Empire, Civilization, and World Order after Fukuyama: Nietzsche, Tianxia, Hobbes, and Schmitt

Heng-Fu Zou ()

No 809, CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics

Abstract: This paper argues that Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis no longer provides an adequate framework for understanding the contemporary world. In place of liberal convergence, the twenty-first century has revealed the return of great-power rivalry, civilizational self-assertion, strategic rearmament, and competing projects of world order. To explain this transformation, the paper develops a composite framework drawing on Hobbes, Schmitt,Nietzsche, and the Chinese idea of Tianxia. Hobbes clarifes the structure of insecurity in a world without a common superior power. Schmitt clarifies sovereignty, decision, and the renewed centrality of political enmity. Nietzsche clarifies rank, command, greatness, decadence, and the production of higher civilizational types. Tianxia expands the analysis beyond the Roman-Western horizon by introducing a broader imagination of world order grounded in civilizational totality. On this basis, the paper offers a comparative interpretation of China, Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia, the United States, Iran, Japan, India, and Vietnam as distinct but interacting forms of imperial or civilizational power. Its central claim is that modernity has not abolished empire or grandeur. It has multiplied their forms. The present age is therefore better understood not as the end of history, but as the return of history in a more openly Hobbesian, Schmittian, Nietzschean, and civilizationally plural world.

Keywords: Nietzsche; Tianxia; Fukuyama; Hobbes; Carl Schmitt; empire; civilizational state; great-power rivalry; world order; Rome; China; America; Russia; political theology; realism; end of history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B15 F51 F52 N40 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2026-05
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cuf:wpaper:809

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