Patrick Lawrence on ‘Zhou Enlai’s Posthumous Triumph’

Nov. 29, 2022 (EIRNS)—Reflecting on the anticipated December visit to Saudi Arabia by China’s President Xi Jinping, to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and King Salman bin Abdulaziz and quite likely with leaders of other Arab nations, Patrick Lawrence writes that the coming world marks “the end of the West’s 500 years of global dominance.”

The growth of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS formats occurs as the non-West now accounts for the majority of the world’s economy. “Why wouldn’t Saudi Arabia ... and other nations traditionally allied with the West begin to shift loyalties?”

Lawrence writes, that when he thinks of “practical reasons for this shift in global vitality,” his thoughts go to Zhou Enlai, who he characterizes as “among the visionary figures of postwar decades, when scores of nations were achieving independence and working out what kind of world order they proposed to live in.”

Zhou’s Five Principles are “the mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, equality and mutual benefit in relations, and peaceful coexistence.”

They were formulated as China and India worked out their 1954 Agreement. They appeared, in expanded form, as the Ten Principles for Peaceful Coexistence espoused by the Non-Aligned Movement at Bandung in 1955. Lawrence considers them comparable to the tenets of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

Do the non-Western nations adhere to these principles? Can you imagine Russia or China telling Saudi Arabia or Egypt how to conduct their internal affairs?

A commitment to principles is needed, as the West’s repeated violations of international law attest. Lawrence quotes from remarks by Gérard Araud, formerly France’s Permanent UN Representative and Ambassador to the U.S., to a Nov. 14 Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft forum. In his speech, Araud described the rules-based order as “When the Americans basically want to do whatever they want, including when it’s against international law. ... That’s the vision that the rest of the world has of this order. Their vision of the world is certainly not a ‘rules-based order.’ It’s a Western order.”

“Let us recall that in full what Zhou stood for was titled Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” Lawrence concludes. “They are as valid today, indeed as urgent, as they were when he drafted them not quite 70 years ago.” Likewise, and no less urgent, at the Nov. 22 Schiller Institute conference “Stop the Danger of Nuclear War Now,” the third conference of a growing number of elected, political and social leaders, founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche laid out for discussion Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.