천하天下

I am an amateur archaeologist, a lover of old things. I prefer Shostakovich's romance flowing from an old transistor radio to the latest Bluetooth speaker. I also prefer people I've known for a long time to newly met acquaintances. So, I am unlikely to get a divorce or find a new partner. My wife wants to throw away the books, magazines, and antiques I collected during my youth abroad, which are piled up in my room. However, knowing that this habit is what binds her and me, she has granted special autonomy to my den.

When I have the opportunity to travel to Rome or Istanbul for business, I seek out historical sites. Standing before marble buildings, I am amazed that the people of that time enjoyed a higher material standard of living than we do now. As the Roman Empire declined due to financial crises and population decrease, the city of Rome shrank into a rustic and poor town. Descendants of prestigious families who had produced senators for generations entered the Papal See at the Lateran Palace, becoming bishops to barely make a living. The splendid culture and wealth of Rome, the capital of the ancient world, and the military power that supported it, seemed to evaporate in an instant. It was then that I learned that the world does not always progress.

Where an empire recedes, what was there before rises again. In Gaul and Britain, Roman urban life and Latin administration thinned, and the indigenous order that lay dormant beneath them re-emerged. In North Africa, after the collapse of Roman urban and administrative order, Berber forces and later Islamic order filled the void. It wasn't that Rome 'disappeared,' but rather that when the center enforced by Rome collapsed, the periphery found its place again.

A similar thing happened after Britain lost its imperial status. The institutions, economic systems, overseas infrastructure, and remaining colonial ties that had been established to maintain the empire became more of a burden than a benefit. The pound block, naval power, and the hollow shell of the Commonwealth seemed majestic for a while, but in reality, they were a weight that crushed the vitality of mainland Britain. Stagnation was inevitable, and the British people began to live by reminiscing about the past. No one can guarantee that such a thing will not happen to the United States. If the United States loses its hegemonic position, its massive military, the lavish lives of Wall Street power elites, the luxury stores of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and even government buildings, including the White House, could become dark, gloomy buildings due to the lack of maintenance costs. The architecture of an empire becomes a ghost the moment the empire's cash flow ceases.

You don't have to look far. Just look at Russian cities after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The gray apartment complexes of the Brezhnev era, rusty playground equipment, dirty benches, and discarded needles next to them revealed the true face of a once-superpower. When the ideology and order imposed by an empire disappear, nationalism fills the void. This is not a matter of taste, but a gravity akin to the expansion and contraction of history. When the center expands, universalism gains traction, and when the center contracts, each nation rebuilds its own home.

North Korea was not exempt from that rule. One of the decisive reasons North Korea shifted from state socialism to a Kim Il-sung nationalist state was the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a central power. The basis for maintaining the regime shifted from world revolution to the myth of the nation. China and Vietnam turned to market economies after the collapse of the socialist center. North Korea could not go all the way down that path. Kim Jong-il, a dictator who loved movies, met with Hyundai's honorary chairman Chung Ju-yung, who visited North Korea in 1998, and showed interest in the development of Mount Kumgang and inter-Korean economic cooperation. He was not unaware of the achievements of the South Korean-style developmental state. He had already enacted the Joint Venture Law in 1984, designated the Rason Free Economic and Trade Zone in 1991, and later proposed cross-border cooperation initiatives such as Rason-Khasan. However, comprehensive reforms halted due to fear of regime collapse. The content of nationalism was filled not with bread, but with nuclear weapons. Using the 1994 Korean Peninsula nuclear crisis as leverage, North Korea secured the Geneva Agreed Framework and maintained a balance of power between the United States and China, buying time for its survival as a nation-state. Opening up was a pretense, and nuclear weapons were insurance.

Europe also shows the wandering that followed the shaking of its center. After the Cold War, European integration was an ambitious project. However, while bureaucracy thickened and political correctness, including discourses on homosexuality and human rights, rearranged the community's priorities, the foundations of industry and energy weakened. Its fragility was revealed only after being hit by the bombshell electricity and energy bills thrown by the Russia-Ukraine war. The EU is still stumbling, unable to find its direction on where to go and how to make a living. The signboard of universal civilization remains, but the cheap energy and security dividends that supported it have disappeared.

Now, the only remaining center is the United States. The emergence of American-centric nationalism, like Trump's, is, paradoxically, a sign that America's center is faltering. In its heyday, the United States claimed it could sacrifice its national interests and even the lives of its citizens for democratic morality and free-market order. For today's America, such talk is a luxury. The notion of raising tariffs if allies don't pay or invest gives an ominous feeling that perhaps we should cut our losses with the 'United States Inc.' When imperialism collapses, nationalism, like mushrooms after rain, emerges with a new feel. This is not a matter of good or evil, but of order.

In 410, when Alaric, the leader of the Visigothic mercenaries, plundered Rome, Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, wrote 'The City of God.' He argued that God's kingdom would come in place of a fallen Rome. He knew that earthly empires are not eternal and sought to fill that void with a different order. Even as the US financial market booms with AI technological innovation, the fluctuations in government bond yields are unusual. Beneath the surface of prosperity, both maintenance costs and trust costs are simultaneously rising.

Pro-Japanese and pro-American media, who break out in hives at the slightest doubt about America's power, or those who revere the American president like a new modern emperor, will shout 'Long live America!' with a spirit of perseverance. However, in an era where the centrality of the United States is fading, we must consider what will fill that void. If it is nationalism, we must begin to design what kind of nationalism we will create.

What is needed is not a nationalism united by closure and resentment. It is not a British-style nostalgia that sits on the ruins of an empire and only recites the past, nor is it a North Korean-style survival nationalism that buys time with nuclear weapons. What can survive in a world without a center is a nationalism that simultaneously possesses the power to protect itself and the openness to deal with the outside world. A nation that entrusts its soul to the fleets of others and the ideologies of others, mimicking universality, will be the first to stop when that universality withdraws. Just as the marble of Rome becomes ruins and the ideology of the Soviet Union remains as gray apartments, the order of the United States is not eternal. What remains then are ultimately only the people who endure on their own land, in their own language, with their own institutions and their own industries. Whatever that endurance is called, the design must begin before the center completely collapses.