The world stage is as uncertain and precarious today as it has been since the Second World War. From the Russian war in Ukraine, bringing Europe and the United States back into Cold War dynamics, and the brewing Chinese-American conflict to the destabilising effect of regime changes in the Middle-East, Syria being the latest addition to the list and the brutal prosecution of the Israeli war in Gaza, the geopolitical equilibrium in operation since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has been decidedly unsettled. Alongside, the singular failure of the United Nations — with a toothless International Court of Justice, a benign General Assembly and a gridlocked Security Council — in securing an end to conflict, let alone secure meaningful agreement on the common and existential challenge of climate change, questions the fate of multilateralism. More insidiously, it has unleashed the mercenary spirit of interest-driven foreign policy agendas. Amidst these confusing and stark developments, what of the ‘ideal of human unity’, the life work of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo? And can we learn something from Sri Aurobindo’s analysis of geopolitics in the early 20th century to make sense of the apparent chaos of world movements today? This article offers some (all too) brief reflections.
The Dream of Liberal Internationalism
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s, The End of History? propelled him to worldwide fame as the poster-boy of hope and optimism. Liberal democracy, he argued, “may constitute the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution 1.” As liberal democratic ideals — of science, liberty and moral progress — covered the globe, the wasteful expenditure of blood and treasure by countries occasioned by the timeless struggles of international politics would be at an end. Their “irrational desire” to be greater than others would be replaced by the “rational desire” to see them as equals 2.
Few would subscribe to this rose-tinted view today. But even we if make appropriate concessions for American triumphalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is striking is that Fukuyama was far from the first, nor will he be the last, to entertain some version of this utopian dream of liberal internationalism. Writing in the 18th century, German idealist Immanuel Kant saw, “a perfect civil constitution”, “a law-governed external relation between states” at the end of human “wickedness and destructiveness” in his, Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (3). In the 19th century, British liberal John Stuart Mill foretold the rising tide of international cooperation and progress, laying out his doctrine of sovereign equality, “the good of no country can be obtained by any means but such as tend to that of all countries 4.” Speaking to the League of Nations in 1919, American President Woodrow Wilson defended the “equality of self-governing peoples, whether they were big or little”, calling his fellows to walk “out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before 5.”
It is another story that liberal internationalism somehow made its peace with imperialism, but come the mid-20th century and these heady currents of Enlightenment optimism, preaching the gospel of reason and humanity, were eviscerated in the totalitarian horrors of the Holocaust. This led British historian Peter Laslett to proclaim in 1956 that, “political philosophy is dead 6.” That is till, so we are told, it was reborn in 1971 in America with John Rawls’ exposition of liberal values in his influential, A Theory of Justice and The Law of Peoples, emblematic of the resurgent optimism of the baby-boomers. But this “resurgent faith”, as Katrina Forrester wrote, was “full of contradictions” — think the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs invasion targeting Cuba, support for Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare in the first Gulf War to name a few instances 7. Its promise was more as a “ghost story”, “a spectral presence” than a reality. Nonetheless, twenty years and a Cold War later, we come full circle to Fukuyama. We can’t seem to help ourselves.
This aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity in the community of nations finds expression in Sri Aurobindo’s, The Ideal of Human Unity. Its persistence in our imagination, Sri Aurobindo argues, reflects our spiritual nature. It is constantly beset by the universal endowment of ignorance and violence encoded in our egoism, yet it remains ever-present behind the thick cloak of darkness and shines through in rare moments of idealism. It is as seductive in its appeal as it is difficult to realise. Modern conditions of globalisation, rationalism and science, in particular, have pushed the allure of this ideal to the fore. Writing in the Arya in the heat of the First World War, Sri Aurobindo noted that “… today the ideal of human unity is more or less vaguely making its way to the front of our consciousness.” This ideal, he went on to say, “… having once made its way to the front of thought, must certainly be attempted, and this ideal of human unity is likely to figure largely among the determining forces of the future; for the intellectual and material circumstances of the age have prepared and almost impose it, especially the scientific discoveries which have made our earth so small that its vastest kingdoms seem now no more than the provinces of a single country 8.” I do not mean to suggest that the “ideal” Sri Aurobindo speaks of in this paragraph aligns entirely with the work of Kant, Rawls and others. Indeed, there are significant internal differences between (and problems within) the “liberal” commitments of these thinkers, each of whom spoke in vastly different contexts. I club them together at the risk of caricature only to stress the common thread of an underlying idealism committed (at least formally) to a rule-governed, equal and free society of nations.
Is this persistent dream of a just and peaceful global order a romantic fantasy? Or is it an insistence on moral and spiritual resilience sure to justify itself? In the current climate of 2025, the precarity of global affairs makes optimism difficult to justify. Consider the cruel irony of the inhuman prosecution of the war in Gaza, courtesy the American veto on the Security Council, the resurgence of Cold War dynamics and proxy battles in Ukraine, the naked threat of American expansionism and economic coercion with the ongoing global tariff war, the fragile state of the Chinese-American conflict, deepening cracks in NATO and internal fissures within the European Union, the concurrent rise of nationalism and populism, the inability of the international community to collaborate on climate change and much more. 
It is difficult to predict how global forces will move in the near future. I would like to suggest however, that Sri Aurobindo’s Works allow us to view global movements within a useful, long-term perspective. This is a perspective that is anchored not in the immediate frictions these conflicts have generated but in the deeper, subliminal forces that drive them. Consistent with Sri Aurobindo’s claim that gross, material events are the effects of subtler causes, it is useful to reflect on the underlying forces that are driving current events:
“Nothing is more obscure to humanity or less seized by its understanding, whether in the power that moves it or the sense of the aim towards which it moves, than its own communal and collective life. Sociology does not help us, for it only gives us the general story of the past and the external conditions under which communities have survived. History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time 9.”
Taking a cue from this orientation, two underlying points emerge. The first is that current global conflicts have their roots in older, unresolved rifts. One way of looking at current events is as part of a rebalancing process with the recrudescence of subtler causes of conflict baked into the global order which keeps simmering under the surface post the Second World War. The second point that is worth reflecting on is that the path to unity in Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary scheme, as also that of others, is through conflict. Current global events are thus an inevitable and expected, if protracted, process by which nations arrive at some semblance of harmony. Let us consider each point in turn.
Back to the Future
The major conflicts we see on the global stage today are not new; nor are they simply a regression to our baser instincts. Present-day conflicts represent the surfacing of long-held and often latent tensions in the world order. Let us quickly canvass present-day conflicts to consider what this means. The original sin of British land carving in 1948 has been festering between Israel and Palestine in the years since. The sense of national ignominy from Mikhail Gorbachev’s capitulation persisted after the fall of the Iron Curtain, with Bill Clinton and his successors in NATO rubbing healthy doses of salt in the wound by their eastward expansion driven by the pathological need for rivalry. American ‘addiction to oil’, as George Bush Jr. put it, has fuelled endless foreign wars and coups, the lasting effects of which have resurfaced in the recent Iranian conflict revolution. The transatlantic rift between America and Europe, now apparent, was decades in the making. The post-war enthusiasm that led to the European compact had to deal with internal divisions one day. The skewed distribution of the benefits of globalisation was waiting for a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson to light the fire of parochialism and populism. The long timidity of Asia, Africa and the Global South was preparing for an assertive return to call out Western hypocrisy, with its ensuing frictions between BRICS and the G10. The skewed policy imperatives of the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organization favouring ‘developed’ countries had sown the seeds of distrust which are now sprouting. The tense choices that lie before the Arab project of modernisation were inevitable, just as the Islamic brotherhood of the Turk, Arab and Persian was always shaky. The stress on local cultures in the face of an unrooted internationalism was bound to swing the pendulum back. The outdated power distribution in the UN, with the spoils going to the victors of the War, was on borrowed time. The American shadow cast over Latin America by the Monroe doctrine was always going to be temporary. Red China’s aspirations to Asia were lying in wait since 1962. The unholy bonhomie of technology and greed, of the military-industrial complex, was always lurking in the shadows of war. The unipolar moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, driven by American might and messianic self-definition, could not logically hold sway indefinitely over the economically and culturally rising rest.
Seen from this perspective, present-day conflicts represent early movements towards a necessary and valuable rebalancing of the world order from the post-war consensus that had long defined its basic architecture. Odd as it may sound, the events we are witnessing today are all movements forward – the first step towards a greater equality is a recrudescence of the tensions festering beneath the surface. Before a new, saner world order emerges, the old will have to be broken completely rather than a cosmetic touch-up at the fringes as was the case for long. Much like the painful process of a doctor debriding a wound, the entire fund of psychological aggression, avarice and egoism thinly veiled by the adornments of diplomatic doublespeak and crafty legal justifications will first need to be excised before we heal.
Consider the following logic — in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the defeat of Germany, “by her own weapons could not of itself kill the spirit then incarnate in Germany 10.” Rather, it would “… merely lead to a new incarnation … and the whole battle would then have to be fought over again” i.e. the Second World War. “So long as the old gods are alive”, he said, “the breaking or depression of the body which they animate is a small matter, for they know well how to transmigrate.” It is with this prism that we can perhaps make sense of current developments. Unless the underlying psychological causes of conflict are resolved, the forces of war and struggle will keep recurring in different forms and their “causes, opportunities, excuses will never be wanting 11”. The ugly spectre presented to us today is a move deeper into the roots of older unresolved conflicts and thus, despite appearances, a move forward. What appeared as a peaceful equilibrium post-1991 was an unsteady patchwork held in place by an implicit and invisible force, particularly in relation to the Global South. As those nations now gather their energies and assert themselves, it will inevitably result in friction.
Unity Through Conflict
Indeed, from this perspective, global uncertainty today, where all the ‘old gods’ have arisen in unison, may be one of those terrible mechanisms of providence where destruction paves the way for peace. This approach is key to Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary explanation of international movements and to Immanuel Kant’s idealist take on internationalism. In his A Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Kant argued that Nature’s method to unity is through disunity, a raising up of opposites for their eventual reconciliation. For Kant, humans have a natural inclination to a “social unsociability”, that is the need to be in concert with others and to antagonise them. This “cunning of nature” is what “coerce[s]” us to become a “moral whole 12.” Kant therefore asks us to “thank nature” (!) for our “insatiable … appetite for power” that drives us to conflict. Without it, he says, we would lie, “eternally dormant … as good-natured as the sheep put out to pasture.” In a similar spirit but from a higher plane, Sri Aurobindo articulates a vision where the Divine in his Līlaa (13) — the unfathomable play of creation — erects a terrible night of Darkness from which the dawn of Light emerges — and we rise in proportion to how low we can sink. “Often the decisive turn”, he suggests, “is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle 14.” The evolutionary process of nature, in Sri Aurobindo’s view, incrementally expands aggregates through a balancing of the twin forces of individuality and community. While “… at the present stage of human progress the nation is the living collective unit of humanity 15”, he wrote in the early 20th century, the development of a sense of internationalism — not abrogating national units or cultural identities, but harmonising their differences — is inevitable in the teleological ordering of nature. In this conflict between nationalism and internationalism, just as tamasic and rajasic forces lead individuals to collide domestically, nation-states too will go through a complex ‘yoga of nature’ before a just international community of nations can emerge. The purification of national egos required in this yoga will be — as Sri Aurobindo’s empirical survey in The Ideal of Human Unity looks to demonstrate — a turbulent and protracted process. We can expect, as recent global events too amply demonstrate, the unpurified vitalism of nation-states to exact a high price in that process:
It may be questioned whether by the time that things are ready for the elaboration of a firm and settled system, the idea of a just internationalism based on respect for the principle of free nationalities may not by the efforts of the world’s thinkers and intellectuals have made so much progress as to exercise an irresistible pressure on States and Governments and bring about its own acceptation in large part, if not in the entirety of its claims. The answer is that States and Governments yield usually to a moral pressure only so far as it does not compel them to sacrifice their vital interests 16.”
As Sri Aurobindo argued in The Ideal of Human Unity, political, economic and administrative association between states — what he called ‘external unity’ — is a necessary but insufficient requirement to arrive at the ideal. We have made significant progress on that front. The deep and critical interlinkages between states on all three levels since the Second World War are apparent. They are a step forward, yet only a preparation for what appears to be a distant period of our evolution when deeper cultural and spiritual oneness — an ‘internal’ or ‘psychological’ unity — can emerge. Sri Aurobindo’s scathing criticisms of the League of Nations and its successor United Nations as de facto oligarchies of the Great Powers, tempered only by the formal concession of sovereign equality in the General Assembly, hold as true today. They remind us that that the “possibility of a democratic federation of the peoples in which the dwarf and Goliath nations, the strong and the weak, the wealthy and the less wealthy … will have … an equal position” is a “vain … hope or dream”, a “far-off possibility” given the current state of our consciousness 17.” Sri Aurobindo counsels us that we should not naively expect this state of global affairs, “… until a probably much later period of our collective evolution 18.” This may be a bittersweet balm to apply to the wounds of the current world stage, yet it provides a perspective that can steady our will to persevere.
This logic cuts both ways. On one hand, the forces of unification are strong. The world is more culturally integrated and economically interdependent today than ever before. No nation is entirely the master of its own fate and circumstances compel everyone to play nice to an extent. For example, the American-Chinese trade relationship, worth over $700 billion, is critical to the domestic health of both. America’s foreign adventurism has come at the cost of piling debt, much of which is owned by China. The need for Gulf oil has led to an otherwise unlikely friendship. Sanctions against Iran and Venezuela have increased energy prices for the sanctioners. US and EU cross-investments stand at more than $5 trillion. Russia’s war has seriously affected its trade flows, just as the end of Nord Stream supplies to Germany increased European gas prices. The Indo-Canadian stand-off over Khalistani extremism may have been considerably worse without the $20 billion trade relationship at stake. And amidst all this, global cultural exchanges at the people-to-people level are incrementally deepening, particularly with social media. Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature supports this optimism. Pinker reminds us that we are on a slow “escalator of reason” — while “the very idea” that global violence and cruelty have rapidly declined in relative terms in the past century “invites scepticism, incredulity and even anger”, the data backs it up 19. Think of the unprecedented availability of information, falling levels of poverty and malnutrition, increases in longevity and healthcare access, a plethora of international organisations at least attempting to moralise international relations. Indeed, consider too, the media façades erected by aggressors to justify their conduct, even if laughably so — hypocrisy after all is the first step in developing an ethical instinct. Before Satya, the golden age, comes Kali, the age of hypocrisy, as Vyasa tells us. That this is not enough to satisfy us is a promising sign of our growing moral sense.
On the other hand, recent events amply demonstrate that we should not underestimate national egoisms. Just as forging federal unions at the nation-state level engendered great collisions in the past three centuries — think the iron fist of British rule and then Sardar Patel in India unifying scattered and warring entities, the machinations of the Irish-Scottish-Welsh admittance to the United Kingdom, the mutual swallowing of European national units till the war-inspired compact was made possible; similarly, the forces of fragmentation at the international level will be a fortiori stronger. In Sri Aurobindo’s framework, these forces too will demand their due. To justify the idealism of something “wondrous, rich and strange” that will “eliminate war and international collisions from our distressed and stumbling human life”, Sri Aurobindo counsels that, “the awakening must go much deeper, lay hold upon much purer roots of action before the psychology of nations will be transmuted 20.” This problem of a perfect civil constitution, similarly for Kant, is “both the hardest and the last to be solved by the human species 21.” Moral — not to speak of spiritual — evolution traces a tortuously long arc and, as in Kant’s time, “we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as moral 22.”
Returning to the question with which we began this article, we would do well to approach the ideal of human unity with both an enduring faith and a robust realism. With all its promise and hope, Sri Aurobindo’s, The Ideal of Human Unity is often neglected, even in the circle of devotees and sympathisers, as a work of hard-nosed, realist political science. What distinguishes Sri Aurobindo’s discussion of internationalism from the kindred works of Immanuel Kant and more recent thinkers like Francis Fukuyama is the recognition of the deep and unforgiving roots of disharmony and conflict at play in the evolution of the Superconscient from the Inconscient. Kant’s idealism and Fukuyama’s hopefulness overestimated the reach of our moral and intellectual capacities to reform our egoistic natures. A far greater churning of our collective subjectivity — to address the subtler forces of conflict — will be required before we can reasonably speak of the ideal of human unity. We have a long road to travel before Sri Aurobindo’s dream of spiritual oneness, or even Kant’s and Fukuyama’s less ambitious hopes of a law-governed global order, can be realised. As we open the Pandora’s box of international relations, the unmasking of latent power dynamics will mean that like Pandora herself, we will have to go through many evils before we find hope.
