Universal, uniform, common
The post-1945 international order rests on a discreet equivocation. Its foundational documents — the U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration, the Bretton Woods architecture, the WTO regime — speak the language of universality. They do not say "this is what the victorious powers of the Second World War wished to install." They say "this is what is owed to all persons, all states, all economic actors, in virtue of their being persons, states, economic actors." The equivocation is between describing a particular order and describing the universal-as-such. For most of the order's lifetime, the equivocation went unchallenged because the dominant powers and the language of universality were sufficiently aligned that no one needed to ask which they were defending.
That alignment is now under strain, and the equivocation is becoming visible. Chinese officialdom is the most prominent of the actors making it visible, but it is not alone — Indian, Brazilian, South African, Turkish, and Saudi voices have made adjacent moves. The standard form of the move is to point out that the institutionalized universal carries a recognizable origin and a recognizable bias, and to propose that the order be re-read as a particular configuration that has overclaimed.
The standard liberal-universalist response is that this is a bad-faith attack: the values are universal even if the institutions are imperfect; their universality is not impeached by the contingency of their first articulation. There is a partial truth in this response. There is also an evasion. The bad-faith reading of the Chinese counter-claim is too cheap, and the evasion is the failure to distinguish the universal from its impostor.
This is the territory Jullien's De l'universel, de l'uniforme, du commun opens. It is, in my view, his most directly applicable book to the U.S.–China question, and the least likely to be read on the policy side because it requires conceding ground that the dominant Western frame does not know how to concede.
The three terms
Jullien distinguishes three terms that the standard universalist usage runs together.
L'universel is the Western intellectual construct: a claim that holds across all instances regardless of locality, relation, or history. It is the form of mathematical truths, of the Kantian moral law, of the human-rights person. As an intellectual ideal it is not a Western tribal possession; it is a tool any tradition can use. As an institutional practice it has, historically, been generated by Western traditions and exported under their seal.
L'uniforme is the descendant the universal produces when it gets industrialized. The shopping mall, the international airport, the corporate brand standard, the Brussels regulatory template, the IMF structural adjustment package: l'uniforme is the universal's genuine offspring once it has to be administered at scale. It looks like the universal but is its degraded form, in which difference is not transcended but merely flattened. The Western critique of globalization, when honest, is a critique of l'uniforme; it is rarely allowed to land because the defenders of l'universel hear it as an attack on l'universel itself.
Le commun is what Jullien proposes as the genuine alternative, distinct from both. Le commun is what can actually be cultivated as shared across genuine difference. It is not asserted prior to the encounter (that would be l'universel); nor does it dissolve the encounter into sameness (that would be l'uniforme). It emerges, slowly, from the mutual labor of distinct configurations that recognize the écart between them and work across it without erasing it.
The three terms are not synonyms with shaded differences. They are three different operations. Confusing them is the central failure of the post-1945 order's self-understanding, and the central failure of the counter-discourses that oppose it.
The post-1945 order claimed l'universel and produced l'uniforme
The Universal Declaration is, in its drafting history, a remarkable document. It involved careful negotiation across delegations from radically different traditions, and many of the most pointed objections — from Confucian, Islamic, and indigenous-Latin-American perspectives — were taken seriously enough to shape the text. The drafters knew they were not transcribing a pre-existing universal; they were trying to compose one. The document's subsequent career, however, treated it as if it were the transcription of a pre-existing universal, and the institutions built on top of it have largely operated in that key.
The genuine yield of the post-1945 order, where it has produced yield, has been closer to le commun than to l'universel: shared norms cultivated over decades through often-painful negotiation across genuine difference, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, and never simply assertable as already-shared. The order's official self-description as universal has obscured this real achievement and made it less defensible. When the Chinese state objects that "universal values" is code for Western particulars, the only honest answer is that what the order has actually produced, when it produces anything, is the cultivable common, and the order would be on stronger footing if it described itself accordingly.
Chinese counter-claims overclaim in the other direction
The PRC's counter-discourse on universalism has its own confusions. The standard move is to oppose "Western values" with "Chinese values," and to assert the latter's parity or superiority. This presupposes that values come bundled by civilization — that there is such a thing as a coherent set of "Chinese values" and a coherent set of "Western values," and that the relevant question is which set should govern.
This is, by Jullien's own argument in Il n'y a pas d'identité culturelle, a category mistake. Cultures are not identities; they are resources. The Confucian classics, the Daoist canon, Mahayana Buddhism, the legal codes of dynastic administration — these are repertoires available to thought, not bundles owned by an ethnic-state. The Chinese counter-claim, in its strong-state form, treats them as identity-property, available for export only in branded form, and unavailable for actual common-cultivation across the écart with non-Chinese partners.
This is not, on the Jullien reading, a more authentic alternative to Western universalism. It is the same operation in mirror image: the assertion of a particular as if it were already universal, the rejection of the actual labor of producing the common, and the exploitation of the resulting confusion for political ends. When PRC official language proposes a "community of common destiny for mankind" (人类命运共同体), the formulation in fact points at le commun, but is regularly deployed in ways that import l'uniforme — the soft hegemony of a particular configuration claiming to speak for shared humanity.
The error is symmetric to the post-1945 order's. Both sides confuse the universal with the uniform; both sides resist the harder, slower work of le commun; both sides claim already to possess what would have to be cultivated.
What le commun would require
A relation organized around the cultivation of le commun would have specific characteristics that the present U.S.–China relation lacks.
It would treat the écart as productive rather than as a problem to be solved. It would not aim at convergence (we will both eventually believe the same things) or at clash (we are simply opposed and one must win). It would aim at the slow generation of shared norms across genuine difference, with each side bringing its own resources without claiming that those resources are already universal. The norms generated would not belong to either side; they would be common in the strict sense — products of the relation, not exports from one party.
It would distinguish, in any specific dossier, what is actually common-cultivable from what is not. Climate, public health, certain dimensions of AI safety, certain norms of nuclear behavior — these are reasonable candidates for le commun, because the underlying problems are shared and neither side's preferred solution is available without the other. Other dossiers — the political organization of each polity, the values that each makes constitutive of citizenship, the aesthetic registers each privileges — are not candidates for le commun in any near-term sense, and treating them as such produces fake agreements that collapse on contact with reality.
It would also concede the point that the relevant agents on each side cannot easily concede. Liberal universalism would have to admit that the universal it administers is partly l'uniforme, and that the genuine universal it serves would be better served by humility about its own particular origins. Chinese state-civilizationism would have to admit that "civilization" is a resource and not a property, and that its particular configuration is one configuration among others, with its own contingent origin and its own characteristic gaps. Neither concession is forthcoming under current incentives. Each is the price of a relation that could become productive rather than merely costly.
The size of the gap and the size of the labor
It would be wrong to end on a hopeful note that pretends the labor is light. Jullien's bet on le commun against both l'universel and l'uniforme is a bet that runs against the dominant institutional incentives on every side. The infrastructure of the post-1945 order, the political economy of contemporary Chinese state-building, the media cultures of both polities, and the academic incentives of comparative work all reward the easier moves: the assertion of universality, the proclamation of identity, the satisfying clash, the sentimental reconciliation. None of them reward the patient cultivation of common norms across genuine and unsoftened écart.
Whether anything will be made of le commun in the U.S.–China relation in the coming decade is a real question with no settled answer. The point of the framework is more modest: to give a name to the work that would have to be done, distinct from the easier operations that present themselves as substitutes. Without the name, the work cannot be intentionally undertaken. With the name, it remains hard.
Concepts touched: universal, le commun, écart, fécondité, resources, 仁 ren, moral law.