China, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Ancient Greeks
Just when you think the performance is over, the orchestra starts up again: there seems to be no end to the ugly symphony of Chinese scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo. Even before the announcement, Norway was subjected to diplomatic menaces in the hope of discouraging the Nobel committee from awarding the prize. After the announcement came the demand, wreathed in obscure threats, that the nations of the world not send their diplomats to the award ceremony; and now the Chinese threaten that nations who officially acknowledge the honor will “bear the consequences.”
Why is China behaving in this way? The Nobel Prize is a Western attack on China, the official People’s Daily explains, because Western states “fear the rise of China.” This makes no sense if China’s rise is regarded as purely economic. But their wealth is not the increase the Chinese feel is threatened: it is their status, their prestige. The ancient Greeks would have understood China’s reaction far better than we do.
Modern Western powers tend to regard the international community as made up of states that are in principle equal, even if they differ sharply in power and wealth. The ancient Greeks, the Chinese, and, in fact, many contemporary international actors view the international community instead as consisting of a vertical ranking of states, in which higher rank merits a special degree of respect from the lower ranks. National rank has a powerful emotional element to it. Often the easiest way to detect a state that values national rank is the emotional language it uses: the language of anger or pain or revenge. Such emotion can be counterfeited, but it is not just rhetoric: for such emotions are in fact felt, individually and in mass, by the people of rank-minded states (whether or not they have confidence in the government that professes to be expressing their fury). They feel real pride in the rank of their nations, and anger and pain when their nations are insulted. Angry they may be, but not irrational: rank makes states act in certain predictable ways, because the currency of rank is not money or power, but the public respect a state is paid by other states, minus the insults it suffers from them.
This is how the Nobel Prize can be understood as a weapon directed against China. It is an insult: an insult both because it lowers the international esteem in which China is held and because it implies that China is not worthy of the rising rank of which it is so proud.
A story from ancient Greece echoes that of contemporary China: the coming of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) between Athens and Sparta, when Sparta went to war to defend her long-time superiority in rank, and a rising Athens fought to compel Sparta to admit her equality. These ancient Greek adventures remind us that states that feel that they are rising in rank (like Athens once and China now) are intensely sensitive to perceived insult, because they need their pretensions to rank confirmed by others. Those ancient events remind us also that the natural diplomatic reaction to insult is to insult in exchange (for revenge restores the rank lost by being insulted, and even verbal revenge eases the pain). “Drive out a curse!” demanded the Spartans of the Athenians. “No, you drive out two curses!” thundered back the Athenians. That is why the Chinese are shouting at the West. Next come attempts to coerce acts of deference from the insulting party, to make him publicly back down: that also restores the endangered rank of the insulted. After the exchange of insults, the Spartans presented a laundry list of demands to the Athenians, but the details did not matter: what mattered was forcing the opponent to yield. So similarly the Chinese, threatening that the diplomats of Europe must boycott the awards ceremony in Oslo or “bear the consequences.” In ancient Greece, when the Athenians refused to back down, diplomatic relations ceased, and war followed in due course. It is hardly to be expected that China will go to war with Norway over the Nobel Prize bestowed on Liu Xiaobo--although, historically, rank-minded states have sometimes gone to war for far less serious insults. But even if their high kicks are sometimes limited by circumstances, states that think about international relations in terms of rank—as many have through history, and as many now do—appear to dance to very similar jigs.
very similar jigs.