The Revolt Against Western Dominance

There are broadly two ways in which a global order might come into being. One is via the coming together on more or less equal terms of a series of regionally-based systems, whether made up of states, empires, or other political groupings. The other is by the global dominance of what was originally a regional system. It is this latter model that stands behind global order in the twentieth century, with the expansion of an originally European international society on to a global scale—first, through the globalizing force of capitalism and the immense transformative impact that it has had on the regions and societies that are drawn into a deepening system of exchange and production relations; second, through the emergence of an often highly conflictual international political system, which, as Halford Mackinder argued, came to see the entire Earth as a single stage organized for the promotion of the interests of the core powers of that system;Footnote ² and third, through the development of a global international society whose institutional forms (the nation-state, Great Powers, international law, spheres of influence) were globalized from their originally European context in the course of European expansion and the subsequent process of decolonization.Footnote ³

Alongside early twentieth-century discussions of the impact of the industrial revolution and economic imperialism there ran a continuous preoccupation with moral, cultural, and civilizational factors. These played a crucial role in determining the status of “great nations” and who was to count in the international pecking order. Within Europe, Marx, Mill, Hegel, and many others had all believed in a hierarchy of nations. For all these thinkers it was axiomatic that only some nations possessed the necessary moral character for greatness and for playing a historically progressive role; and that the West alone represented rationality, progress, and universal history.Footnote ⁴ It was in relation to the non-European world that differentiation and hierarchy were clearest. Hence the widely-held belief in the concept of civilization and in a hierarchy of races; hence the elaborate debates as to the principles, criteria, and “standards of civilization” by which non-European states might be accepted as sovereign members of the “society of states” or the “family of nations”;Footnote ⁵ and hence the idea of Europe as the unique site of a universal and universalizing modernity, in which, as David Ludden suggests, the economic divergence between Europe and the rest soon became a “global cultural phenomenon.”Footnote ⁶

A central part of the problem of global order in the twentieth century revolved around the struggle of the non-Western world, the Third World, or (later) the Global South against these structures and relationships of inequality. To be sure, both recent historiography and postcolonial theory have complicated our understanding of what the rise of the West involved and how Western dominance should be understood. But what Hedley Bull termed the “revolt against Western dominance” was central both to patterns of peace and war and to understandings of international and global justice.Footnote ⁷ For Bull, this “revolt” unfolded through a series of struggles—for equal sovereignty, for racial equality, for the end of empire, for economic justice, and for cultural liberation. Moreover, the broad direction in which history had been moving through the twentieth century seemed clear. By the 1970s empires had all but ended; the United States and USSR were experiencing serious limits to the utility of military power in Vietnam and Afghanistan; and Western capitalism was in crisis. Commentators pointed to the diffusion of power and the challenge posed by the Third World to Western order; to the tensions within the capitalist core, as Keynesian orthodoxy unraveled in the face of social conflict, low growth, and high inflation; and to the way in which North/South cleavages were shaping the politics of new global issues, such as the environment, resource scarcity, and nuclear nonproliferation—as well as to how these cleavages were prompting a call for greater international justice.Footnote ⁸

By the end of the 1970s the dominant response to these challenges crystallized around a determination to re-assert U.S. and Western power. One major response was to foster, encourage, and enforce an aggressive phase of liberal globalization, especially of financial globalization. And yet it was precisely the intensification of economic globalization that helped to create the conditions both for the successful emerging economies of today and for the current challenges to U.S. and Western power and authority. The other central feature of the U.S. and Western approach was to revive a policy of active and aggressive interventionism across many parts of the developing world. Again, while this may have been a successful element in the eventual victory of the West in the cold war, it also helped to foster, or deepen, or shift the character of many of the conflicts that are proving so intractable to Washington today, especially those in relation to the Islamic world. Seen in terms of both these responses, the “long 1970s” become more important in understanding where we are today while the end of the cold war rather less so.

But this longer-term continuity was disguised by the apparent nature of post-cold war international society. In the 1990s global order was widely understood through the lens of liberal internationalism or liberal solidarism. Globalization was rendering obsolete the old Westphalian world of great power rivalries, balance of power politics, and an old-fashioned international law built around state sovereignty and strict rules of nonintervention. Bumpy as it might be, the road seemed to be leading away from Westphalia—with an expanded role for formal and informal multilateral institutions; a huge increase in the scope, density, and intrusiveness of rules and norms made at the international level; an ever-greater involvement of new actors in global governance; a move toward the coercive enforcement of global rules; and fundamental changes in political, legal, and moral understandings of state sovereignty and of the relationships among the state, the citizen, and the international community.

The West had won the cold war. Those states of the old Third World that had previously challenged the Western order would now become increasingly enmeshed, socialized, and integrated within it. The challenge of the Third World had been tamed, if not rendered obsolete. The nature and dynamics of power were changing. Many argued that soft power would now outstrip hard coercive power in importance and that concentrations of liberal power would attract rather than repel or threaten. Just as the example of a liberal and successful European Union had created powerful incentives on the part of weaker and neighboring states toward emulation and a desire for membership, so on a larger scale and over a longer period a similar pattern would be observed in the case of the liberal, developed world as a whole. A new raison de système would emerge that would alter and ultimately displace old-fashioned notions of raison d’état.

Yet, viewed from today, this picture seems far less secure. We can point to a large number of factors that have pushed global order back in a broadly Westphalian direction. These have included the renewed salience of security issues in global politics, the re-valorization of national security (especially in the United States), and a renewed preoccupation with the costly and frustrating business of fighting wars; the continued or renewed power of nationalism, no longer potentially containable politically or analytically in a box marked “ethnic conflict,” but manifest in the identity politics and foreign policy actions of the major states in the system; the renewed importance of nuclear weapons as central to the structure of regional security complexes and in the construction of great power hierarchies; and the quiet return of balance-of-power strategies as both a motivation for state policy (as with U.S. policies in Asia) and as an element in the foreign policy of all second-tier states. As has been widely debated in the academic literature, this has tended to take the form not of hard balancing and the building up of hard power, but rather soft balancing either in the form of attempts to explicitly delegitimize U.S. hegemony or to argue for alternative conceptions of legitimacy.

Moreover, as the 1990s progressed it became clear that economic globalization fed back into the structures and dynamics of a Westphalian state system rather than pointed toward its transcendence. The state as an economic actor proved resilient in seeking to control economic flows and to police borders as well as in seeking to exploit and develop state-based and mercantilist modes of managing economic problems, especially in relation to resource competition and energy geopolitics. Most significant, the very dynamism and successes of liberal globalization were having a vital impact on the distribution of inter-state political power—above all toward the East and parts of the South. The financial crisis fed into these changes, undermining Western claims to technocratic and normative legitimacy.

It is, of course, possible to see these developments simply as international relations returning once more to its “Westphalian norm”—the return of history and the end of dreams, as Robert Kagan would have it.Footnote ⁹ But it is more accurate and more helpful to face up to the complex, hybrid, and contested character of international society—a society that faces a range of classical Westphalian challenges (especially those having to do with power transition and the rise of new powers), but one that faces these challenges in a context marked by strong post-Westphalian characteristics (in terms of the material conditions of globalization, the changed character of legitimacy, and the changed balance between the international and the domestic spheres, even in large, introspective societies).

Shifts in power have given rise to much skepticism within the United States and Europe as to the capacity of large emerging states either to lead or, more modestly, to assume a “responsible role” within the Western-led liberal international order. There is frequent frustration with the failure of the “good BRICS” to stand up and be counted.Footnote ¹⁰ On this account, large emerging powers should no longer hide behind their colonial past or their previous position as members of the Third World or the Global South. As The Economist recently noted, “The salient feature of the Third World was that it wanted economic and political clout. It is getting both.”Footnote ¹¹ The ever greater heterogeneity across the developing world and, above all, the power of today's emerging developing states makes any residual reliance on ideas of the Third World or the South wholly redundant. Many with such a view have called for major emerging powers to jettison claims for special treatment or special status, arguing that in terms of the trading system these powers should “graduate” from the developing country category; that in terms of climate change they should not hide behind the Kyoto Protocol's idea of “common but differentiated responsibility”; and that in terms of humanitarian intervention such states as India, Brazil, and South Africa should externalize their own domestic democratic commitments. In other words, they should no longer use relative weakness, historical grievances, or developing country status as an “excuse” to evade assuming their “responsibilities” as major powers.Footnote ¹²

Shifting Understandings of Justice

Debates about power shifts and emerging powers have become ubiquitous. But their implications for global justice and for the ethics of a connected world remain understudied. Justice matters in its own right. But it also matters because a stable and peaceful order needs to accommodate both shifting power and competing conceptions of justice.

Debates within the West on global justice moved through the post–cold war years in two broad directions. First, liberal theorists reacted strongly against the notion of state-based claims for distributive justice and against the so-called “morality of states” that had characterized theory in the 1970s.Footnote ¹³ Cosmopolitanism was clearly about achieving justice for individuals; it was about what “we” in the rich world owed distant strangers. More broadly, the reconstitution of the hegemony of the so-called liberal “Great West” set the agenda of much normative debate. This agenda included a newfound openness to intervention, which was apparently freed from the power-political and ideological distortions of the cold war years and now had the potential to serve a much broader range of liberal purposes; a focus on accountability and the need to find ways of holding the obvious power-holders of the day responsible for their actions; and—given the apparent triumph of liberal democracy, combined with the deepening of globalization—a normative focus on applying Western liberal political principles to a global scale and toward the idea of global democracy. Within academia there was an enormous growth of work on distributive justice, especially by those who sought to deploy Rawlsian approaches to the global level.

Most of the Western liberal work on global justice saw the post–cold war dominance of the United States and the West not as a problem but as an opportunity to be exploited. If this involved interventionism, paternalism, or even renewed empire on the part of the rich and powerful, then so be it—so long as social justice was being promoted. Anthony Padgen usefully noted the close historical relationship between European cosmopolitan ideas and the spread of empire.Footnote ¹⁴ But for much of the post–cold war period such arguments made little headway. Rather little work on global justice made reference to the self-understandings of the “objects” of justice in the non-Western world. There was very little sympathy with the view that postcolonial nationalism might have a value different from other forms of communitarianism. There was little apparent concern that emancipation into the global liberal order might not be so emancipatory if the terms of entry involved a denial of agency and autonomy.Footnote ¹⁵

The other major development was to shift normative attention away from Southern states and toward social movements and civil society groups within the Global South (such as the post-Seattle protest movements and anti-globalization groups), as well as toward meetings such as the World Social Forum (WSF). The idea that the WSF represented the “New Bandung” captured this shift, away from states and toward different forms of social movements.Footnote ¹⁶ Anti-globalization movements were seen in part as exercising effective political agency and as the most viable means of developing countervailing power in the face of market-driven globalization. But they also became central to a new generation of deliberative democratic theorists interested in bottom-up approaches to tackling unequal globalization and in the pressing need to overcome democratic deficits in global governance.Footnote ¹⁷

The Virtues of Pluralism

The temptation is to see these sorts of ideas as continuing to represent the liberal understanding of what the “ethics of a connected world” ought to look like. Yes, global liberalism might find itself in harder times. And, yes, shifting power can all too easily constitute a fundamental challenge, whether in the form of illiberal versions of religious fundamentalism or authoritarian revival, or in the return of sovereigntist conceptions of international order. Yet the normative underpinnings of the global liberal order remain valid.

But are they? Instead of thinking in terms of “the global liberal order” and “its challengers,” we might profitably explore a wider range of liberal ideas. In particular, we might recover a rather different and more pluralist view of a liberal international order, examine how it differs from current U.S.-centric versions, and explore how it might be normatively grounded. In presenting such a view I do not claim that it “fits” the positions and policies of any particular large, emerging power. However, I do think that: (a) normatively, it is crucial to recognize that there have been, and there continue to be, many versions of liberalism, and to evaluate the policies of large emerging powers in this light; (b) historically, the construction of the global liberal order has been more open, contested, and contingent than some accounts would suggest;Footnote ¹⁸ and (c) rather than conceiving of “challenges” to the liberal order as somehow coming from outside that order, it is more helpful to reject binary distinctions, easy dichotomies, and one-directional teleologies.

The starting place is, of course, the view that a pluralist and multipolar order is actually a morally better system than one in which power is heavily concentrated. This idea forms part of a deep-rooted tradition in Western thought, including in Western liberal thought. According to this tradition, a balance of power “makes freedom possible”; it is a “constitutional principle of international society,” and it is the necessary underpinning of international law and institutions. During earlier rounds of debate on Western decline and on power diffusion, this argument was made much more explicitly than it is today. In 1972, for example, Alastair Buchan was cautious about resurrecting classic notions of balance of power (the “crude sense of countervailing power”), but stressed the importance of a “philosophy of coexistence” and the way in which the “old multiple system” had as one objective “the preservation of the autonomy of its members.” He went on:

Second, there is another very old liberal intuition, namely, that some equality of power, or some capacity to make one's voice heard, is necessary to compel recognition and respect. Of course, a simple capacity to exert power is unlikely to bring about normative approval, and much will clearly depend on the type of power being exerted and on the purposes for which it is used. Justice (as opposed to a paternalist concern with welfare) and a meaningfully shared and grounded conception of rights are not possible in situations of extreme inequality and dependence. As a result, we can never leave unequal power entirely out of the picture. This point can be linked to the importance of agency, particularly as emphasized by republican liberals. Cosmopolitan liberal theory has been strangely silent on the question of agency. Post–cold war liberal discourses on global justice often appear to be discourses about what the rich and powerful owe to the poor, weak, and oppressed. The weak and oppressed appear mostly as the passive objects of (potential) benevolence. Their voices, visions, and understandings of the world are seldom heard or seldom deliberated upon. We might look instead to more strongly republican modes of liberal thinking, given the emphasis of republican liberals on the importance of states as agents, their powerful idea of freedom as nondomination, and their central concern with minimizing alien control. Deliberation is never enough if the political terms of deliberation are insufficient or lacking. As Philip Pettit suggests, the most serious danger posed by international institutions is not that they themselves will exercise alien domination, but that they will fail to prevent different forms of inter-state domination. The legitimacy of international institutions will be seriously weakened to the degree that inter-state inequalities generate asymmetrical bargaining positions and involve the domination of weaker parties.Footnote ²⁰ This is why it matters that emerging developing countries have been able to place a broader range of moral issues on the global agenda, including the importance of representation and of “democratizing” international institutions, the role of differential needs in trade negotiations, and the role of historical and current inequalities in assigning responsibilities within a climate change regime. It matters, too, that major Southern states have been able to lead and facilitate coalitions of developing states.

A third issue has to do with the effective capacity to hold the powerful to account. Liberal principles of political legitimacy are sustained by a combination of moral and strategic purposes. It is of course true that liberal political principles—such as “transparency,” “accountability,” “participation,” and so on—are underpinned in part by purely moral values, such as the values of individual autonomy and equality. But they are devised also to serve the strategic function of constraining—as effectively as possible—abuses and misuses of power by those who wield it without regard for these liberal moral values. Principles of political legitimacy must therefore articulate not only underlying moral values but also the kinds of strategic mechanisms that are required to protect these values. Thus the calls from emerging powers for the reform of international institutions do not rest solely on what resources they can bring to resolving shared problems, or on the degree to which such reforms may provide greater representativeness. They also rest on the degree to which the greater participation of emerging powers may prevent the dominance of special interests and the institutional abuse on the part of the states and interests that are currently the strongest.

Fourth, there is the question of representativeness. There are, of course, enormously complex and unanswered questions as to the proper scope of democratic ideas beyond the state and as to how the core Western values of democracy should be applied to global governance and to global social choices. But there is every reason to believe that giving substance to the democratic idea at the global level may well come to play the sort of critical role in the twenty-first century that the idea of national self-determination played in the twentieth century. Given the diffusion of inter-state power to emerging countries and the broader diffusion of the capacity for political and social mobilization (as evidenced by the Arab Spring), the current distribution of decision-making power is likely to come under increasing attack. Of course, there are multiple problems facing democracy in countries such as India, Brazil, and South Africa. But it is very hard to see how representative legitimacy cannot but involve a far more radical reform of existing multilateral institutions and a reorganization of the seats around the top table of global governance.

Of course, many of the claims about representative and procedural legitimacy made by emerging powers will be instrumental. Any self-respecting realist would expect these states to use the normative potential of the system to increase their power and legitimacy. It is entirely natural that they will use the language of procedural and substantive justice in making claims for a greater role within international organizations (as with India and Brazil in the World Trade Organization and the G20). They will denounce attempts by established Western powers to use international norms to further their own interests—for example, as regards humanitarian intervention. These emerging powers are behaving in essentially the same way as did the revisionist states of the 1930s, exploiting both their power and the moral resources of the system. But governments and societies always tend to see far more instrumentalism in the policies of others than in their own; and while instrumental abuse strains the possibilities of effective consensus, it does not undermine the importance of moral issues being raised. This is in the nature of ethical contestation in a structurally nonideal world.

Major illiberal states raise even harder questions. But in his critique of Rawls, Henry Shue captures the most important liberal reason for insisting that the rules of international society cannot be solely a matter for democratic states to decide upon among themselves. In particular, he criticizes Rawls for focusing his Law of Peoples on the foreign policy of a particular kind of state, and for failing to provide sufficient guidance as to the rules that might shape relations with nonaggressive repressive states, especially those that do not accept Western liberal notions of reasonable pluralism:Footnote ²¹

A fifth issue has to do with intervention and who should be made subject to it. In terms of military or coercive intervention, there are strong historical liberal reasons for caution and restraint. As David Hendrickson notes in this roundtable, it is often classical realists who question the capacity of interventions to bring about more good than evil and who think about the dynamic of unintended consequences—one thinks here of Reinhold Niebuhr in particular. But the difficulties and limits to effective intervention were elaborated clearly by Mill, and the moral case against intervention was nowhere more powerfully stated than by Kant.Footnote ²³ The discourse of emerging countries has evolved considerably from the very rejectionist and defensive stance taken in the early post–cold war years; and many of these traditional liberal arguments for caution can be found in, or can be developed from, the recent statements of large emerging powers.

It is important to recall that traditional diplomacy, including the nineteenth century Great Power concert, rarely involved an absolute prohibition of intervention. It depended rather on: (a) a shared agreement that interventions would not be used to promote power-political purposes (hence, the crucial difficulties posed by conflicts that arise when the promotion of humanitarian norms intersect with geopolitical and strategic goals, such as in Syria and in Burma today); and (b) the shared acceptance of regime legitimacy—not just the survival of powers as powers, but the agreement that the stability of regimes in major states should not be called into question. This implies that the rules by which today's major powers may seek to accommodate each other's interests are likely to be rather different from the sorts of debates that have driven post–cold war discussions about the responsibility to protect. Here the focus would be more on whether it is possible to maintain a liberal order in which action is taken to prevent atrocities while at the same time achieving some degree of power-political consensus on the boundaries and forms of such action.

Shifting power also affects the question of which parts of the liberal agenda should be prioritized. One example concerns the construction of a human rights “history” in which economic and social rights have been marginalized, including their central role within the liberal West (for example, as was the case with the Four Freedoms). Another example concerns the movement of people. There has been very little erosion of the state's political or legal authority to control borders and to exclude. In all other areas of human rights, minimal progress has involved the idea that what a state does at home should be the legitimate subject of international concern and that states should at least have to justify their policies to the international community. But in the area of the movement of people no such progress has been visible. Indeed, there have been growing calls within Western states for the revision or replacement of the core of the international refugee regime, namely, the 1951 Convention. Shifting power may gradually alter this picture: directly, when emerging powers come to demand and impose reciprocity of treatment for their nationals at foreign borders; and indirectly, when these powers raise questions affecting their diasporas (as with the debates on highly skilled labor within trade agreements).

Behind these five issues lie broader and deeper questions of how liberal theory has grounded the sort of cosmopolitan claims to which Western states are at least notionally committed. Jeremy Waldron has suggested that much Kantian-inspired theory has been debated by people who already agree about many of the most central principles of justice.Footnote ²⁴ Equally, it has been easy to adopt a rather empty category of “nonideal” theory and to leave compliance problems, whether legal or moral, to one side when the direction of history seemed so clear and when structural power appeared so clearly weighted on the side of the global liberal order. One of the most important consequences of the emergence of new powers, of new forms of political and social mobilization, and of the broader “provincializing” of the Western liberal order has been the creation of a far greater heterogeneity of interests and values and a far greater capacity for effective contestation.

This may have two sorts of consequences for how we think about global justice. One is to resurrect the case for greater attention to the links between order and justice. On this account, political morality should accept that there will be a recurring (but certainly not absolute) need to give priority of order over justice; that the appropriate standards of evaluation will arise from within the political world itself rather than come from an external legal or moral standpoint; and that politics is all too often characterized by ineliminable conflict rather than reasoned consensus. This view doubts that the maxims of law and morality can ever wholly displace the centrality of political decisions and political judgment. It is deeply skeptical both of the European liberal predilection for global constitutionalism and of the U.S. belief that global liberalism can be best promoted by the effective actions of a powerful and prosperous liberal core.Footnote ²⁵ It is no coincidence that the current contestation of liberalism at the global level is fostering a revival of this tradition of thinking.Footnote ²⁶

The second consequence is to force us to revisit the old eighteenth century concern with the importance of nonparochialism. As Adam Smith puts it:

Although abstract human reason can assist in the search for impartial and generalizable principles of justice, we can never do without “the eyes of other people.” Nonparochialism becomes an essential requirement of justice in a global and interdependent world. This does not mean we should turn our back on the claim of proponents of the liberal international order that they are taking the agenda of the Enlightenment into the twenty-first century. It means, rather, that we might recover the critical spirit of much Enlightenment thinking, including its skepticism about claims to absolute and universal authority, without awareness of history, language, and locality. Kant's original plea for the submission of conflicting views to public adjudication has all too often been turned into the univocal imposition of a standard whose formal impartiality masks its origin in a partial interest.

Of course, the traditional moral reasons for valuing a balance of power (providing space for pluralism, guarding against the oppression of world government, protecting small states) can easily be countered by listing the ways in which including emerging powers more centrally within global governance may make effective multilateralism still harder to achieve: the greater heterogeneity of interests, the lack of cultural or historical solidarity, and the general diffusion of preferences, with many more voices demanding to be heard both globally and within states as a result of technology, globalization, and democratization. It is also undoubtedly the case that today's emerging powers are making moral demands for self-interested and often crudely instrumental reasons. Moreover, room for moral deliberation (as opposed to strategic bargaining) within international public spaces is extremely narrow. Nevertheless, we should not evaluate the challenges to a global liberal order only in terms of either what “we” might be forced to give up or how much “they” can be accommodated or encouraged to act as responsible stakeholders and as effective supporters of the particular kind of liberal order that emerged in the immediate post-1945 era, which was globalized with the end of the cold war. This order is now under challenge—not, it should be noted, primarily from rising powers, but far more crucially because of its own instabilities and intrinsic tensions, as well as the human rights abuses on the part of the United States and other Western states. This challenge will surely lead us to consider as full a range as possible of liberal international orders and the values they seek to promote.

This kind of pluralist pushback is certainly discomforting, especially for those living in states characterized by what Abraham Lowenthal once labeled “the hegemonic presumption.”Footnote ²⁸ A pluralist political ethics has always generated acute moral dilemmas, and these will no doubt be rendered both more common and more acute by the powerful post-Westphalian forces outlined earlier. But the virtues of pluralism need to be evaluated alongside an all-too-likely alternative—namely, that Western liberals, disillusioned with the prospects of implementing their preferred version of global order, come to join forces with the many others who have always seen international life as a morality-free zone.

A modest optimism is perhaps justified if we return to the empirical and if we resist the logic of binary distinctions and easy dichotomies between the “West” and the “Rest.” Of course, almost all discussion of globalization recognizes that its impact is highly uneven, as some parts of the world are incorporated into ever denser networks of interdependence while other regions are left on, or beyond, the margins. Equally, almost all commentators stress the extent to which globalizing forces may produce fragmentation, reaction, or backlash. But to think principally in these polar terms has been to obscure what is most interesting: that, while powerful systemic pressures exist, processes of both change and, more importantly, outcomes vary enormously. The character and intensity of globalizing pressures depend on geopolitical position, level of development, size, and state strength. Perhaps most crucially in very large, enormously complex, fast-developing states, systemic and global pressures come up against powerful inherited domestic structures and historically embedded modes of thought. It is important, then, both to acknowledge and to analyze the systemic pressures but, at the same time, to unpack and deconstruct the complex processes of break-down and adaptation that have taken place, and to do so in a way that pays close attention to the complex struggles for power both between and within emerging societies.

The impact of globalization on emerging states and societies has all too often been conceived in polar terms—incorporation versus exclusion; fusion versus fragmentation; modernizing, liberalizing coalitions versus confessional, nationalist, or Third World-ist counterforces. However, patterns of binary thinking are extremely unhelpful—analytically, normatively, and politically. Instead, we need to understand the relationship between the outside and the inside and to track the processes by which Western ideas of international order and capitalist modernity have been transposed into different national and regional contexts, as well as the mutual constitution of ideas and understandings that result from that interaction. In some cases, perhaps most plausibly China, ongoing integration may well involve a questioning or recasting of the fundamental social categories of Western social thought: state, market, civil society. In other cases we need to be constantly alert to what Fernando Henrique Cardoso once labeled the “originality of the copy.”Footnote ²⁹ And in many places, relations of space and time and belonging have shifted so that “North” and “South” coexist simultaneously within the same geographical space.Footnote ³⁰ The mixed and hybrid character of the global order means that we need to be especially alert to the recombination of old and new not just at the level of global order but also at the level of the state and of state-society relations. And here one might focus less on the BRICs as a group and more on the intellectual and policy “bricolage”—to use Mary Douglas's term—that has been taking place in the emerging states and through which old and new ideas are melded together in ways that are working against these states becoming simply absorbable within some expanded version of a liberal Greater West.Footnote ³¹