! A part of the South American nation wants to be free from the Spanish yoke that is still upon them, so can the United States, which is full of painful memories of its own mother country, the United States that not long ago heard the call to break the chains—can it help to liberate its fellow Americans in the southern hemisphere in some way?  No, it cannot. Finally, has it provided financial assistance to the Republic of Haiti to repay the ransom? No and no. This free nation which has supposedly cast aside all the prejudices of old Europe, this nation, which is supposedly ahead of all other nations on the road to civilization, declares its opposition to the existence of a free people, and to the existence of a Black nation.”[5]
 
The modern idea of an independent sovereign state is not a product of the "Westphalian system" or the absolute monarchy as imagined by Jean Bodin (1530-1596) or Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), but a concrete result of the achievement of independent statehood by the North American colonists.  Since the 19th century, how many new political regimes have imitated the Declaration of Independence! During the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, "the common desire of the German people was that the title of emperor be restored to the Habsburg imperial family and that he be given more broad-reaching and practical powers." Nevertheless, even conservatives like Klemens von Metternich (1773 - 1859) and Friedrich Genz (1764 - 1832) understood that the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in any shape or fashion "would not be good for Germany or Europe," and thus supported the demands of Bavaria and Württemberg for "sovereign independence."[6] 
 
The world-historical meaning of the Atlantic Revolution is that the principle of natural rights gradually displaced traditional notions of natural justice, and has dominated world history ever since, shaping the image of a universal West.  In the words of the German historian Heinrich August Winkler (b. 1938): "The uniqueness of the West (on both sides of the Atlantic) is the sum of all those political ideas that developed in the course of the late eighteenth century."　　
 
When the French allied themselves with the American colonists against Britain, it sparked a transatlantic spread of ideas that included rights, representation, and republicanism. The eruption of the French Revolution provided a new form and medium for the circulation of these ideas that subsequently swept through much of the world. The wars between the revolutionaries and the monarchies that opposed them changed the borders and political institutions of Europe, opening the way for ideas such as liberty, equality, and national independence to spread throughout Europe and into parts of South America, Asia, and Africa.
　　
How is it, then, that the idea of the Atlantic Revolution can also be a world-historical paradox?
 
Part One
 
The idea of revolution was very controversial from the outset, and during the heated debates around the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights, the Breton Club and its allies sat on the left side of the presidium, while those who opposed the radical measures began to sit on the right, which gave rise to the concept of "left" and "right" in modern politics. 
 
Over the course of more than two hundred years, "left" and "right" in world history have taken on numerous new identities, even as the antagonism between radicals and conservatives has remained the same, an irreconcilable struggle that continues to this day. Yet this is not the real reason why the idea of the Atlantic revolution has become a world-historical paradox; rather, the paradox comes from the latent energy of the chimeric freedom (in the words of the Hungarian writer and politician Árpád Göncz, 1922-2015) contained within the revolutionary idea itself.
 
Beginning in the 1990s, just when it was thought that the Atlantic revolutionary idea had achieved a universal victory, its "most valuable legacy," Western liberal democracy, has faced an acute and deadly threat "from within."  To cite Winkler once again, this threat is embodied in:  “The populist movements and parties who claim that they are the true representatives of democracy because they, and they alone, speak for ‘the people.’”
　　
The basic impetus for populism grows directly out of the liberal democratic concept of rights. In other words, the radical ideas of the "Atlantic Revolution" threaten the very fruits of that revolution, or the very idea of liberal democracy threatens liberal democracy itself.  That is the paradox.
 
Winkler, a world historian of great repute in Germany today, may not be historically correct in saying that the idea of the Atlantic Revolution has only been in crisis since the 1990s.  Shortly after the end of World War I, the German historian of ideas Ernst Troeltsch (1865 - 1923) noted that the "innermost tremors and deepest transformations" that Europe had undergone had "begun to expose the obvious gaps and fractures of our proud age."
 
European humanistic ideals and the governmental and social order associated with those ideals were relativized, and then critically dismantled, and they ultimately succumbed to any number of future plans, to pessimism, or to material interests that simply required violence.
 
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Eric Voegelin (1901 - 1985), the renowned German-American historian and political philosopher, revisited the topic, and concluded that at the present moment, there is a belief in the possibilities of progress brought about by technological civilization and humanism, but at the same time, there is a conscience of a new barbarism. It was born in the eighteenth century, when people believed in the progress of civilization, and it has continued to "give off a rotten smell," as Voegelin put it, throughout the twentieth century.
 
In 1955, at the age of 36, Louis Hartz (1919-1986) published a book (The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution) reflecting on "American exceptionalism" that is now said to be a classic of American political history. The book was written in the year the Korean War armistice was signed, and is deeply meaningful. In it, he asks:
 
“You can turn the Wilsonian question on its head and ask: When has the United States ever more deeply valued the limitations of the cultural paradigm it offers to other nations?  You can also turn the question of McCarthyism on its head and ask:  When has the meaning of civil liberties been more thoroughly understood than it is now?”
 
In the view of the Harvard professor of government, "the outcome of the struggle between an intensified 'Americanism' and the New Enlightenment remains to be decided:"
 
“For us, the issue has no precedent in history. It raises the question of whether it is possible for a nation to compensate for the homogeneity of its domestic life through contact with foreign cultures. Further, whether American liberalism could gain a consciousness of relativism through it external experience, i.e., gain that philosophical spark that European liberalism obtained through the experience of internal social change and social conflict.”[7] 
 
Winkler thus has no reason to say that the crisis of the Atlantic revolutionary idea emerged only after the end of the Cold War. At best, he can say that after the Cold War, the crisis of the idea was much more severe and profound than in the two previous postwar crises, because "the United States, the leading force in the transatlantic Western world all along, was itself experiencing a serious identity crisis as well as a systemic crisis. "
　　
In the last two decades, to quote the philosopher Kok-Chor Tan (b. 1964), "the philosophical literature on global justice has grown exponentially" and "so-called liberal nationalism and patriotism" are said to have "gained increasing support in contemporary research." However, the growing need to defend the liberal idea means that the crisis of the Atlantic revolutionary idea is becoming ever more acute.
　　
In 2007, Anne-Marie Slaughter (b. 1958), the first female dean of Princeton University's Wilson School of International Relations, published a small book with the somewhat revisionist title, The Idea That is America, and an inspiring subtitle, "Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World." As an international relations expert and foreign policy analyst, Slaughter begins her book by saying that once "America emerged as the undisputed victor of the Cold War…we have been so resented in many parts of the world that any U.S.-led policy initiative is dead in the water. It is no exaggeration to say that even the citizens of friendly democratic countries consider the United States to be morally corrupt,” and this despite our "unparalleled power and wealth."
　　
Faced with the reality of the global moral condemnation of America, Slaughter changes gears and loftily insists that this reality imposes on her the obligation to defend "American values," so as to inspire Americans to uphold "American patriotism and the progressive spirit of America."  She believes that if Americans do not "successfully hold on to their values" in the international arena as they do at home, then they will lose their direction and abandon their values in a "more hostile and thus more dangerous world."
　　
Slaughter also admits that the crisis American values is not recent:
 
“Clearly, we have been progressively losing ground since the Cold War. If we take seriously the notion that our greatest strengths are not our armies, our land, and our wealth, but our values, then we should rethink the entire set of strategies and behaviors currently used to reflect and promote those values.”
　　
Indeed, already in the early 1960s, Walter Rostow (1916 - 2003), an economic historian who was then assistant to the U.S. president for national security affairs, suggested that:
　　
“The ongoing struggles for power and ideology in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa have jeopardized the instinctive assumption that American-style democracy is necessarily the wave of the future and is morally right in all instances.”
　　
It is thus clear that the problem of America's moral image in the international community has plagued American politicians for more than half a century. By reviewing the history of U.S. foreign expansion, Rostow attempts to reconcile the contradiction between American ideas and its expansionist behavior, hoping to "bring  Alfred Thayer Mahan's (1840-1915) insights together with those of Woodrow Wilson."  In contrast, Slaughter reaffirms the indisputable validity of the idea of America by looking back at American history, which clearly shows that this idea needs defending. Her logic is very strange: having admitted that the United States has done many things internationally that are unjust and inconsistent with the ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality, why is her goal to convince Americans, rather than people of other countries, that the American idea remains a universal value?
　　
As an expert on international relations issues, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a book to inspire Americans not to be disillusioned with the American idea, but the book talks almost exclusively about domestic issues in American history, not American international relations, which makes little sense. Even if she can demonstrate that American domestic politics are consistent with American values, it does not follow that American international behavior is consistent with those values. Indeed, ever since Woodrow Wilson proposed "liberal democracy" as a universal principle of the international order, hypocrisy has been seen as a fundamental characteristic of American speech and behavior, and this is surely directly related to the domestic economic situation in the United States.
 
Part Two
 
It is worth recalling the origins of globalization:  in March of 1493, after Columbus returned from his maiden voyage to the New World, the Spanish Crown asked the Pope to recognize Spain's possession of the New World, prompting the King of Portugal to protest, which led to the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), mediated by the Spanish Pope.   It established a boundary between the two countries, known in history as the “papal meridian,”  some 600 kilometers west of the Azores, which delineated the overseas spheres of influence of the two countries.
　　
In response to the pope's ruling, "orthodox Christians had to accept that no navigator from another country should approach any other ocean except the North Atlantic, and two whole generations did indeed observe this," as the British historian Ramsay Muir (1872-1941) put it in his The Expansion of Europe (1917).  In February of 1500, Vincent Pinzón (1462 - 1514), the Spanish navigator and captain of the ship La Niña on Columbus' first voyage to America, arrived in Brazil and began to explore the mouth of the Amazon River. Due to the restrictions of the Treaty of Tordesillas, he could not claim the territory for the Spanish Crown. A month and a half later, the fleet of the Portuguese navigator Pedro Cabral (1467 - 1520) arrived in Brazil, which subsequently became a Portuguese territory.
　　
In September 1522, after Magellan (1480 - 1521) died in the Philippines during his trip around the world, his crewmates completed the first historical circumnavigation of the globe. The earth being conclusively affirmed as being round, the papal meridian was thus incomplete: where were the limits of the Spanish and Portuguese spheres in the east and west? In fact, this question is merely theoretical. The historical situation is that Spanish expeditions crossed the Pacific Ocean once again to reach the Maluku Islands (in present-day northeastern Indonesia) and renewed disputes with Portuguese colonists, who had been in this region since 1511.  
 
In 1524, the two countries set out to settle the dispute, this time without the good offices of the Pope; Charles V (1500-1558), King of Castille and Holy Roman Emperor, and King John III of Portugal (1502-1557) each sent a delegation and engaged in direct negotiations. After several years of talks, Spain agreed to give up the Maluku Islands.  Portugal compensated them with 350,000 pieces of gold, and in April 1529 the two sides signed the "friendly" Treaty of Zaragoza, which traced a line at 143 degrees longitude in the western Pacific Ocean (17 degrees east of the Maluku Islands). The Treaty of Tordesillas was thus supplemented by a second line of division (through Eastern Siberia, Japan, and central Australia). 
 
According to this treaty, the Philippines belonged to the Portuguese sphere of influence. A half century later (1580), King Philip II of Spain sent the Duke of Alba to annex Portugal on grounds of civil unrest, and then established a trading post on the Philippines.  From that point forward, neither the "Papal Meridian" nor the Zaragoza Line existed in reality. 
 
Philip II's Spanish Empire became the first single empire to dominate the global geography in the modern sense, and European statesmen of the time acknowledged that "by 1560, Philip II indeed had established sole hegemony over the world,” in the words of British historian Hugh Thomas (1931-2017).  However, this hegemony in fact existed only on paper, or was only symbolic. The Spanish Empire could not physically dominate every political space on the planet, and in fact could not even dominate Europe,  even if its territory was theoretically so vast that it "stretched from the Philippines in the east to Cuba in the west, from California in the north to the Straits of Magellan in the south," to cite Hugh Thomas yet again.  
　　
Before long, England, the Netherlands, and France began competing to take over America. The Dutch-American historian Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882-1944), known for his popular history books, wrote the following about the Treaty of Tordesillas:
　　
“Almost from the moment the line of demarcation was established, trouble never stopped. Since the treaty made no mention of England and Holland, both countries pretended that they had never heard of such a line and plundered whatever they wanted from these places. France and even Sweden did the same thing.”
　　
England and the Netherlands did not "pretend never to have heard" of the Treaty of Tordesillas, but simply ignored it. The kings of England and France already ignored the authority of the Pope even before the Protestant Reformation, and the Puritans had even less reason to recognize his authority after the Reformation. The authority of the Spanish Empire in Europe depended solely on military power. Moreover, while the Treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza appear to have divided the world between the two kingdoms, in fact, neither Portugal nor Spain was truly a rising power with a “maritime mentality,” but were instead rather traditional "continental states" that "valued religious beliefs over commercial success, and emphasized continental expansion over maritime control," in the words of Andrew Lambert (b. 1956), the British military historian. 
 
The world historical significance of these two treaties is that they mark the beginning of European geopolitical domination of global politics. Political historians can say that for the first time in human history, two political regimes divided the globe into two jurisdictions, but it cannot be said that it was "the first and last time," as the historian and political scientist Anthony Pagden (b. 1945) insists. In the following centuries, any number of  bilateral or multilateral treaties did the basically same thing, except that they were no longer quite so grand and the division of the jurisdictions was more specific. 
 
What happened next is no less significant in world history than the great discoveries: the American colonists seceded from their mother country after a civil war and declared themselves an entirely new political unit.  In 1823, John Adams, one of the founding fathers, drafted a proclamation for the then U.S. President James Monroe, addressing the European monarchs who had formed a "Holy Alliance" after the Napoleonic Wars, declaring that the United States would take the lead to protect the Americas from Europe.
　　
Although the treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza resulted from conflicts of interest between Spain and Portugal, such dividing lines were still based essentially on the principle of a friendship grounded in similitude rather than a confrontation based on difference. Thereafter, European kingdoms fought each other for colonies and eventually signed peace treaties based on the principle of the "friendship" of the Christian family, while on the other side of the “friendship line” was the state of nature.  Although the Americans were part of the mother church of Christian Europe, they substituted a confrontational line of defense for the traditional friendly dividing lines Christian Europe had been using, and the world-historical meaning of the age of discovery finally revealed itself in all its glory.
　　
The founder of modern political geography, Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), noted that from a world historical perspective:
　　
“The discovery of the American continent by Europeans signified a thorough-going transformation of the relationship between the two oceans and their place in the inhabited world. Until 1492, America and its native peoples were on the eastern edge of the inhabited world, connected by the Pacific Ocean; but the Atlantic Ocean was like a gulf between America and the western edge of the world, located in Europe and Africa. The Norsemen settled in Greenland and reached Vinland, but did not really connect the two continents.”
　　
Since 1492, colonization has made that connection, linking everything that is alive and vibrant, while the old Pacific connections were discarded and forgotten. In the early centuries following the creation of this connection, the ever increasing number of immigrants focused almost exclusively on this connection and strengthened it. No country did more than the United States to pull the Americas from the eastern margin of the world to the western margin, and the United States was the country among all other colonies with the most Atlantic and European character. The march to the Pacific and the “migration” of the native Americans, which virtually amounted to their destruction, can be seen as a victory of the Atlantic peoples over the ancient Pacific lands.
 
Subsequently, in 1898 the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, Spain’s Pacific possessions, preventing Japan, who was rising rapidly and imitating European empires, from expanding to the east and south Pacific.  In 1899, the United States achieved the partition of the Samoan Islands, advancing the western defensive line to the central Pacific Ocean from the Aleutian Islands through Hawaii to the Samoan Islands.  The Monroe Declaration was originally meant to be a "protective boundary around the Americas, but also a line of self-isolation and defense against Europe," based on American "contempt for antiquated and corrupt nature of the Old World," because the New World was "endowed with a moral claim to 'selection' rooted in Calvinism.”  Now, defense turned to offense, and the American belief in its "selection" was elevated to a sense of mission in world history.[8]
　　
On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) announced at the National Press Club that the U.S. "defensive radius extends along the Aleutian Islands to Japan, and to the Ryukyu Islands," and then "from the Ryukyu Islands to the Philippines."  The “offensive line” of the United States thus extended to the margins of East Asia, but did not include the south of Korea.  When civil war broke out on the Korean peninsula in June 1950, President Truman immediately "ordered the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Taiwan," even declaring that "a decision on the future status of Taiwan must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, the signing of a peace treaty with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations." In other words, the U.S. not only assigned the southern part of the Korean peninsula to its sphere of influence, but also took the opportunity to intervene in the Chinese civil war by including our island of Taiwan in its sphere of defense.  The term "first island chain" that we often talk about today is an invention of American politicians. Its meaning is to make these large and small islands into "a chain" of "unsinkable aircraft carriers" to contain the new China by garrisoning troops there.
　　
To date, the U.S. Western Pacific Defense Line, completed in 1951, remains the most ambitious and longest geopolitically divided defensive line in the history of the world. When viewed in conjunction with the papal meridian of 1494, a thought-provoking arc of political history stands out over nearly five hundred years of world history. The political-historical question that next arises is: What "Atlantic [political] character and the European [political] character" does the United States represent? What was the “civilized virtue” that allowed the United States to draw its own defense line on the continental edge of the West Coast of the Pacific?
 
Mao Zedong said more than once that “America’s hand is extended too far, and wherever it goes, people are unhappy,” expressing a common-sense notion of justice that ordinary Americans would understand if their natural goodness and decency had not been perverted by their Puritanical belief that they have been chosen by God.  Can a conflict be avoided between the ancient virtues of Chinese civilization and the Puritanical universal civilizational aspirations of the "chosen" Americans?  American politicians today claim that the "historic rivalry between great powers is never just about power, territory, or even physical security," and insist instead, as the American neoconservative Robert Kagen (b. 1958) puts it, that:
　　
“The greatest competition in history is also about the definition of morality and justice, about the debate over the role of the individual and society, about tradition and change, and about the description and interpretation of the image of God.”
　　
This sounds unobjectionable, but the American strategist who penned these words begins by defining the competition facing the United States today as one between the "world's strongest centralized state" and the "world's strongest democracy," which is tantamount to a picking a winner on the basis of the theory you start with. The logic implicit in such rhetoric is that it is impossible for a "centralized state" to correctly define morality and justice, and the Atlantic Revolution has already passed historical judgement on this.
 
Robert Kagan does not realize that his binary opposition of  "centralized states" and "democratic states" is nothing other than typical Puritanical "Cold War" rhetoric, and is completely self-referential.  What will happen when the major issues he describes are debated at the level of the history of world politics and political thought? Or perhaps the "spiritual chaos of our time" and the "crisis of civilization" that Americans are constantly talking about are no big deal after all?
　　
The independence of the United States did not only mean "the gradual transformation of the 13 American colonies who opposed the British crown into the world island,"[9] but also "the period from the Peace of Paris in 1783 to the Spanish-American War in 1898," to cite the French philosopher Raymon Aron (1905-1983). The world-historical significance of what the United States did in 1898 does not lie in the act of taking the colonies from Spain, but in the contradiction between America’s founding philosophy and this act. 
 
American aggression in Asia may seem surprising because the history of the United States is the history of resistance to British colonial rule. However, the history of the United States in the 19th century is the history of imperialist aggression. By the end of the 19th century, the United States had annexed Hawaii and part of the Samoan Islands, and after the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired Guam, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
　　
The same is true of the political imaginary of "national self-determination" and "independence and freedom" that the American-French Revolution brought to the world.  The entire century following the Atlantic Revolution illustrates that both the United States and France devoted themselves to seizing the strategic and economic geopolitical resources around the world in the name of “freedom and democracy.”  Compared to the many "peace treaties" signed since the Treaty of Westphalia, the Treaty of Tordesillas is nothing but a dead letter.
　　
Geopolitical rivalries have existed since ancient times, so what innovations did America and France bring to the game?
　　
 After the failed attempts of the Anglo-Saxon peoples entrenched in their outlying islands to dominate the land mass of Western Europe, and following the bitter divorce between England and the colonies in North America, British and American politicians gradually developed the habit of attacking traditional European imperialistic sentiments and sense of mission, asserting that "the process of national division works only for Westerners and not for all of humanity."  But such notions" led [Western] peoples to shoulder their national missions with greater and greater dedication," the disastrous consequence of which was that great powers in Europe and the United States "attempted to achieve universality through imperial expansion."
　　
The French revolution culminated in Napoleon's imperialism, the German revolution in Hitler's imperialism, but they inevitably ended in failure, with the result that the Anglo-Saxon forces claimed the universality of the British and American variants of democracy, but they now had to face a non-Western civilization as well, which also had a claim to universality and which extended to all the battlefields of Europe.
 
When Voegelin wrote about what he called a “non-Western culture” at the beginning of the Cold War, he was referring to the Soviet Union.  In fact, whether Soviet Russia was a "non-Western civilization" is debatable, since after the reforms of Peter the Great (1672-1725), Russia not only accelerated its measures of integration into modern Western European civilization, but also became increasingly involved in European hegemony. To tell the truth, Russia's civilizational identity has always been rather ambiguous, and while it actively sought to become a part of Christian Europe, it was always rejected. Hegel concluded his major course on the philosophy of world history with this comment on the Westernizing posture of the Russian Empire:
　　
“It is only recently, in the last hundred years, that Russia has come closer to European life and has shown itself to have changed into something similar to European culture. But the country is still not part of the process of European culture; it is outside the circle of the arts and sciences. But in terms of external politics, it has at the same time manifested itself as a powerful force, as something solid, pure, and as yet unenlightened, establishing and maintaining even in modern times the bonds that have allowed Europe to persist, although solely in a negative way.“
 
Two hundred years have passed and Russia is still not a member of the Western family. At the end of the twentieth century, having paid the price of dissolving the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union and introducing universal suffrage, Russia applied for membership in the European community and was still rebuffed. Hegel already counted Russia as a "third nation" in Europe, and today the West still considers it its enemy, even though Russia has long been integrated into the circle of modern European civilization in artistic and scientific matters. 
 
Part Three 
 
The inherent contradiction posed by the idea of national independence and universal human rights and the global expansion of the European and American great powers was only the external aspect of the world-historical paradox of the Atlantic revolutionary idea, which evoked nothing other than anti-imperialist and anti-colonial sentiments.
　　
On the one hand, the values of human rights, democracy, and freedom nourished the world’s political imagination, the idea that that mankind would eventually create a free and fair world, in which "revolutionaries not only trumpet individual rights when revolutions are underway, but would also prove that great revolutions do not depend on favorable circumstances," as noted by the British historian Mike Rapport (b. 1950).   On the other hand, Rapport reminds us that the Napoleonic Wars "killed as many Europeans as the First World War." Throughout Western Europe, the post-revolutionary Napoleonic Wars brought elements of compulsory modern republicanism to many regions, resulting in "active and passive resistance to the French Revolution," in the words of Jacques Solé.
　　
The anti-imperialist and anti-colonial sentiments also grew out of the Atlantic revolutionary idea, to the point that many historians remain perplexed to this day by the Janus-faced nature of the Atlantic revolution. The remark by the Dutch historian Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882-1944) that "there are no murkier waters in world politics than those of the Napoleonic Wars" is not without wisdom. We might justifiably update that to say that same is true of the world under U.S. domination today.　　
 
Western political historians and historians of ideas have recognized that the fundamental crisis of the Atlantic revolutionary idea lies in the very notion of individual freedom and rights, which ultimately leads to the breakdown of social ethics and even sets the stage for the disintegration of the state. In fact, it was not until the early 1990s that "the debate within the Western world about whether to 'accept or reject the political ideas of 1776 and 1789' came to a temporary end," to cite Winkler again.  The rightness or wrongness of the "human rights" philosophy promoted by the Atlantic Revolution was always in dispute, and not long after the entire Western world celebrated its "Cold War" victory, a series of critical questions arose: "Where is America going? " "Will the EU collapse?" "Will the West split apart?"
　　
All these questions stem from the idea of liberal democracy and universal human rights, which were seen as symbols of the Atlantic revolution. Montesquieu (1689- 1755), the original architect of these ideas, is specifically mentioned by Winkler as the bridge between the English and American revolutions.
　　
Montesquieu's theoretical model, constructed in opposition to the absolute monarchy of continental Europe, explains the outcome of numerous events in English constitutional history, and in particular what happened after the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688-1689.  The reaction to Montesquieu's book was stronger in the North American colonies than anywhere else.  The Spirit of the Laws greatly increased the confidence and vigor of the European settlers.
　　
People often assumed that the Federalist Papers looked to Montesquieu, first, because of federalism and, second, because of his advocacy of the separation of powers, which provided useful guidance in the construction of the American federal system of government. In Woodrow Wilson's view, however, the U.S. Congress was merely a "committee system" that genuinely limited the extent to which the leader’s power could fall into the hands of a minority, but that also distracted Congress from its legislative role and robbed the state apparatus of efficiency. The legislative and executive powers check one another only in principle, and in practice, at different times that they have waxed and waned together or mutually depleted one another, but the basic tendency has been for the executive to become increasingly powerful, which means that the bureaucracy keeps growing.
 
As for the mutual checks between the federal and state levels, the effect has not been obvious either. The problem faced by the United States, in Wilson’s analysis, was that "certain rich and powerful forces" "controlled the Senate" until around 1890, when the situation changed significantly to become more like "an accomplished group of partisan managers." But even this is a far cry from "true party leadership.”
 
Winkler reminds us that we must look back to 120 years ago to see clearly the consequences of the institutional problems of which Wilson was speaking:
　　
“In presidential democracies like the United States or France, the threat of executive monopoly is particularly strong, so populist movements may have a better chance in such countries than in parliamentary democracies. But even in parliamentary democracies, there are movements or parties that have gained ground by presenting themselves the only true voice of ‘the people.’"
　　
Montesquieu substituted the label "spirit of the law" for the traditional term “political virtue,” which he actually understood as the "passions" of liberty and equality, or in other words republican virtues.  By embracing the teachings of Montesquieu and viewing laissez-faire political freedom as an indispensable right of human nature, Americans lit a fuse that could explode at any moment.   In the eyes of Samuel T. Huntington (1927 - 2008), the United States is actually an active volcano made up of the rights to "liberty, democracy, and equality:”    
　　
“The value system of the American creed includes freedom, democracy, equality, and individualism, and the fundamentally anti-government, anti-authoritarian characteristics that flow therefrom. Whereas other ideologies can confer legitimacy on established authorities and institutions, the American creed delegitimizes all hierarchical, coercive, authoritarian organizations, including even political institutions that are uniquely American.”
　　
In a sense, this divide between ideals and institutions dooms Americans to coexist with a uniquely American cognitive dissonance. This cognitive dissonance is normally dormant but awakens with a vengeance when tensions around the creed peak, igniting a raging fire around the promise of American politics.
　　
That the American system of government embodies the deepest crisis of modern Western civilization is not inconsistent with America's demonstration of great political effectiveness. The inherent crisis of its civilization would not be enough to keep the country from becoming great; the political potency of the Puritanical and Enlightenment movements would not only enhance the appeal of the United States, but the prosperity and wealth that the United States has gained through geopolitical advantage and historical serendipity would in turn enhance that political potency.　　
 
Part Four
 
The American legal scholar Bruce Ackerman (b. 1943), who is renowned for his studies of American constitutional history, has suggested that Chinese scholars pay attention to the American constitutional experience, first and foremost because "the American Revolution represents the first successful anti-imperialist revolution of the modern era.”  While acknowledging that "America's break with the British Empire in the eighteenth century was in many ways different from China's heroic struggle against Western domination and humiliation in the twentieth century," Ackerman still believes that some " hidden isomorphism" can be found between the two.
　　
China's modern revolution undoubtedly grew out of "resistance to Western domination and humiliation.” The need for a radical change in the traditional political order, which had existed for more than two millennia, was due to the fact that without such a change it was impossible to return a unity of purpose to China’s traditional civilization. But was the American Revolution an "anti-imperialist revolution?" This statement sounds surprisingly new and attractive at first, but unfortunately it does not correspond to the actual history of the creation of the United States.
　　
Before the War of Independence in the colonies began in April of 1775, the colonists had been engaged in a decade-long (1765-1775) "constitutional struggle with the British Parliament," initially against parliament’s power of taxation, which was ultimately rejected altogether. In other words, the conflict between the British Parliament and the colonial assemblies was a crisis of British internal affairs. Even after the outbreak of the armed conflict, the crisis did not lead to the "independence" of the colonies. It was only in the following year (May 1775 to May 1776) that the divorce of the North American colonies from the British Empire became irreversible.
　　
It is clear that the history of the United States began with this divorce. In fact, "British rule in North America could not be described as harsh; on the contrary, it could be described as a model of good governance. For this reason, North American colonists at that time generally identified with the British.” The independence of the North American colonies was not so much a "colonial revolt against the Empire" as "a British civil war," and the independence of North America was "not the cause and purpose of the war, but merely its result."[10]
 
There is thus no historical justification for viewing the American Revolution as an uprising against tyranny. This narrative is a product of revolutionary propaganda and the nineteenth-century Whig view of history. There was no shortage of legitimate objections to these views, both at the time and in the more reflective attitude of twentieth-century researchers.
　　
If we want to find a "hidden isomorphism" in the Chinese and American revolutions, I fear it will only be in the modern belief in progress. The crux of the issue is, again, that even if we accept this “isomorphism," the historical origins of the United States and the new China are simply not at all comparable.
　　
Western historical thinkers have long worried that once "other [non-European] civilizations have developed science, industry, and rational government, they too will in due course imitate the model of inter-civilizational relations that has developed in the West over the past four hundred years,” to cite Voegelin yet again. Since the basic political character of this model was shaped by the political teachings of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Western politicians can only view intercivilizational relations from the standpoint of an amoral political posture, and thus cannot believe that the new China, having inherited the traditional virtues of Chinese civilization, would not imitate the dubious virtue that Western civilization has cultivated in the past 400 years, once China has developed science, industry, and rational government.
　　
Evidence of historical progress is most readily visible in the material aspects of civilization, notably in science, technology, economics, and the consequent improvement in living conditions. The problem is that progress in material civilization does not necessarily benefit the health of society, and a highly developed system of math and physics can be a factor in social disintegration for societies that can master it and translate it into technology—even the pioneers of modern social science were well aware of this.
　　
Both Saint-Simon and Comte well understood that scientific and industrial progress could not replace social progress. To prevent the disintegration of Western society—which is already a clear and imminent danger—new institutions must be conceived, new institutions with an authority equal to that of the old institutions that are being destroyed.　　
 
Human nature remains unchanged, including the difference between virtue and the lack of virtue, and it is precisely this difference that the political system derived from the idea of the Atlantic revolutions strives to erase. This leads us to an old case in political historiography, which is the conundrum encountered when Turgot's (1727-1781) historical vision of progress reached East Asia, which Voegelin formulates as, "The great Asian civilizations, and especially Chinese civilization, do not seem to participate in what we fondly regard as the march of progress."
 
In Turgot’s view, this was because Chinese civilization stagnated due to its early development, and the rigidity of its political system blocked the development of science at higher levels. In Voegelin's view, Turgot's explanation, though ingenious, falls short of the mark. His "contribution" is simply to remind us of the need to "begin to address a problem that we do not fully understand even today:"
　　
“Perhaps we can argue that the first step toward solving the real problem of the structural differences between Eastern and Western civilizations lies in recognizing that the Eastern notion of ‘stagnation’ is as unfounded as the Western notion of ‘progress.’ If we abandon the Western category of ‘progress,’ then the Eastern category of ‘stagnation’ automatically disappears.”
　　
It is difficult to accept Voegelin's argument because the progress of material civilization is already deeply felt by all Chinese people. Nor are today’s Chinese people convinced by the arguments of certain Western anthropologists—like Jack Goody (1919-2015)—that East Asian civilization was never “stagnant,” and early on displayed certain elements of Western “progress.”  Nor is it historically accurate to say that Chinese civilization "does not seem to have been involved" in the process that modern European civilization regards as progress.
 
The question is whether progress in terms of material civilization is equivalent to progress in terms of ethics and virtue. Turgot followed Montesquieu's view that the progress of material civilization must be accompanied by or bring about progress in terms of ethics and virtue. Chinese intellectuals during the late Qing "Foreign Affairs Movement" came up with one answer in the formula “take Chinese knowledge as essence and Western knowledge as utility,” in which they admitted that China had indeed "stagnated" in terms of material civilization and lagged behind modern Europe, but they refused to admit that modern Europe had made any progress in terms of ethics and morality, although they were limited by their knowledge of world history and could not explain their reasoning. 
 
At the same time, Western political historians have also recognized that "China is unique in that it has maintained an absolute dominance and a culture over a huge span of time,” to cite the historian Eric Jones. This being the case, the first step in understanding Voegelin’s evocation of the real problem of the structural differences between Eastern and Western civilizations is to say that the notion of China's "stagnation" in terms of virtue and morality is as unfounded as the notion that the Atlantic Revolution brought about the "progress" of Western virtue.
 
Once we abandon the Western notion of moral "progress," the Chinese notion of moral "stagnation" will automatically disappear. Obviously, it is a great historical test of the virtue of any civilization to make good use of, and even to control, the development of science, technology, and economics so that they benefit, rather than endanger, the basic ethical qualities of human life and even nature and life themselves.
　　
Concluding Remarks
 
When discussing China in his 2014 volume, World Order, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) comes to the following conclusion:
 
“It is only recently, in their respective histories, that China and the United States have come to fully participate in an international system of sovereign states. China considers itself unique, and essentially prefers that everyone mind their own business. The United States also considers itself unique, that is, the American ‘exception,’ but it also believes it has a moral obligation to go beyond its national interests and spread its values throughout the world. These two great nations, with different cultures based on different premises, are both undergoing fundamental changes domestically. Whether these changes will ultimately lead to competition between the two countries or to a new form of partnership will have a major impact on the future of the world order in the 21st century.”
　　
However "cautious and cunning" Kissinger's writing may be, he hits the nail on the head: the Chinese idea is not inherently universal and expansive, whereas the Atlantic revolutionary idea inherently contains the idea of a virtue worthy of sharing. Kissinger's statement is not substantially different from that of his predecessor Rostow during the Cold War era:
 
“In the broadest sense, our goals are political rather than military. We believe that we are ourselves engaged in a fundamental historical contest, a contest about how the nations of the world should organize themselves into one family.”
　　
The question is whether the future world community should be based on the natural interdependence of "independent nations working together" or on the Atlantic revolutionary ideal of a world "progressively moving toward a higher plane of human freedom.” While the international principle that China contributes to the creation of a world community is "harmony without uniformity," American politicians continue to believe that their country, in carrying forward the idea of the Atlantic Revolution, has a "moral obligation to transcend [other countries'] national interests," even though this is nothing more than an excuse for pursuing American self interest. In any case, whether this "fundamental historical contest" is conducted in a peaceful or military manner depends entirely on the political virtues of American civilization.[11]
　　
Since the beginning of reform and opening, we have continually questioned the limits of the path the new China has chosen, but we might turn this around and ask whether this questioning has its own limits.  Have we understood that the Atlantic revolutionary idea is a world-historical paradox? 
 
After revisiting Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" in an important book, the American political historian Ira Katznelson (b. 1944) reflected on the French Revolution, asking the question Tocqueville asked in L’ancien régime et la révolution:
​ 
“For people at the time, was the Revolution really as extraordinary as it has been made out to be? Was it really so sensational, earth-shattering, and inspiring? What was its true content and essence? What is the long-term historical significance of this sudden and momentous revolution? What did it destroy? What did it create?”
 
Even today, this question makes you stop and think. If the West does not want to fall into a trap in which it cycles between the logic of internationalism and the logic of populism—both grounded in the Atlantic revolutionary ideal—then it might behoove us to restore to our discourse the classical notion of natural justice, and such calls have emerged even in American academia.[12] Of course, neither the Greco-Roman nor the Qin-Han Chinese conceptions of natural justice have yet entered the ring of intellectual competition, but this is solely because they have no political vehicle connecting them to world history.
 
Notes

[1]刘小枫, “大西洋革命理念的世界史悖论,” published online on Aisixiang on January 2, 2021.

[2]Translator’s note:  This citation is from the Chinese translation Lynn Hunt and Jack R. Censer’s The French Revolution and Napoleon:  The Crucible of the Modern World.

[3]Translator’s note:  The citation comes from the Chinese translation of a Russian biography of Saint-Simon.

[4]Translator’s note:  The citations are taken from a Chinese translation of the complete writings of Saint-Simon.

[5]Translator’s note:  The citation comes from a Chinese translation of a French work on Saint-Simon.  I can’t tell if it is a contemporary academic work or something put together by Saint-Simon’s students in the 19th century.  The references in the citation are obscure to me, but the point is that Saint-Simon’s enthusiasm for the great American experiment was not shared by his students, who were appalled by American hypocrisy on the international scene.

[6]Translator’s note:  The citations in this paragraph are to the Chinese translation of Algernon Cecil, Metternich 1773-1859: A Study of his Period and Personality (1943).

[7]Translator’s note:  For Hartz, the American paradox was that politics and political imagination were confined to different readings of the same liberal consensus, because there was no genuine “conservative tradition” in the United States.  The Republicans claim to represent the “interests of the little man” in demanding tax cuts that benefit the wealthy.  Democrats claim to represent the same people by raising taxes to pay for government-administered programs.  For a quick summary of Hartz’s views, see here.

[8]Translator’s note:  The citations in this paragraph are taken from the Chinese translation of The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt:  Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order, edited by Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito.

[9]Translator’s note:  The reference is to Halford John Mackinder’s (1861-1947) theory of the “geographical pivot of history,” in which he described the “world island” as being made up of the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.  Liu means to suggest that America subsequently became the world island.

[10]Translator’s note:  The citations in this paragraph come from the work of the Chinese historian Zheng Fei 郑非.

[11]Translator’s note:  The citations in this paragraph are to Chinese translations of works by George Friedman, the noted scholar of geopolitics and to Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent’s Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment.

[12]Translator’s note:  Liu cites John Mearsheimer, among others.