I greatly appreciate the seriousness with which Friedrich Kratochwil has engaged my book. Because he agrees with my core propositions—that all culture is heterogeneous, that all political orders emerge under conditions of cultural complexity, and that a key feature of “ordering” is constructing authorized forms of difference—I focus here on the concerns he raises, clarifying several aspects of my project and argument that may have been misunderstood.

It is important to note that On Cultural Diversity is the first of three volumes on cultural diversity and international order, and its primary purpose is to critique the dominant way in which IR scholars think about culture (the “default conception”) and to propose an alternative theoretical perspective. Although this book references new histories that show the heterogeneous contexts in which diverse orders have emerged, it is primarily a work of theory. Detailed historical and contemporary case studies, authored by leading historians, lawyers, sociologists, and IR scholars, are provided in the second volume in the trilogy, Culture and Order in World Politics (edited with Andrew Phillips and currently in press).

With this in mind, let me address Kratochwil’s principal concerns, which center on my use of history. First, my project examines how different historical international orders (the Qing Chinese, Ottoman, and modern) organized cultural complexity through the institution of different “diversity regimes.” My goal is not “to deliver clues for dealing with our present predicament,” but to reframe how we think about this predicament. We need to recognize that our present order evolved under heterogeneous conditions and developed distinct institutional practices for ordering this complexity: the important question today is whether these practices can accommodate new conjunctions of power and expressions of difference. Second, because Kratochwil thinks I am looking to the past for guidance, he asks how the Ottoman millet system can be compatible with a modern diversity regime that emphasizes human rights and how understanding the Qing Lifanyuan system can help us better deal with China. My point in addressing how other orders managed diversity (explored in detail only in Volume II) is not to conjure solutions from the past: it is to reveal the management of diversity as a generic ordering practice and to show the historical diversity of such practices. Third, Kratochwil suggests that constructing viable diversity regimes may be more difficult than I admit. Yet nowhere do I suggest that these major ordering institutions emerge with ease. Indeed, I am at pains to stress that diversity regimes develop in response to particular manifestations of power and expressions of difference; reflect the complex imperatives of control, coordination, and identification; and, because they create cultural and political hierarchies, are always vulnerable to contestation and change.

Kratochwil ends by returning to a theme from his own book, Praxis. He asks how we can “engage in responsible politics by realizing political projects to which ‘we’ are committed,” instead of simply making shallow acclamations of fellow feeling. This is beyond the scope of my inquiry, but my book offers one potentially relevant insight: although “we-ness” can be the product of shared practices, it is very often a political construct, a product of the institutional organization of cultural diversity (a phenomenon explored in Volume II). We may ask, therefore, how contemporary manifestations of such organization encourage (even if they do not cause) the shallow identifications that Kratochwil critiques, while limiting the development of more substantial common purposes and commitments.