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Ukraine war
OpinionComment
Lanxin Xiang
Lanxin Xiang

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

  • The war in Ukraine reflects a breakdown of the Western management of ecumenical peace in Europe since the end of the Cold War
  • Now the West is focusing its attention on China and treating Taiwan as the Ukraine of the East, raising the prospect of another damaging war

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A woman draws water from her well after a Russian aerial bomb exploded outside her farm, severely damaging her home, in the village of Yakovlivka outside Kharkiv, Ukraine, on April 2. Photo: Reuters
Lanxin Xiang
Ecumenical peace is a powerful Christian movement emphasising Christian unity all over the world. As part of Christian civilisation, Russia deserves a place in it. Unfortunately, today’s ecumenical peace has been replaced by a “democratic peace” that Russia is in effect excluded from.
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China, of course, was never part of it. Thus, China has good reason to see the war in Ukraine as an internecine conflict as its cause has nothing to do with Chinese history and culture.

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

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

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

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

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