During the past two decades, there have been growing calls for broadening the discipline of international relations (IR) by giving due recognition to the history, culture, ideas, and agency of non-Western states and societies. Several aspects of this trend are noteworthy. First, it originated from the growing dissatisfaction by non-Western scholars with the Western (US and European) dominance of the IR field, a dominance that obscures and marginalizes the past and recent contributions of other societies. As such, the primary voices challenging this dominance have been non-Western scholars, sometimes in collaboration with a few Western counterparts. These include not just scholars of postcolonialism and race, but also some working in the English School and constructivist and non-Western/post-Western traditions.
Second, these dissenting perspectives have called for IR scholars to look beyond European and US history, as well as their wellspring—classical Greco-Roman history—in analyzing and developing IR theories. They argue that IR should instead draw from the broader canvas of world history or global history from a long-term perspective, including pre-Westphalian interstate systems around the world. As I wrote in 2014 (“Global International Relations and Regional Worlds,” International Studies Quarterly, 58[4], 2014), Westphalia’s “hegemonic position” has led IR scholars to dismiss or ignore other “international systems and orders with fundamentally different dynamics of power and ideas,” such as the Amarna interstate system comprising Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Hatti, and Mittani that existed around the fourteenth century BCE; “the East Asian international system among China and its neighbors with its deep sense of legitimized hierarchy, and the much more decentered Mandala system of Southeast Asia.” Hence, a truly global field of IR should be founded on a “comparative historiography” of these and other international systems, which is important for understanding not only the past but also the present and future of the world order.
Following from this, international relations and world order should be understood as having not a single point of evolution but rather multiple and often interconnected foundations and trajectories. In analyzing this multiplexity, it is important to study local agency, with agency being defined in both material and ideational terms. One feature of this agency is the ability to select, adapt, and modify external influences, including ideas and institutions from the West that came through European colonial expansion around the world. In other words, although that expansion had a considerable impact in shaping the modern institutions and interaction capacities of non-Western societies, it was rarely wholly accepted; rather, those institutions and capabilities were formed through resistance, contestation, and ultimately localization in different regions of the world. Preexisting cultural and political ideas and institutions of non-Western societies never disappeared: instead, they influenced how the European norms and institutions had an impact, often in a hybrid form. This also caused regional variations in international order-making.
It is thus gratifying to see three recent books that contribute powerfully to broadening our understanding of the foundations of global order. The three books reviewed here vary in terms of their geographic scope. East Asia in the World focuses on East Asia (not including Southeast Asia, except in the context of the Sinocentric East Asian order), whereas Culture and Order in World Politics is the broadest, with case studies from East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East; it also addresses some institutional features of world politics in general, including the liberal international order. The World Imagined falls in between, covering China, Islam, and Southeast Asia in that order. In this review essay, I take up the East Asia book first, then The World Imagined, and end with Culture and Order in World Politics. This is no reflection of their relative importance but simply a matter of following their geographic coverage. In conclusion, I make some general points about how to move forward with the focus on diversity in the foundation of the contemporary world order.
All three books reject Westphalia as a universally applicable model, although it is far from obsolete. All three also explore ideas about and institutions drawn from international orders in non-Western cultures. Although limited space precludes doing justice to the richness and complexity of these volumes, I highlight their key arguments and findings about the origins and foundations of international systems and orders. (I use these terms interchangeably, as the books under review also seem to do).
“Chinese World Order” Redux
East Asia in the World advances some of the key themes that are most associated with coeditor David Kang, a long-time voice against the blind application of Western IR theory to East Asia. The book’s central argument—that, before European encroachment, East Asia had a distinctive international system that operated on non-Westphalian principles of hierarchy and deference (to China) yet provided a reasonable degree of regional stability and prosperity—is not new. But the book adds much nuance, detail, and complexity from an IR perspective to previous accounts, especially the conception of a “Chinese World Order” advanced in John King Fairbank’s 1968 classic edited volume.
To do so, the book is structured around 12 historical “events” (some of which are really processes, rather than events in the normal sense). These range from the origins of the East Asian system (part of a sweeping 2,000-year story beginning with the Qin-Han unification of China from 221 BCE–220 CE told by David Kang and Kenneth Swope) to dynastic changes, wars, and interstate relations including the Ming invasion of Vietnam (1407 CE); the Japanese invasion of Korea (1592–98); and the transition from Ming to Qing rule in China itself in the seventeenth century. The final part deals with “events” triggered by the arrival of Western powers, including the imperialism of both Western and Asian powers (Japan), China’s defeat of the Dutch, the Opium Wars, the opening of Japan, the Philippine declaration of independence and the Sino-Japanese War, and the final breakdown of the Sinocentric order in the early twentieth century. Empirically rich chapters consider momentous events and turning points in the system, ranging from conflict between China, Korea, and Japan in the seventh century CE, through the Ming takeover of China in the fourteenth century, to the Japanese invasion of Korea in the late nineteenth century.
The book further argues that to understand China’s challenge to the Western liberal order today, one has to keep in mind the long shadow of East Asia’s past. Doing so may not necessarily foreshadow war between China and the West; indeed, editors Stephan Haggard and Kang emphatically dismiss this possibility, calling such concerns “misguided” (p. 20). The principal danger facing the region is not hegemonic war but “contending ideational orders.” Citing Ryan Griffiths (p. 20), they note that China’s territorial incursions are not to the core landmass of other sovereign states but to peripheries or “margins of the grid.” Although this distinction is unlikely to impress realists and hardliners, it deserves to be taken seriously in any policy debates about the rise of China and its implications for global order, which routinely cast China as a revisionist and expansionist state.
The book is an outstanding example of how to bridge the “areas studies versus discipline” (in this case IR) divide. It moves effortlessly between the two domains. On the one hand, it highlights the theoretical pitfalls of the Westphalian straitjacket and the consequent neglect of non-Westphalian systems while offering rich East Asian case studies that highlight alternative ways of organizing international order. At the same time, the book also advances area studies approaches. An important aspect of the book is its “regional” perspective, as opposed to examining individual countries on their own, which is commonplace in area studies. To be sure, the “region” here is deeply Sinocentric, given that it includes China, Korea, and Japan. Southeast Asia, especially the part more exposed to Indian influence, is not part of the book, except for Vietnam and the Philippines—but these two countries are only studied in relation to the operation and decay of the Sinocentric order. By placing local or “national” histories in that regional context, the book not only highlights the existence and functioning of an international order but also demonstrates local agency, as opposed to Western agency in creating an East Asian international system.
For an edited book that takes an unabashedly Sinocentric view and makes such sweeping generalizations about its nature and functions, not having a single contributor from China stands out. And anyone sensitive to US-centrism might also be uncomfortable with the sharp contrast drawn by Coe and Wolford (chapter 15, p. 265), between “Historical East Asia” (HEA)’s “closed system” under Chinese primacy and the supposedly open multilateral system created by the United States in providing the public goods of trade and security. Such a characterization pits the US-led system in the post–World War II era against the Chinese-led system before the European powers arrived. The contrast goes too far. One must not forget that the United States had pursued a closed or exclusionary system in the Western hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, before its turn to multilateralism after World War II. The British-led international order, which the United States is supposed to have followed in promoting “free trade,” was hardly an open one either, except in the Anglocentric imaginary. At the same time, whether the HEA was a closed one can be questioned, especially when one considers the participation of China in the larger and largely “open” Indian Ocean trading network. China was a major participant in that network, although it was not and could not be the hegemonic power. In fact, that system functioned without any hegemonic power (the brief Zheng He voyages of the first half of the fifteenth century notwithstanding) to become the most extensive and relatively open trading network in the world before the advent of European colonial powers.
This leads me to a larger point: although the East Asian system did have distinctive features, it was not entirely autonomous or self-contained but overlapped and interacted with the Indian Ocean system. Except for a brief mention of the “age of commerce” in Richard von Glahn’s chapter, along with a map of “Maritime East Asia” (p. 48), the book does not deal with the maritime trade links with the Indian Ocean. Had the book given more attention to Southeast Asia, the limitations of the overly dichotomous conception of East Asia’s “closed system” and the US-centric “open” system, would have been clearer, as would the pitfalls of applying the Anglo-American-centric notion of hegemonic stability to understand and explain East Asia, something Kang has consistently and powerfully warned against.
Imagined Worlds
The World Imagined by Spruyt looks beyond East Asia and offers an analysis of three civilizations: China, Islam, and Southeast Asia. Each of these cases is dealt with in two parts. The first deals with precolonial systems and the second with the encounter with colonial powers. Compared to the other two volumes reviewed here, it has the advantage of the greater coherence that comes with a single authorship.
Spruyt rejects the materialist and positivist view of the international order and instead adopts what he calls a “historical interpretative” approach. The material dimension cannot be a “defining element of order,” because different international systems/orders with similar material capabilities or distribution of power may differ from each other (p. 54). Instead, “international societies are based on collective beliefs” (p. 328), which “determine to which ends material capabilities are deployed” (p. 54).
That ideas and beliefs matter in the making of regional and international orders is not a novel argument. The literature on regions—a term that Spruyt uses interchangeably with “international system” and “international order,” especially in the case of Southeast Asia (p. 258)—has for some time viewed regions, like nation-states, as imagined communities that develop collective identities (Emanuel Adler, “Imagined Security Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations,” Millennium, 26[2], 1997). Similarly, the argument that “the impact of the Western state model continues to be refracted by local interests and cultural beliefs” (p. 346) echoes the well-established literature on ideas and norm localization.
Beliefs matter, but do they matter as much as Spruyt claims? Material capabilities may also determine to which end collective beliefs are deployed. For example, China’s rising material power has led it to revive and deploy its collective beliefs, such as “harmony” and Tianxia (“all under heaven”) in a much more open and robust manner compared to the preceding decades of the same communist regime. Hence, both material capabilities and beliefs play a role in the making of international systems. The challenge is to explore their dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship and to identify under what conditions one may be more important than the other.
The same goes for the book’s distinction (in the Southeast Asian context) between “conscious instrumental design” and “long-term influences of collective identity” (p. 264) and its rejection of the importance of the former. Are these two mutually exclusive? Was Europe’s international order, including Westphalia, devoid of collective spiritual and religious beliefs, both before and after 1648? A wealth of recent literature on Westphalia, most notably William Bain’s Political Theology of International Order (2020), has dismissed this dichotomy. Similarly, Southeast Asia’s supposedly instrumental design in the postwar period was not devoid of collective beliefs, as the book claims (misreading my own work). Hence, making too sharp a distinction between collective identity and instrumental design dichotomizes Europe and the East, presenting the former as rational (and hence scientific) and the East as spiritual or otherworldly.
Spruyt’s use of Hindu-Buddhist concepts to study the international relations of Southeast Asia follows previous work. As he notes (p. 255), my own earlier work on contemporary Southeast Asia “starts with an overview of early modern and precolonial periods to conceptually anchor its modern polities,” using some of the same Hindu-Buddhist notions, especially Mandala and Galactic Polity. But Spruyt adds value to this line of work with a comparative perspective that places Southeast Asian concepts alongside those from Islam and China.
The book is thus a brilliant synthesis of literature on the history of the three civilizations, drawing extensively from insights derived from what traditional IR scholars might ignore or dismiss as “area studies.” This is especially commendable given that Spruyt is not a specialist on any of the regions that he discusses. If this is trespassing (p. xi), we need more such intruders. Like East Asia in the World, which is mostly authored by seasoned area specialists, Spruyt’s is a powerful effort to bridge the overstated dichotomy between disciplinary and area studies approaches.
Spruyt’s case studies of pre-Westphalian international orders noticeably exclude pre-Islamic India. The reason for this exclusion is neither clear nor convincing. Three of the reasons he gives for his case selection (pp. 74– 79)—the cases all present alternatives to the Westphalian model, yet each claimed universal authority; all three developed and relied on distinctive collective belief systems that were key to their functioning; and they allow him to test whether the non-European systems were compatible with the institutions of the sovereign-territorial state brought in by Europeans—could apply to pre-Islamic India. Pre-Islamic India was universalist and was also based on non-Westphalian principles.
To be sure, Spruyt considers the Moghuls. But although the Moghul rulers did acquire Indian characteristics through intermarriage and cultural assimilation with some north Indian Hindu clans, especially the Rajputs, they remained more central Asian than Indian, except toward the Moghul period’s very late stages. They imbibed an Islamic rather than a Hindu-Buddhist collective worldview, which is why Spruyt is right in including the Moghuls under Islam.
India’s exclusion may be due to the fact that the book focuses only on the civilizations of the early modern period that confronted European powers “near equal[ly] or (earlier) even on superior terms” (p. 77). But a number of independent non-Islamic Indian polities—the Marathas, Sikhs, and Vijaynagar, among others—also possessed collective beliefs and saw Europeans as inferiors or equals. They coexisted with and challenged the Moghuls. Some of the early encounters of Europeans were with these groups, as mentioned in the book with reference to the Marathas (p. 309).
The book’s Southeast Asia section does examine Indic Hindu-Buddhist concepts, such as Mandala, which, as previous studies cited by the book had already shown, heavily influenced the precolonial Southeast Asia state-system. But to discuss that region while excluding the original source of these beliefs is, to say the least, ironic. India offers one of the earliest and most developed examples of a non-Westphalian interstate system, paralleling and arguably predating that of China. Writings on classical India are among the earliest works on non-Western international relations, as exemplified in Benoy Sarkar’s 1919 essay on the “Hindu Theory of International Relations” in the American Political Science Review. Moreover, India, one of the world’s rising powers, has now turned to its pre-Islamic beliefs in articulating its foreign policy and international relations.
Unlike East Asia in the World, which discusses interactions and linkages among the polities of East Asia, Spruyt does not discuss such interactions among the three regional systems of China, Islam, and Southeast Asia but covers them as separate international systems. A more connected history of the three such as in the context of the Indian Ocean system, the largest maritime commercial network in the world before European arrival, would have further enhanced the contribution of this book, which is already substantial.
A Pluralistic Universe
Culture and Order in World Politics, the broadest of the three books under review, is the second of a trilogy examining the nexus between cultural diversity and international order. As Hurrell (chap. 6, p. 16) argues, no international order is without cultural foundations, including Europe, although these cultures may vary. This is not an argument for cultural relativism but rather a refutation, in keeping with the other two books in this review, of the assumption that Eurocentric or Westphalian norms are the absolute foundation of contemporary world order as traditional IR presents it to be. Although the main argument of the volume was presented in the first book in the trilogy, this collection builds on the argument by examining the liberal order in more detail. I focus on this volume only, because its arguments about the liberal order and cultural diversity stand on their own.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I provides the context and conceptual framework linking cultural diversity and international order-building. The second discusses historical orders, with two examples: China (in two chapters) and the Ottomans. As in Spruyt’s book, India is missing here, a major gap given that India, as a democracy, would have had much to say about diversity in the liberal order, which is the subject of the third part. A highlight of part III is John Ikenberry’s chapter that starts by noting the pluralistic heritage of the contemporary world order, which he describes as an “amalgamation of orders, built around often inconsistent and competing norms, principles, and political projects.… There are regional realms: European, East Asian, Global South, and so forth…. These various realms and layers of order have built up and evolved over the centuries” (p. 137).
That the modern world order, as noted at the outset, has a multilayered and diverse past should not be startling. But much previous Western writings on IR, including Ikenberry’s own, paid scant attention to non-Western orders, such as those of China, India, and Islam, and when they did, expected them to be subsumed under the US-led liberal hegemonic order. In this book, Ikenberry appears to move closer to his critics, including this reviewer, who had argued that the liberal order was neither hegemonic nor durable. The idea of a hegemonic or dominant liberal order seems incongruent with the deep diversity and multiple layering of the world order’s historical makeup, a point Spruyt’s The World Imagined also supports, especially with the reemergence of China, India, and Islam—societies with histories of building their own “world orders.” The world order of the future, as in much of the past, needs to be viewed as having a pluralistic, multicivilizational, or multiplex makeup.
In an interesting deviation from the standard liberal order narrative, Swidler (chapter 9) draws a distinction between the “global polity” and the liberal order (LO). Although the former is an outgrowth of the latter, the LO has not kept up with the challenges of global governance posed by broader transnational forces.
The volume does not engage some of the prior non-Western scholarship on alternative world orders (Qin Yaqing, Yan Xuetong, and Zhao Tingyang on China and Manjeet Pardesi on India, among others, that Spruyt to his credit draws on) or to work that pointed to the limits and crisis of liberal hegemony (e.g., Inderjeet Parmar). Neither does it cover Africa and the precolumbian Americas, which would provide support for the multiple foundations of the world order, nor deal much with the issue of race and racism, with the exception of Ellen Berry’s (chapter 8) analysis of how domestic forces in the United States, notably the Tea Party and its close cousins in the Republican Party, challenged the UN’s Agenda 21 campaign for sustainable development. This opposition is viewed as showcasing racism within the liberal order, because such multilateral initiatives have the strong cultural imprint of non-Western rising powers. It should be remembered, however, that multilateral sustainable development initiatives also had strong support from West Europeans. If the idea was to acknowledge racism within the liberal order, there would have been plenty of other areas to look at, including slavery and the racist views of Kant, Hume, Churchill, and Woodrow Wilson. Without covering these other areas explicitly and keeping in mind that race is a primary aspect of cultural diversity, a study of cultural diversity and the pluralistic foundations of world order risks sanitizing the liberal order.
The book’s real strengths are its case studies in part IV, which illuminate contestation and change in world order in many areas. When it comes to world heritage, Kalaycioglu shows how the criteria for including any monument in the UNESCO World Heritage list has moved toward recognition and common cultural identity, as opposed to nationalist identifications. Birnbaum, in comparing Pakistan and Israel, shows how the accommodation of religious identity has changed from being coercive or the basis of discrimination to being the basis for state-making. Lorca demonstrates how international law has become more influenced by non-Western lawyers, thereby moving away from cultural exclusion. Missing from this analysis is Siba Grovogui’s work that shows that, even though international law allowed for the independence of colonies, it has also severely limited the autonomy of postcolonial states.
A basic problem in structuring the case studies in this volume is that it views the liberal order (LO) as a paradigmatic, if problematic starting point, which has changed internally to allow a diversity of regimes to emerge with a view to making it more inclusive. An alternative view would be to see the LO as a clubbish byproduct of imperialism and racism (Amitav Acharya, “Race and Racism in the Founding of the Modern World Order,” International Affairs, 98[1], 2022) that thrived by suppressing non-Western nations. In the end, it was those nations’ resistance and demands for alternative mechanisms that forced the LO to open up. Anticolonial and antiracist movements were critical in this process. Any diversity regimes that emerged were less the result of enlightened concessions by the liberal nations than what could be extracted through resistance. Without casting it as such, the liberal order gets a veneer of tolerance and respectability it does not really possess.
Moving Forward
If IR is to extricate itself from Eurocentrism and US-centrism, it must recognize the wider foundations of world order than the Westphalia-based European and US-led orders present. All three books agree with this goal. But it is important for such work to bring in other voices that, like David Kang’s, have been at the forefront of the campaign to expose and challenge Western dominance in the discipline. Such work must engage the often earlier and path-breaking contributions of scholars like Navnita Behera, Pınar Bilgin, Alan Chong, Siba Grovogui, Lily Ling, Carla Norrlöf, Randolph Persaud, Giorgio Shani, Robbie Shilliam, Deepshikha Shahi, Shiping Tang, Arlene Tickner, and Qin Yaqing, and, more recently, Adom Getachew, to mention but a few relevant names. These scholars not only write in English, but are also well versed in IR theory. Whether one accepts names like “Chinese School” and “non-Western,” “post-Western,” or “Global” IR, the contributions of these scholars are too significant to be ignored or glossed over.
The study of historical international relations should cover not just how past non-Western systems differed from the European/Westphalian system, which is well discussed in these three books, but also how they contributed to and shaped the European and world order. Many of the core features and institutions of the contemporary world order that are usually credited exclusively to the West—such as the system of multiple independent states (the interstate system), republican politics (much more widespread in history than democracy), “just war” humanitarian principles, rational institutions (created by human interest and design, not God’s will), economic interdependence, and freedom of the seas—have their origins in other civilizations or were developed independently in different regions before coming together in the modern era. How “the West” learned these ideas and institutions from “the Rest” is a big part of the story of the emergence of the contemporary world order, including the liberal order, which must not be overlooked in any study that seeks to broaden our understanding of international relations.
In addition, non-Western regions or cultures should not be looked at as mere add-ons or case studies to test the validity of Western models like Westphalia, but must find central space in theorizing about world politics and order in their own right. Hence, concepts such as Tianxia, Ummah, Galactic Polity, or Mandala should be treated as organizing frameworks or starting points of volumes such as these, rather than being relegated to case studies to support or critique scholarship largely authored by Western writers.
A comprehensive account of the multiple and global foundations of the contemporary world order is yet to be written. Such a work must have fuller geographic coverage, including classical India, which is missing from all three books here, as well as Africa and the precolumbian Americas. It must cover interactions among regional international systems, including the diffusion and mutual learning of ideas and institutions among them and between them and the West. It must fully account for the imprint of colonialism and racism. It should capture the story of these international systems orders from within or from the perspective of these civilizations and societies and not just through the prism of theoretical lenses derived from Greco-Roman, European, or US history.
We have a long way to go to bring these ideas into IR’s mainstream and so craft a truly inclusive or Global IR. But these three volumes provide a powerful and timely push toward that goal.
