In September 2014, students in Hong Kong spearheaded a protest movement against legislative initiatives by the central government in Beijing that were seen as furthering restrictions on autonomy and full-fledged democracy in the territory. The movement, which became known as “Occupy Central,” renewed a political debate about the nature of political rule in China and the relationship of the central government to its semi-autonomous territories. But it also triggered a debate of a different kind about the relationship between the protesters’ demands and China’s central intellectual tradition, Confucianism. A commentator on Warp, Weft, and Way, a prominent Chinese and Comparative Philosophy blog, asked, “Where are all the Confucians in Hong Kong tonight?” Footnote 1 If Confucianism was, the commentator argued, friendly to democracy, then why did supporters of Confucianism not participate as such in the protests? He reasoned that the protests actually had nothing to do with Confucianism and that the attempt by a well-known historian of China to link them to the Confucian tradition’s emphasis on the duty of intellectuals to criticize government was an attempt to “Confucianize” a debate that was about something else. The commentator pointed to the fact that the central slogan of Occupy Central, “When dictatorship becomes a reality, revolution is a duty,” was not an echo of the Confucian tradition, but rather traceable to Victor Hugo.
What the commentator is picking up on is a broader problem within existing scholarship: while academic work primarily focuses on questioning, rejecting, and offering alternatives to so-called Western categories and concepts, protestors around the world continue to embrace ideas like democracy, freedom, and human rights. Indeed, just as there was nothing peculiarly “Confucian” about the Hong Kong protesters’ slogans and demands, the same is true of the slogans and demands of major contemporary Chinese dissenters, from the Tiananmen protestors Footnote 2 to the human rights manifesto known as Charter 08 to the writings of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Footnote 3 A similar argument can be made about the Arab Spring protests that occurred a few years ago: there is nothing necessarily “Arabic” or “Islamic” about such slogans as “The people want the fall of the regime,” “Bread, freedom, social justice” or “The revolution of dignity.”
Political scientists have been wary in recent years of speaking of universal categories, seeing them as a product of what Susanne Rudolph describes, borrowing from Louis Hartz, as the “American ‘impulse to impose Locke everywhere’ on a world presumed to be eagerly waiting to receive it.” Footnote 4 In comparative politics, the turn away from universals was a reaction to modernization theory, with its prediction of linear progress for all societies according to the (highly acclaimed) Western model. In political theory, it is the long-standing disinterest of political theorists in looking beyond the Western canon that has led to the recent turn towards Comparative Political Theory, which focuses on the study of non-Western texts and authors. The general trend in political science, in other words, has been to theorize difference.
But what if, by completely turning our back to the idea of universalism, we are missing something important? To wit, what about the slogans relayed above? Why should we simply dismiss them as conveying surface resemblances without a deeper connection to reality or, worse, as elite mottos that are unrepresentative of authentic local experiences and traditions? In this article, I argue that Comparative Political Theory (hereafter CPT) is unable to make sense of the protestors’ slogans because it does not offer any language, tools, or approaches to deal with the convergence of normative claims across traditions. CPT assumes, almost as a matter of definition, the divergence between Western and non-Western traditions, rejecting convergence ex ante.
But there is, as a matter of fact, convergence between East and West—the convergence that is produced by that notorious phenomenon, modernity. Here I argue against two charges often made against the idea of modernity: the charge that it is too vague, and the charge that it amounts to Westernization. I show that modernity, understood as a set of material conditions coalescing around the modern state and the international order that sustains it, is not only a useful concept, but that it is also necessary, precisely to make sense of the protestors’ mottos cited above. In short, given that China, as well as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria, are centralized, bureaucratized, industrialized, and sovereign states, just like South Africa, Thailand, and Greece, it makes perfect sense that the slogans of their protestors would be similar. The slogans do not signal the final triumph of Western values. What they symbolize is a common discourse of resistance to political authority that stems from facing common challenges brought about by shared material conditions. Footnote 5
From this simple, and very general, fact follow significant implications for political theory and various attempts to theorize East and West. I divide these into two general categories: interpretive (relating to the study of the history of political thought), and normative (relating to political theory as an “engaged” practice, to use Andrew March’s phrase). Footnote 6 First, the modernity argument provides empirical (and normative) reason to rethink the way we conceptualize the history of political thought such that, when the need is felt for broad-level categorization (for example, for teaching purposes), we ought to move from an East/West division to a modern/pre-modern division. Relatedly, the past of non-Western traditions would be, on this view, relevant in the same way that the past of the Western tradition is relevant: as a counterfactual indication of what things could have been. In other words, the past is a looking glass through which we “moderns” can reflect on our shared predicament.
Second, ideas like Confucian rights or Islamic democracy cannot constitute a real alternative to modern (usually described as “Western”) conceptions of government because, by accepting the premise of the modern state, their advocates are constrained conceptually by its normative, empirical, and discursive confines. Proposals for alternatives ought instead to transcend the sovereign state itself: by doing so, scholars interested in the fate of non-Western societies can join forces with critical theorists theorizing the end of sovereignty, democratic theorists emphasizing the global demos, theorists of global justice, and international relations theorists studying regional and multilayered political arrangements.
I will begin with an outline of the principal ideas associated with CPT and show how, by missing the importance of modernity as a shared phenomenon, CPT scholars reproduce problematic distinctions between East and West. I will then turn to the topic of modernity, fleshing out a view of modernity centering on the sovereign state. I contend that modernity is a shared global condition and that it is not tantamount to Westernization. In the third and last part of the article, I return to the two implications just mentioned, suggesting paths beyond the sovereign state.
Comparative Political Theory and the Methodological Question
The study of non-Western traditions in political theory has been relegated to CPT, and the justification of CPT has turned on identifying its proper methodological terrain. Footnote 7 In the words of Fred Dallmayr, its earliest proponent, CPT is a “mode of theorizing” that eschews both universalism and particularism. Footnote 8 Roxanne Euben has argued that CPT is not only an “argument for” the study of non-Western perspectives, but also “a methodology” for such a study. Footnote 9 Farah Godrej devotes her book, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, to specifying what such a “methodology” consists of, in response to “the relative scarcity of methodological reflection within the emerging field calling itself comparative political theory.” Footnote 10 She argues that, in the study of non-Western thought, it is not enough to simply adopt a “methodological lens: Foucauldian, Straussian, conceptual, intellectual history, deconstructionist, and so on”; these are “often insufficient to understand well the ideas from other civilizations, given the unique challenges these pose.” Footnote 11 She recommends an approach that combines “internal immersion in the lived experience of the text and an external stance of commentary and exegesis of the text.” Footnote 12 In terms of “internal immersion,” Godrej calls for an “interpretive method” in which the texts are not analyzed simply as texts but through “a praxis-oriented existential transformation in which the reader learns to live by the very ideas expressed in a text.” Footnote 13 As illustration, Godrej argues that someone interested in understanding the concept of dharma in Hindu thought would need to experience “the dharmic life Gandhi instituted at his ashrams (community of followers)” and to “insert herself into conversations with and among community members who claim to live by a certain understanding of dharma,” attempting to make sense of these understandings through “methodologies used by anthropologists, ethnographers, or scholars of comparative politics (such as participant-observation, interviewing, or case analysis).” Footnote 14 In terms of the external stance of commentary, Godrej argues for two options, but favors the first: in the first option, the practice of studying a non-Western idea, such as Gandhi’s theory of nonviolence, “brings ideas from non-Western traditions to bear on specific problems and normative issues,” providing “a potentially new answer to a question we have grappled with in Western political thought.” Footnote 15 The second option is the approach she attributes to Leigh Jenco and which she describes as “holism,” in which the only way transcultural understanding can occur is by “attempting to replicate the entire webs of meaning within which it [the text or idea] takes shape.” Footnote 16
Jenco, indeed, rejects the idea that the study of non-Western traditions should merely “decenter” political theory as traditionally practiced. That is, it is not enough, according to Jenco, to show that Western political theory is parochial and that it has no claim to universal truth; rather non-Western traditions should be taken as sources of original theory, not just “case studies” for “existing theories.” Footnote 17 One way to do this is to take seriously not only the content or ideas to be found in non-Western traditions, but also the methodologies of study used by non-Western thinkers. The examples she gives are the interpretive methodologies employed by two Chinese Classicists, Wang Yangming (1472–1528) and Kang Youwei (1858–1927), the former favoring an “intuitive” textual approach, the latter recommending more elaborate philological techniques. Footnote 18 Jenco’s guidelines for recognizing “non-Western traditions as themselves productive of methodological and political-theoretic inquiry” Footnote 19 are otherwise reminiscent of Godrej’s. She counsels “local experiences within a living tradition and prolonged, deeply committed engagement with its canonical texts in the original language,” including “language study, historical research, and fieldwork,” and also the adoption of a “critical insider” perspective, which involves “immersion, illumination, participation in ritual, and daily practices.”
Construed as a call to study non-Western traditions seriously, and a reminder about the extent to which Eurocentric categories, questions, and concerns shape the existing practice of political theory, the preceding recommendations are of course important, and were especially so in providing an incentive, and grounding, for turning beyond the Western tradition. They have helped to legitimate a dramatic broadening of the texts and themes that political theorists and historians of political thought study and teach. If it were not for the work of CPT scholars, texts such as the Analects, the Upanishads and the Muqqadimah, and non-Western thinkers such as Kang Youwei, Sayyid Qutb, and Gandhi, would not have been slowly but surely moving from the periphery to the center of debates in political theory.
I would suggest, however, that the recommendations listed here have perhaps outlived their usefulness. For, ironically, they reinforce the very East-West dichotomy they were intended to overcome by prescribing a distinct methodology for the study of the East. Footnote 20 Why is cultural immersion, for example, necessary for the understanding of the Analects, a text more than two thousand years old? If it is indeed necessary, then why is it not also necessary in the same way for understanding Plato’s Republic? To put the question more broadly, why is it that political theory concerned with the East should look more like anthropology than political theory concerned with the West? Why are not the familiar recommendations concerning close attention to historical and intellectual context as good for the East as they are for the West? Indeed, Jenco herself recognizes, in the introduction to her book on an early twentieth century Chinese thinker, that the study of non-Western political thought can be subsumed within the usual practice of the history of political thought:
It may be possible to formulate an argument that cultural versus historical differences demand alternative modes of engagement, but until that time I will press forward on the assumption that, given proper training, the political thinking of early Republican China is as accessible to me as is that of any other time and place, whether ancient Athens or Florentine Italy. Footnote 21
As Andrew March argues, the study of non-Western authors and ideas should not necessarily pose any methodological challenge to the current practice of political theory, since political theory is already comparative and its historical methods are already sensitive to context. Footnote 22 Devising methodologies for the study of the East commits, according to Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent, the error of cultural essentialism. As they put it, “starting with spaces is not as obvious as those who open an atlas, or those who divide history into exercisers of colonialism and its recipients, may think.” Footnote 23
One potential response to this critique, which draws on the effects of a long colonial history, lies in Godrej’s argument that “Gandhi is alien to us in a different way than Machiavelli is, and Plato’s works may present us with a sense of familiarity that is entirely different from that which we feel when we encounter, say, Confucius.” Footnote 24 On this view, familiarity, or at least an unspoken recognition of the importance of the authors of the Western canon, produces an automatic deference that cannot be presumed in the case of studying non-Western authors, and hence requires an immersive experience to produce it. Footnote 25 Two related points can be made in response to this claim: first, the necessity of ritual and participant observant immersion surreptitiously recreates the dichotomy between Eastern thought as ritualized, unfathomable, exotic, and hence requiring anthropology, and Western thought, as fathomable through thought and reason alone, and hence requiring pure philosophy. In other words, cultural immersion does not produce deference when it is associated with the East as such. Secondly, methodological recommendations about how to study anything beyond the West assume by definition that the “theorist” is a Westerner. For it is presumably “Westerners” for whom Plato and Machiavelli are more familiar than Confucius and Gandhi. And it is thus the Westerner who needs cultural immersion to avoid imposing European categories on his or her studies of non-Western texts and authors. It is the Western political theorists who, according to Jenco, need to be “disciplined” through the study of non-Western thought, and it is their practice that should be “re-centered.”
Why have we been unable to conceive of the theorist as being anything but a Westerner? This is of course related to the sociological make-up of Western academia, where those of American or European birth or citizenship are the majority. But the Westerner is not often identified by birthplace, but by education and socialization. Consider for example Jenco’s argument against Dipesh Chakrabarty, a prominent historian and postcolonial theorist who critiqued, in a famous book titled Provincializing Europe (2000), the predominance of Western categories in the social sciences and the limited applicability of Western ideas (like the Marxist conception of capitalism) to non-European countries (he focuses on India). Because Chakrabarty does not reject Western categories wholesale, Jenco points to the “irony” that he and others who “most insist on the inescapabilty of Europeanized categories … are themselves not of European or American cultural descent” but that it is their “Anglicized (and often overseas) education, not their local contexts or countries of origin, that determine how and to what extent they participate in Anglophone academic debates.” Footnote 26 On Jenco’s view, then, Chakrabarty has basically been Westernized: he has had an “Anglicized education,” which allowed him to participate in “Anglophone academic debates,” which in turn led him to the view that Western categories are inescapable. It follows from this that to find people who can really represent “local contexts” and “countries of origin,” we need to look beyond such education and debates.
But what is “Anglicized education”? Is an education that is done in the English language “Anglicized”? What if the education is not in English, but it involves Western philosophy? What if it does not involve Western philosophy, but it involves Western science? Where do we have to search to find the authentic, un-Anglicized voice of the East? An answer to this question is suggested in Lila Abu-Lughod’s recent book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? The book is a critique of the Western discourse on the liberation of women. Among others, Abu-Lughod critically engages with feminist movements in the Muslim world, particularly Egypt, including governmental and nongovernmental organizations, asserting their incommensurability with the lives of “particular ‘grassroots’ women.” Footnote 27 The latter are the women of one “Upper Egyptian village,” whose “life stories,” according to Abu-Lughod, help us think though “the complex terrain of women’s rights in the Muslim world today.” Footnote 28 Although she argues that there is no such thing as one Muslim woman who represents all, Footnote 29 and that “no one can represent or speak for ‘ordinary women,’” Footnote 30 Abu-Lughod privileges the view of these rural women over, for example, the voice of the “women lawyers” who are “graduates of the Egyptian universities” and who make up the staff of the Cairo-based Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance. Footnote 31 And while she does not explicitly describe the latter as Westernized, the book is set up to suggest as much, since they take part in the global (Western) discourse on feminism.
There is no denying the existence of a schism between elites and non-elites, but is this schism distinctive of non-Western countries, and why are non-elites privileged in non-Western contexts and elites in Western contexts? Isn’t the West, too, characterized by schisms between elite and masses, official and grassroots organizations, and urban and rural groups? If liberal activists are to be treated as spokespersons for Western culture as Abu-Lughod treats them, then there is no reason not to consider Egyptian feminists, or the Hong Kong activists I mentioned earlier, as spokespersons for their cultures as well. The charge of Westernization presumes that there is a much larger schism between elites and masses in non-Western countries than in Western ones, an assumption which is hard to maintain in a world where intra-societal inequality of access to education exists on both sides of the ostensible East-West divide. Moreover, the charge relies on the premise of a pristine Eastern culture, untouched by “Anglicized” education and debates. Yet educational institutions are recognizable across boundaries because social, economic, and political structures also look alike, at least on a very basic level: states that defend their boundaries on the basis of an international standard of sovereignty, while being pierced through by the forces of capitalism; societies centered around cities and industrial production, and divided by wealth inequalities based on private property; regimes that rule or claim to rule through standing laws, and make better or worse attempts to assuage their populations by variously speaking, and acting on, the language of national interest, democracy, and welfare; cultures that aim at literacy, value the sciences, are penetrated through by technological advance, and are divided on the question of religion; and last, but not least, intellectual endeavors to think through, assess, and reform all of the above. This is modernity at play, the topic I will now turn to.
Modernity as a Shared Condition
My central argument is a simple one: the shared phenomenon of modernity should direct our thinking (at least in some crucial aspects) beyond East and West, to avoid the continuing essentialization of East and West in CPT and related fields. My argument relies on a view of modernity as a primarily material and institutional, rather than philosophical or cultural, condition. Footnote 32 My claim is indeed that the confluence of material conditions, alluded to at the end of the preceding section, brings forth intellectual endeavors responsive to these conditions. This argument does not hinge on a strictly materialist understanding of history wherein ideas are always and only determined by material forces. Footnote 33 It only requires accepting the claim that historical conditions make some ideas more relevant and pressing than others.
Understanding modernity as a material phenomenon points us in the direction of processes of industrialization, urbanization, universal education, the rise of the middle class, etc., which can be dated back to the eighteenth century. Most relevant for my argument in this article, given its focus on politics and political ideas, are processes of bureaucratization, centralization, and territorialization embodied in the modern state, “that master noun of modern political discourse,” as Clifford Geertz calls it. Footnote 34
The Modern State
Quentin Skinner argues that the modern state is distinguished from previous state forms by the feature that “it is the state itself, rather than the community over which it holds sway, that constitutes the seat of sovereignty.” Footnote 35 This conception of the state, according to Skinner, developed in Europe between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries during a period of discursive transformations culminating with Hobbes. For, in the fourteenth century, Skinner writes, the Latin term status was usually used to refer to the state of the rulers themselves, which was supposed to partake of the “majestic,” Footnote 36 the prevalent belief being that “sovereignty is intimately connected with display.” Footnote 37 The shift in the meaning of the term “state” started first with Italian republican theorists who introduced the idea of an autonomous political authority that is separate from the rulers themselves, and which holds monopoly over the use of force. Footnote 38 For their part, the monarchomachs (“those who fight against monarchs”) of the late sixteenth century introduced the distinction between legal and natural persons. Footnote 39 Both the Italian theorists and the monarchomachs, however, still equated the state with the community. It is only with Hobbes, argues Skinner, that the preceding trends come together in the idea that the legal person of the state is the one, and only, bearer of sovereignty. Footnote 40
The modern state theorized by Hobbes became the default form of political organization in Europe with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Footnote 41 Its principles have become, with varying degrees of success, norm, law, and reality. Charles Tilly offers a succinct statement of what these principles amount to, writing that “an organization which controls the population occupying a defined territory is a state in so far as (1) it is differentiated from other organizations operating in the same territory; (2) it is autonomous; (3) it is centralized; and (4) its divisions are formally coordinated with one another.” Footnote 42
The characteristics of the state that can be drawn from this definition are territory, sovereignty (which encompasses autonomy and differentiation), and centralization. The modern state holds exclusive control over a defined territory, epitomized by Max Weber’s famous account of the state as holding a monopoly on the use of force. It exercises this control from a clearly recognizable center where its power ultimately resides. It is distinct from pre-modern political entities since the latter, in the words of Gianfranco Poggi, “expressed and extended the particular powers and interests of individual rulers and dynasties” and “lacked those characteristics of intensity, continuity and purposefulness which follow from entrusting such activities to an expressly designated, territorially bounded organization.” Footnote 43 Another way to put this is in terms of “state capacity,” as Graeme Gill does, arguing that one distinguishing characteristic of the modern state is “its capacity to penetrate society institutionally and thereby create the conditions for the effective control over, and governance of, society.” Footnote 44 It is these distinguishing characteristics that (normatively) necessitate, as I will elaborate, specific ways of defending people from state power and, hence, explain the prevalence of shared ideals in both the East and the West.
Another distinguishing feature of the modern state, closely related to the features above and crucial to the argument at hand, is that it is part and parcel of an international order that sustains it. As Poggi explains, the combination of sovereignty and territoriality brings about the fact that “the political environment in which each state exists is by necessity one which it shares with a plurality of states similar in nature to itself.” Footnote 45 By contrast, empires, even when they developed extensive and elaborate bureaucracies ruling over a more or less defined territory (the exemplary case here is the Chinese Empire for most of its existence), “did not conceive of themselves as existing side by side with other such entities and as making up with these a wider system analogous to the states system.” Footnote 46 In other words, sovereignty is not just an internal feature of the state; it is also an external feature, marking out a distinctive world order. In the words of Anthony Giddens, “sovereignty simultaneously provides an ordering principle for what is ‘internal’ to states and what is ‘external’ to them,” which implies “a certain universality” albeit one which was only extended to non-European states after WWII. Footnote 47 Another crucial aspect of this world order is capitalism, which is closely intertwined with the prevalence of the nation-state form; yet, as Giddens has argued, we should not conflate the two. Footnote 48
While the premises of this world order, concerning the role of states and their relationships to each other, are “neither uniform or uncontested,” they have, as David Armitage argues in his recent book, “set the terms of debate for at least a century and a half.” Footnote 49 For example, although he questions modernization theorists’ claim of a sharp break separating pre-modern identities and modern nationalism, Prasenjit Duara also argues that “what is novel about modern nationalism [in India and China] is not political self-consciousness, but the world system of nation-states,” explaining that “the form of the nation-state is sanctioned by a battery of discourses generated from the system as a whole.” Footnote 50
As just mentioned, the principles of the treaty of Westphalia were only made reality outside of Western Europe in the late nineteenth century, and especially with the waves of decolonization after WWII. Both colonialism and resistance to colonialism led to the diffusion of the state model. Footnote 51 As Crawford Young says of the newly independent African states, they took their previous colonial regimes’ “structures,” “quotidian routines and practices,” and, a point I will return to, their “more hidden normative theories of governance.” Footnote 52 But it was not only colonialism that produced modern states in the postcolonial world; the world order itself made it necessary, even inevitable, that they would adopt this model, such that polities that did not experience direct colonialism like China, Iran, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Ethiopia, etc., were also forced to adopt it. Footnote 53
Take the example of Japan: Mark Ravina asks why Japan, which still in the 1850s had two sovereigns (the emperor and the shōgun), no national flag and no national army, transformed into a “nation-state” by 1900. Footnote 54 He locates the pressure towards rapid transformation in the global institutional system: “In a world of nation-states, polities must conform to the rules of nation-states.” Footnote 55 Ravina shows how, during the debates over the adoption of constitutional government in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century, many of its advocates emphasized its importance for Japan’s membership in the international political system; he quotes, for example, Tsuda Mamichi who argued, in 1867, that if Japan adopts the “so-called republican form of the Westerners, then no nation and none of the great powers will be able to discriminate against us.” Footnote 56
In short, given the rules of the game, once the powerful part of the world was made up of sovereign states, the rest of the world had to follow suit. Doing so was not an act of passivity or defeat. William Kurby writes of Sun Yat-sen, the provisional president of the Republic of China, that “there is almost nothing of historically Chinese statecraft in his thought,” Footnote 57 of the leaders of twentieth-century China that they are “cultural borrowers par excellence,” and of the PRC that it is “perhaps the greatest plagiarizer of international forms” among China’s republics. Footnote 58 But would it have made sense for Sun Yat-sen to use historical Chinese statecraft, for Chinese leaders to keep to China’s own traditional culture alone, and for the PRC not to adopt international forms? In the following two sections, I argue that adopting the modern state necessitates adopting a whole “package” that comes with it. In other words, Sun Yat-sen could have chosen to revert to the ancient Chinese thinker, Han Feizi, for guiding his rulership, but it is difficult to see how this would have produced success on any measure.
The Modernity Package
Having established both the defining characteristics of the nation-state and its ubiquity, the next step of the argument proceeds as follows: once the state is adopted as a model, then the range of normative ideas to choose from is limited, since these have to be responsive to the institutional characteristics of the state. Sociologists have recognized this. Saskia Sassen writes of “basic organizational and normative architectures” that have defined the modern state, “especially over the last century,” which “have held together complex interdependencies between rights and obligations, power and the law, wealth and poverty, allegiance and exit.” Footnote 59 Rogers Brubaker argues that “the linked ideas, ideals, and organizational models of nation, state, citizenship, and democracy form a kind of package. This package has a certain common core, underlying the varying adaptations, appropriations, and transformations.” Footnote 60 Chakrabarty’s account is also helpful in seeing why the aforementioned ideas form a “package”:
Nation-states have the capacity to enforce their truth games, and universities, their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the battery of institutions complicit in this process. “Economics” and “history” are the knowledge forms that correspond to the two major institutions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the world—the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state … A critical historian has no choice but to negotiate this knowledge. She or he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, that is, in terms of its self-justificatory narratives of citizenship and modernity. Footnote 61
On Chakrabarty’s view, then, narratives of citizenship and modernity operate as self-justification mechanisms for the state. On the one hand, the suggestion here is that these concepts are enforced by the state itself: it is in the interest of the state, for example, to enforce homogeneity on its people through the framework of citizenship. On the other hand, even states with little capacity to impose their will throughout their territory generate citizenship claims by those living in it. Given the territorial nature of the state, it inevitably brings the people living in it together, at least to some basic extent, through their participation in institutions like the law and the economy, thus producing the demand for formal recognition (a demand that cannot similarly be made by people outside its territory). This explains why the concept of citizenship is necessary to “understand the state on its own terms.”
The way the characteristics of the state described in the previous section are linked to specific normative ideals can be illustrated by going back to Hobbes. For Hobbes, authorizing the legal entity that is the state to rule on people’s behalf is inextricably tied to the preservation of two ideals: liberty and right. While Hobbes grants the sovereign unlimited authority, this authority is granted in the first place—that is, the social contract is established in the first place—for the protection of the right of self-preservation and the liberty to pursue one’s ends. One could find problems with this account, as Locke did, for example, arguing that sovereignty did not require a concept of authorization that cannot allow for its rescinding, but rather a concept of trust that can be withdrawn. Yet these disagreements about sovereignty revolve around disagreements about the degree of right, liberty, and popular rule that can be combined with it, and not about sovereignty and some other set of normative concepts, say virtue, or harmony, or truth.
In short, once the modern state is adopted as a political form, it is only reasonable to press claims on the state using ideas uniquely suited to it, like rights and democracy (and for the state to adopt these, under certain conditions). To go back to the example I started this essay with, what would it have meant to stage a “Confucian” revolt against state oppression in Hong Kong? Would it have entailed the protestors advocating that their leaders practice the Confucian cardinal virtue of ren (benevolence)? Would it have involved a demand for the exercise of ritual practices on the part of everyone involved? The naivety of these suggestions does not stem from any naivety in the concepts of ren and rituals themselves (they would have been perfectly reasonable as concepts for use by government officials to admonish capricious emperors in medieval China); the naivety stems, rather, from the mismatch between these ideals and the institutional context at hand. Put bluntly, there is only one suitable response (albeit one with various manifestations) to modern state oppression, and this response has to deploy the network of concepts that accompanied the coming of the modern state: constitutionalism, law, rights, and democracy. Confucian rituals will not work as a response to modern inequalities, and the Islamic dhimma system will not be a plausible answer to modern multiculturalism. Footnote 62 As Abdullahi An-Na’im argues in relation to Muslim-majority states,
European colonialism and its aftermath have drastically transformed the basis and nature of political and social organization within and among territorial states where all Muslims live today. A return to precolonial ideas and systems is simply not an option, and any change and adaptation of the present system can be realized only through the concepts and institutions of this local and global postcolonial reality. Footnote 63
The contention here is not that everyone in the world wants, or is asking for, human rights or democracy. There have been countless critics of human rights, freedom, and democracy as Western impositions from many corners around the world. Yet it is telling that the debate is precisely about democracy and rights: whether to accept these or not, to what extent, in what form, etc. Furthermore, when democracy and rights are rejected, this is done in favor of accepting and justifying further centralization, bureaucratization, and coercive power on the part of the state, i.e., by erring on one side of the modernity package rather than the other. In effect, the alternative views contend, contra the liberal model, that the state should intervene more rather than less in society: to provide for social welfare (one could think of this as the Latin American model), to defend a certain view of the good life (the East Asian model), or to act on religious maxims (the Middle Eastern model). Most proposals will also build in some guarantees against abuse, in the form of legal limitations on the use of state power and consultations with the people, usually in the form of elections. These, in turn, will get debated on the basis of whether or not they are enough to prevent abuse, with opponents insisting on more rights and more democracy. Footnote 64
For a proposal to be inconsistent with this description, it would have to reject liberty, democracy, and rights without falling back into an argument about the extension of the power of the bureaucratic state (and thus to open itself up to an easy critique on the basis of liberty, democracy, and rights). One potential example is the Islamic State (IS). One could argue that IS, rejecting the legitimacy of state borders and harkening back to a Caliphate system, is not playing the modernity game at all. But IS is in fact the exception that proves the rule. Once IS does conquer territory and has to rule over people, then it does have to start acting like a state—as a matter of fact, this is precisely what is already happening. Footnote 65 And once its does act like a state, we have every reason to expect that its subjects will start demanding constraints on state action in the form of rights and laws. Their demands might be couched in religious language, but the debate will become more and more recognizable as a debate about the limits of state power, rather than as a debate internal to Islam.
Westernization versus Modernity
I have argued so far that since the state as a form was adopted in non-European countries, corollary ideas, like constitutionalism, rights, and the rule of the people, have also become the most plausible ideals with which to make claims on these states. Chakrabarty describes this as a “predicament,” arguing that since “these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of ‘modern’ (European) political philosophy,” third-world scholars are “condemned to knowing ‘Europe’ as the original home of the ‘modern,’” while European scholars do not “share a comparable predicament with regard to the pasts of the majority of humankind.” Footnote 66
But this does not actually have to be a predicament. First, the significance of the claim of “who thought of it first,” as Freeden and Vincent put it, can be exaggerated. Footnote 67 For once the material dimension of history is emphasized, then the belief that ideas are arrived at through sheer ingenuity, regardless of environmental, economic, social, and institutional contexts—let alone that this ingenuity is a mark of the specialness of a “culture”—becomes less and less defensible. In any case, world histories, especially of the longue durée, Footnote 68 show that the West did not always rule, even in the not-so-long durée (not at least until the late eighteenth century on one account). Footnote 69 This alone should chasten any penchant towards Western triumphalism.
Furthermore, Europe was never separate from the rest of the world, and thus did not develop its ideas out of nowhere. In fact, it was precisely its colonial experience that was crucial to the formation of some its ideas. Jordan Branch thus argues, for example, that the idea of state sovereignty arose in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries out of what he describes as “colonial reflection.” Footnote 70 Susan-Buck Morss has shown how Hegel’s “master-slave” dialectic cannot be understood in isolation from the Haitian Revolution. Footnote 71 As Chatterjee puts it, Western normative theory developed in many respects “through violent conflict and the imposition of hegemonic power.” Footnote 72 If one concludes from this that the modern state is imbricated with the colonial experience through and through, Footnote 73 and hence with violence and domination, then this would be a reason to go beyond the state altogether rather than merely reject ideas like democracy and rights. I will turn to this topic in the third and final section of the paper.
In any case, that the adoption of the modern state was a necessary act on the part of non-European societies does not make it a passive one. Footnote 74 The form itself allows for variation such that whatever European societies (found necessary to) adopt need not be replicated as is elsewhere. In other words, “modernity and Westernization are not identical.” Footnote 75 For example, on S.N. Eisenstadt’s argument about “multiple modernities,” although the spread of modernity in Asia and Africa started with the adoption of the territorial state, and consequently its “representative, legal, and administration” apparatuses, it also brought with it “far-reaching transformations in the premises, symbols and institutions of modernity,” particularly a rejection of the “Western formulations of the cultural program of modernity.” Footnote 76 In other words, the adoption of the state and its institutions is an intentional act that involves a margin of interpretation, choice, and adaptation. Footnote 77 Just as there are differences between the forms of government and the cultural landscapes of, say, England and Italy, so there are also differences between those of England and of China, Kenya, or Brazil, as well as within this latter group.
But this margin is not unlimited—this is the crux of my argument in this article. Following Brubaker, I prefer to speak of a single modernity than of multiple modernities. Indeed, as Brubaker argues, the idea of multiple modernities assumes something more “fundamental analytically” called “modernity”; Footnote 78 it is this analytically prior phenomenon, however basic it is, that I am interested in here, providing as it does a perspective from which to recognize commonalities between West and East. As Brubaker argues, the notion of “alternative modernities” is only necessary if we assume a very narrow Eurocentric view of modernity; once our definition of modernity is broad and sophisticated enough, then the importance of emphasizing the multiplicity loses a large part of its force. Footnote 79
The distinction between modernity and Westernization, which implies the possibility of being modern without being Western, has been well understood when it comes to non-Western movements that are critical of the West, which have been shown to be “modern” and to echo the West’s own critics of modernity. For example, Roxanne Euben argues in Enemy in the Mirror (1999) that Islamic fundamentalist thought offers a critique of the Enlightenment mirroring those offered by philosophers within the Western tradition itself. The argument has been made, more generally, that Islamic political movements are quintessentially modern movements, and has been extended to such groups as Al Qaeda, Footnote 80 and most recently, as mentioned above, IS. Footnote 81 But the commonality in discourse between Western and non-Western countries clearly extends beyond the rejection of liberal values, it extends to their acceptance too. Footnote 82 While this has been recognized, the acceptance has been underplayed in favor of its limits.
Perhaps the worry is that positing a single modernity is reminiscent of modernization theory with its “belief that industrialization and economic development lead directly to positive social and political change.” Footnote 83 But the crucial difference between my argument and that of modernization theory in its many variants is that my argument makes no prediction of convergence of regime types or value orientations; it merely elaborates the set of normative claims available given that all states do share features of bureaucratization, centralization, territoriality, etc. I do not posit that by adopting the modern state form, states will also achieve democracy (let alone that they will achieve democracy in the exact sequence or form in which European states did Footnote 84 ); but I do posit that given the nature of sovereignty (namely the concentration of power that it involves and its territorial nature), it is hard to see how a normative account of the way modern states, East and West, should be organized such as to fend off against the abuse of state power can avoid talking about democracy, rights, and constitutionalism.
Second, my argument does not assume secularism as classical modernization theories do. Footnote 85 Charles Taylor has critiqued accounts of modernity that ignore the continuing presence of what can be identified as “the sacred.” Footnote 86 His worry is that these accounts miss much of what characterizes Western modernity, particularly the way it is tied to, rather than totally unmoored from, a spiritual outlook. It is telling that the worry that Taylor has about theories of modernity positing a disembodied, socially unencumbered Western individual is similar to the worry Chakrabarty expresses about how Western categories of modernity gloss, and fail to understand, the modern Indian individual (for example, the practices of sociality of middle-class Hindu Bengalis). In other words, if Taylor is right that we have failed to disentangle modernity and secularism, this is true across cultural lines.
Taylor worries that any acultural theory of modernity fails to distinguish different responses to modernity, in the West and outside, and “imposes a falsely uniform pattern” on these. Footnote 87 My contention is that such an acultural theory is needed precisely to capture the fundamental commonalities between responses to modernity (and to appreciate the exact nature of the differences between them). On such a theory, like the one offered in this paper, religion, ethnicity, and culture matter, but they have to be understood in the context of the material and institutional forces of modernity. Indeed, religions, cultures, and ethnicities have morphed with the advent of the modern state: Hinduism matters, but it matters differently in medieval India than in India today. The Shinto religion is important, but it plays a different role in today’s Japan than in its imperial history. Footnote 88
The main worry concerning modernization theory is the equivalence it draws between Westernization and modernization. To the extent that we can distinguish the two (as I have done in this essay), this worry should be allayed. I turn now, in the third and final part of the paper, to the implications of my argument.
Re-orienting Political Theory
I have argued in this essay that recent work in CPT posits a dichotomy between East and West that cannot capture the significant commonalities created by the phenomenon of modernity, or the universal adoption of what I have described as the “modernity package.” In this third and last part of the paper, I draw out the implications of my argument for the practice of political theory in particular. These are two-fold: first, I argue for a move towards both more global and more local histories of political thought to replace both the prevalence of the Western tradition and the new methodologies proposed by CPT advocates. Second, I suggest that alternatives to the “modernity package” necessitate rethinking the sovereign state as a whole.
Beyond East and West: Global Political Thought
The idea of the Western tradition continues to animate the practice of political theory and the history of political thought, despite the emergence and development of CPT. The critique of the idea of continuity in the history of Western political thought is often associated with Skinner and what has become known as the Cambridge School. Skinner describes the approach to the Western tradition heralded by Leo Strauss as “historical fiction,” Footnote 89 particularly in its emphasis on “perennial problems” to which different canonical authors are seen to be answering. Footnote 90 Skinner argues that “there are no perennial problems in philosophy” but only “individual answers to individual questions, and potentially as many different questions as there are questioners.” Footnote 91 It is telling, however, that while eschewing the traditional approach, the Cambridge School has not actually moved beyond the confines of the “Western tradition.” Indeed, Skinner’s three-volume Visions of Politics is concerned with the Roman tradition, the Renaissance, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the relationship between these. In other words, the distinct accounts of various canonical thinkers still coalesce into a larger narrative, even if not a unidirectional one. As Paul Ricoeur argues in relation to Michel Foucault’s thesis that epistemological breaks separate time periods in Europe, such discontinuity itself becomes part of the narrative, wherein “tradition” can be characterized by the interplay between sedimentation and innovation, continuity and change. Footnote 92
This implicit tradition, or matrix, relies on a clear sense of who the “us” are who are doing the interpreting. This is the same “us,” i.e., Europeans and North Americans, that, as I argued earlier, CPT operates within, but the quest for self-understanding is pursued in different ways by those who stay within the Western tradition and those who move beyond it. Thus, much work in CPT is concerned with showing “our” contingency by studying the ways in which political values have evolved really differently from “ours,” whether in Asia or in Africa or the Middle East. Skinner, too, considers it part of the aim of the history of political thought to understand “ourselves,” our “local history” and our “contingency.” Footnote 93 But the quest here does not move beyond the confines of the West, broadly conceived. To stay with Skinner, he seems to be primarily interested in the question of how paths that were, as a matter of fact, available to “us” (for example, the Neo-Roman conception of liberty) disappeared, leaving “us” espousing values that were at one point far from accepted (for example, the classical liberal conception of liberty).
Yet, as I asked above, why should “we” always be located in the West? It might be thought that it is the Western tradition that creates “us”; in fact, however, it is the reverse that is true. As is widely recognized, traditions are not given. Mark Bevir argues that tradition is “a set of understandings someone acquires during a process of socialisation” Footnote 94 and the practices involved in this process “always represent the culmination of a larger historical process.” Footnote 95 In other words, the Western tradition is a product of its time and place, its creation an intellectual and political intervention.
As Amartya Sen does, one can wonder whether it is in fact true that “the West was the West long before it was modern.” Sen attributes such a view to Samuel Huntington, contending that the evidence for it “is far from clear.” Footnote 96 Different accounts place the rise of the idea of the “West” and of “Western civilization” in the eighteenth century, Footnote 97 in the middle of the nineteenth century, Footnote 98 and in the turn of the twentieth century. Footnote 99 It is beyond the scope of this paper to give an account of the rise of the idea of the Western tradition, but it is arguably traceable to some time between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, in response to the growing identity between European states brought about precisely through the processes of modernization that I have described in this essay (the state form, the world order, colonization, industrialization, etc.). Indeed, in his account of what he calls “the myth of the tradition,” John Gunnell links the creation of the idea of the Western tradition by such theorists as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Sheldon Wolin to their post-WWII diagnoses of the malaises of “modernity and its conception of science and politics.” Footnote 100
This means that, once the shared elements brought about by the phenomenon of modernization are recognized, once the “malaise” is seen as shared, then it is hard to maintain the idea of an encompassing “we” as “Westerners.” Put differently, there is no reason to a priori discount various responses to modernity occurring outside of Europe and the United States. To give one example, Andrew March’s work is concerned with the challenge faced by Muslims in non-Muslim countries, and the question of whether an “overlapping consensus” on the terms of societal cooperation could exist between Islam and liberalism. Footnote 101 March describes his work as “engaged” CPT, and its engagement, even urgency, stems precisely from new political realities (the increasing presence and assertiveness of Muslims in Western Europe and the United States). Footnote 102 One way to think about the question of citizenship of Muslims in Europe is to see it as arising from the encounter between two distinct traditions of thought (liberalism and Islam) with incommensurable political visions (liberal democracy and an Islamic state). But another way to look at the question is to see it as the site for thinkers from the two traditions to engage in the same activity, namely to grapple with the questions raised by the phenomenon of pluralism: John Rawls and the Morocccan thinker Abdallah Laroui are both very much engaged in the challenge of reconciling Islam and liberalism. Put differently, the challenge of pluralism in a democracy is a challenge that all live and lively traditions face today, including liberalism itself. By simply shifting the emphasis towards the shared and global nature of the challenge, we also shift the emphasis towards the shared and global nature of the response.
It follows that, if we reconceptualize the “we” of the history of political thought as “moderns” rather than “Westerners,” then the “they” are the pre-moderns, not the Easterners. It is this “they” that can then be used to provide us with a frame of reference for understanding and evaluating our modern condition. In other words, the pre-modern past, whether of Greece or of Mexico or of Morocco, serves a similar function of reminding us of paths we did not take. This involves recognizing, as Chris Goto-Jones puts it, that “the past of all countries is becoming our own past.” Footnote 103 If, in other words, a central dilemma of the modern age is, as mentioned above, the place of religion in a secular society, then the “they” are our non-secular predecessors, the medievals, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, whether in Samarkand or Venice or Baghdad. If the central dilemma is the status and coherence of the idea of the “nation-state,” then various ideas about local and other political arrangements in the past would be relevant to look at. Studying “them” can offer us what Skinner says the history of political thought offers, a counterfactual for what things were in the past and thus could have been in the present, what routes we did not take and why, the possibilities that modernity buried.
This means that a more global political theory will treat texts and authors from the past two or three centuries as valuable reflections on our global predicament, and everything before as offering a sense of the alternatives we did not take. The idea then is to study Confucian thought not only to understand China, and Hindu thought not only to understand India. As Jenco argues in a recent article, if we reconceptualize the genealogy of the history of political thought such that non-Western traditions fall “within” it, rather than outside of it, this encourages political theorists to see non-Western authors “as think-partners who help us to develop a practice we see ourselves as sharing with them.” Footnote 104 In short, the study of the past, whether in the West or the East, will accomplish what Skinner has argued should be true of the history of political thought: it teaches us that what “we may be disposed to accept as ‘timeless’ truths may be little more than contingencies of our local history and social structure,” which is tantamount to discovering “a general truth not merely about the past but about ourselves.” Footnote 105 In other words, studying past thinkers, Western and non-Western, accomplishes the task of “escaping, not from reality, but from the presuppositions of modern Western theory,” as Stephen Salkever puts it. Footnote 106
One might respond to the preceding by arguing that the modern/pre-modern divide is no more convincing than the East/West divide, that the confluence of material conditions I have alluded to operates at too high a level of generality, that the differences among modern countries are too big to speak of commonalities, and that there is still more continuity within traditions than among them. A few comments can be made in response to these worries. First, my aim in this article is not in any way to offer a universal theory of politics. I do not deny the vast array of differences among countries, social movements, political actors, etc. All that is needed for my argument is the recognition that these differences do not line up along an East-West axis: there is no reason to assume, at least a priori, that non-Western countries have shared problems (say, ethnic tensions) that Western countries do not have, or vice versa. In fact, it is telling in this regard that it is almost impossible to know where to draw the line between East and West in the first place: where would Russia fall? Or Brazil? Or even Japan?
Nor do I intend to offer a philosophy of history. The argument should not be taken to suggest that the only way to do history is to divide the world up as modern versus pre-modern. Nothing in my argument is inimical to a third option: local history, which can be associated with a region (Xinjiang), a country (Italy), or an area (Latin America). Neither do I mean to discount all continuities, though it is important to note that continuities themselves are often the product of a self-conscious choice on the part of the living to hold on to the past. As Marx famously put it in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, it is precisely in revolutionary epochs that the living “conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” Footnote 107 In any case, whether the past is a structural force or serves as mere ideological cover, what is needed for my argument is only the recognition that if continuities exist, then they must be demonstrated empirically, rather than taken as given, and, relatedly, that the past does not play a different role in the East and in the West.
Ultimately, my argument is not so much that there are no vertical continuities across time, but rather that there is reason to emphasize horizontal ones across space. In other words, if a default matrix is needed (which must be the case, since it would be difficult to explain otherwise why courses, anthologies, books, conferences, etc. continue to be organized around “the West”), then it should be a pre-modern/modern matrix, rather than an East versus West matrix. In addition to the empirical reasons to favor this division adduced above, there are normative political and philosophical reasons for doing so. These reasons for emphasizing the global dimension are similar to those offered by proponents of CPT, Footnote 108 but my claim is that the temporal approach, centered on modernity, better addresses these concerns than current CPT approaches.
The political argument is related to the phenomenon of globalization. Footnote 109 While it is true, as Godrej argues, that the burden to familiarize themselves with other traditions has been heavier on scholars in non-Western countries, Footnote 110 the pressure to transcend cultural boundaries has also increased in the West because of globalization. On Fred Dallmayr’s optimistic view, globalization today has led to the decline of the “Eurocentric world view of the past” and the “rise of a global arena in which non-Western cultures and societies are increasingly active participants in shaping the future of the world.” Footnote 111 For him, the emergence of CPT as “a mode of theorizing that takes seriously the ongoing process of globalization” Footnote 112 is the intellectual ramification of this political development. While Dallmayr is probably overoptimistic, it remains the case that globalization creates the need to engage in cross-cultural inquiry. As Roland Bleiker puts it, “The dilemmas that currently haunt world politics are far too serious not to employ the full register of human perception and intelligence to understand and deal with them.” Footnote 113 In a recent article, democratic theorists Melissa Williams and Mark Warren move in this direction, suggesting that globalization “opens up new possibilities for democratic mobilization and responsiveness through the formation of transnational and potentially global publics.” Footnote 114 For these “global publics” to be “genuinely inclusive,” Williams and Warren argue, they require serious attention to “cultural differences in social and political imaginaries,” i.e., moving beyond an exclusive focus on Western countries and turning to contemporary non-Western political thought. Footnote 115
The philosophical argument simply stems from what can best be described as cosmopolitanism. It can be derived from the interest in fulfilling the conditions identified by Charles Taylor as necessary for meaningful cross-cultural normative judgment, namely “elaborating a common language,” “developing a common set of practices,” and thus “growing together as civilizations.” Footnote 116 It will not be easy to change the intellectual worldview that political theorists start from, the tradition that they consider their own, before educational and other formative institutions start propagating a more inclusive idea of what “our” heritage is, and who “we” are. Footnote 117 But this is precisely where the importance of the study of non-Western thought comes in, and where the modern/pre-modern approach is crucial: the more non-Western texts and authors are integrated into the canon of political thought, not simply as others with their own problems, but as part and parcel of the endeavor of thinking through political concepts, challenges, and issues (i.e., as part and parcel of political theory as such), the more likely it is for a global identity to take shape, and the more a global identity takes shape, the more it makes sense to speak of a global tradition. The argument is circular, but the circle is not a vicious one. It simply describes the way in which interpretive practices and the conceptualization of tradition affect each other. Indeed, on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of tradition, the traditions we inherit are not “simply a permanent precondition,” one that would require us to devise proper methodologies to sift them out in the process of interpretation. Instead, we “determine” tradition and contribute to its “evolution,” in the act of interpretation and understanding. Footnote 118
Rethinking Sovereignty
The second main implication which follows from the argument I have offered in this article is that alternatives to what are often described as “Western” forms of government (and which I prefer to describe as “modern”) are not real alternatives unless they reject the “modernity package” as a whole. More specifically, given the centrality of the modern state to this package, as I have argued above, the quest to transcend the prevalent norms of government necessitates rethinking the modern state, i.e., rethinking its sovereignty.
On some views, sovereignty is already being weakened by the forces of globalization. Wendy Brown argues that this had led to the decoupling of sovereignty from the state, with states persisting “as non-sovereign actors” and characteristics of sovereignty reappearing in “the very transnational domains of powers that the Peace of Westphalia emerged to contain within or subordinate to nation-states: political economy [i.e., transnational capital flows] and religiously legitimated violence.” Footnote 119 Yet sovereignty remains strong enough to act, in Patchen Markell’s words, as “a potent representation within the modern political imaginary,” and its effects on “the formation of political subjects” remain powerful. Footnote 120 One could even argue that this is particularly true of postcolonial societies for which sovereignty remains an especially important embodiment of newly acquired independence and equality in the international order. Indeed, as Edward Keene argues, what is new about the current state of international affairs is not that we are moving beyond the Westphalian order, but that the Westphalian order has been extended beyond Europe. Footnote 121 The call for rethinking sovereignty can thus be said to be premature in relation to non-Western states that have not quite had the chance to enjoy it yet. On the other hand, what they have actually made of sovereignty in the few decades since its achievement is not especially promising. Kurby argues in relation to China that “governments have been much more successful in defending territory and sovereignty—for which international recognition would be forthcoming—than they have been in erecting stable political systems that enjoy domestic political legitimacy.” Footnote 122
Many of the existing proposals for alternatives to the so-called “Western model” have kept to the state, but combined the state form with an appeal to tradition. Proposals for Confucian democracy and Islamic states take this form. Footnote 123 Given that these alternatives accept the state form, i.e. accept the idea of a centralized, territorially defined, sovereign state, they should be considered, according to the argument offered in this article, alternatives within, rather than outside, the dominant model. Just as European states exhibit various forms of government (for example, Germany operates according to the model of a corporatist state, while the US system leans towards a non-interventionist one), Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern states have adopted (and their intellectuals have advocated adopting) various models of government. Chinese intellectuals have thus, for example, favored federal and meritocratic political systems in China, drawing on Confucian ideals of merit, Footnote 124 while Muslim intellectuals have advocated for participatory models based on the Islamic concept of shura. Footnote 125 These proposals also typically involve some acceptance of ideas of law, democracy, and rights.
As I have argued above, this acceptance is only as it should be, given the context. If, however, the need is felt to move beyond the dominant norms of the present, then the attempt should be to go beyond the nation-state. Some theorists have been advocating such a move, Footnote 126 but the proposal remains primarily the purview of the literature on global justice and democratic theory. Footnote 127 As Williams and Warren argue in the essay cited earlier, the debate around “the future of democracy under conditions of globalization” and the debate around CPT “have not been in conversation with one another,” although they are both “explicitly framed as responses to globalization.” Footnote 128
Today’s most (in)famous experiment for moving beyond the state form is perhaps the European Union, and one might thus worry that the attempt to transcend sovereignty is also a European idea, hence bringing us back full circle to Western hegemony. A few remarks can be made in response to this worry: first, in line with the argument for global political theory offered in the previous section, tracking what is East and what is West in a world where many concerns (such as inequality, violence, anomie, religious fundamentalism, etc.) are shared is unhelpful, and normatively problematic. If the concern to transcend the state form is common between Europe and Asia, then so much the better for the likelihood of its success.
But in any case, as Peter Katzenstein argues, Asia’s regionalism has deeper historical roots than Europe’s. Katzenstein writes that Asian regionalism revolved around China, whose “military and economic predominance and intense cultural exchanges across borders allowed for a combination of formal hierarchy and informal equality.” Footnote 129 He explains that it was “suzerainty,” rather than sovereignty, which defined the China-centric regional order, and that while the system officially favored China as the supreme power, “in practice, as in the institution of tributary trade, these exchanges were profitable for the weaker party, and in some instances they occurred on the basis of equality.” Footnote 130
Regional arrangements were also favored during the anti-colonization movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These took the form, among others, of federative attempts in South America, Footnote 131 Africa, Footnote 132 and the Caribbean. Footnote 133 The interest in unearthing these experiments has stemmed from the desire to show that the nation-state was not necessarily the political form that postcolonial movements aspired to in the first place. Footnote 134 On the argument advanced here, the adoption of centralized, territorial states by postcolonial societies was made inevitable by the modern international order of states, notwithstanding attempts to the contrary. This said, the history of federations can be instructive, both in its motivations and in its failures, in rethinking modern political arrangements.
The idea here is not to go back to Asian regionalism, or to the proposals advanced by Aimé Césaire, Eric Williams, or Simón Bolívar. As Skinner argues, “rather than looking for directly applicable ‘lessons’ in the history of philosophy, we shall do better to learn to do our own thinking for ourselves.” Footnote 135 Yet here, as in the argument for global political theory above, the idea is to use the past to help us rethink the basic assumptions on which the modern world operates. It is not surprising that Hedley Bull refers to different attempts at rethinking the state system as the “new mediaevalism,” within which he includes regional orders such as the EU, given that the idea of “overlapping or segmented authority” is reminiscent of “mediaeval Christendom.” Footnote 136 Bull is skeptical that such phenomena as regional movements, transnational organizations, and private international violence have actually led to the transformation of the state system, since they still operate within the constraints of this system (just as one could argue, as I did above, that a movement like IS is attempting to become a state, notwithstanding its declaration of a Caliphate). While this skepticism is warranted by the current state of affairs, it underscores the enormity that the task of rethinking sovereignty requires, rather than its impossibility in principle.
Rethinking sovereignty would not only involve rethinking it upwards, towards a global or regional level, it would also, by implication, involve revising it downwards, towards the local level, thus creating a system of multilayered sovereignty. Here again it might be instructive to think of the paths that were not taken with the advent of the nation-state: the way local communities, villages, and provinces operated alongside each other before they were mobilized in a centripetal direction. Since the modern state “adapts, reorganizes and even recreates these older representations,” Footnote 137 it would be self-defeating at best to assume that we could just retrace our steps into the past. But, given how difficult it is to use mere abstraction to unmoor ourselves completely from the presuppositions of our world and imagine something wholly different, the past acts as help to pull us away from these presuppositions.
In any case, it is beyond the scope of this essay to offer a proposal for exactly how to rethink sovereignty; rather, my aim is simply to underscore a central implication of my argument concerning modernity, namely that, since modernity is a package, it presents itself as a take-it-or-leave-it option. Proposals for Confucian democracy or Islamic democracy stay within the parameters of this package. On my view, this is not normatively problematic, especially if we avoid calling this package Western and rather emphasize its modern dimension, and if we move towards a more global understanding of political theory as a discipline. Given however that the modern state is seen as problematic from many angles, whether because of its historical entanglement with colonialism, or because of its dismal record in many African and Middle Eastern states, then it is arguably better to direct our thinking toward a new form of government, rather than to wait for the state to shed its violent past and succeed at creating peaceful and prosperous societies.
In the meantime, however, when people in Hong Kong clamor for democracy, it is not helpful to describe what they are engaging in as Westernized discourse, let alone false consciousness. To raise the specter of imperialism whenever familiarity or commonality is identified is descriptively and normatively misleading. This is not to deny that power differentials continue to structure inter- and intra-state politics, but to suggest that overcoming the discourse of “us” and “them” is potentially the more promising response to domination. After all, it is in many ways the constant concern with sorting out what is Western and what is not that replicates an imperialist discourse. This is what we should move beyond.
