Sovereignty in the Millennial World-System
Salvatore Babones,
University of Sydney
Institute for Research on World-Systems Working PAPER #102 irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows102/irows102.htm
Abstract:
Standard treatments of sovereignty in international relations theory
conceptualize sovereignty as an absolute, unitary condition. Each state is (notionally) the ultimate
constitutional political authority within a given territory. But in a development that has gone unnoticed
by international relations scholarship, this Westphalian system of state
sovereignty has broken down. At least
since 1945 major powers have mutually acquiesced in each others' settling of
the internal affairs of their respective client states, and since 1991 the
United States has exercised a near-global authority to settle the internal
affairs of nearly all nominally sovereign states. This post-Westphalian system closely
resembles the imperial Chinese system of tianxia:
"all under heaven." In the new
American tianxia the United States is
the central state of an interstate system in which the vast preponderance of
interstate relationships are (1) associations with the United States, (2) in
direct opposition to the United States, or (3) modulated by the United
States. Moreover just as was the
practice in imperial China, the United States primarily wages war to settle the
internal affairs of other states, not to impose external conditions on
them. In this new, post-modern
world-system the most important lever of power is influence at the imperial
center. Thus the post-modern citizen of
the world inexorably seeks to become, either metaphorically or (increasingly)
literally, a citizen of the United States.
The emerging liberal, universal, homogeneous state is not the United
States per se, but the American tianxia
writ large to cover the entire world.
Introduction
The Westphalian era is over. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia symbolized the
consolidation of the modern world-system into a coherent system of distinct
states with normatively accepted rules of interaction. A world-system in general is "a social
system that encompasses a closed or semi-closed social world" (Babones forthcoming)
consisting of overlapping cultural, economic, and political systems. The modern world-system (Wallerstein 1974) is
the global world-system that for the first time incorporated nearly all of the
inhabited areas of the world into a single overarching world-economy. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) that ended
with the Peace of Westphalia was one of several watershed conflicts that
collectively constituted a global adjustment to the creation of this global
world-economy: the Ming-Qing transition of 1618-1661 in China, the wars that
created modern continental Russia (1598-1689), and the Iberian colonization of
the Americas. The Westphalian system of
sovereignty can be seen as a response to the vast expansion of the world-economy
during this period, the price revolution it engendered, and the destabilizing
forces it unleashed.
The Peace
of Westphalia is customarily used as a symbolic marker for the emergence of the
"Westphalian" system of state sovereignty. Sovereignty is conventionally defined as "supreme
authority within a territory" (Philpott 2001:16). It is
well-known and well-understood that the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia did not specifically
reserve supreme authority within territories to territorial states, nor did it
lay out the axiomatic corollary that sovereign states could not intervene in
the internal affairs of other sovereign states.
The Westphalian system of sovereignty is merely a normative artifact of
the understandings and practices that emerged from
the Thirty Years' War and its associated peace (Croxton
1999), and norms take time to develop and solidify. Whatever the specific causal channels through
which the Westphalian system of state sovereignty arose, the practice of
exchanging resident ambassadors was established among European states in the
aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia (Wheaton 1836:167) and it is perhaps this
overt act that should be seen as the marking the beginning of the Westphalian
system. After all, the Westphalian
system is a norm, and norms are generated through human interaction.
As has been recognized by constructivist
international relations scholars, the unitary conceptualization of sovereignty
is increasingly at odds with reality. (Biersteker and
Weber 1996 This gap has little to do
with pathological cases of quasi-sovereignty like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Gibraltar,
and the Vatican, nor is it connected with the institutionalist bugbear of the
rise of non-state actors. The
emperor-has-no-clothes gap between sovereignty in theory and sovereignty in
practice is the gross disparity in the character of sovereignty as exercised
by, say, the United States and Grenada.
This gap is not limited to external sovereignty, where it is
well-recognized, but applies to internal sovereignty as well. For James this is not a problem. When a less powerful state alters its
internal affairs in accordance with the demands of a more powerful state,
"the decision to grant such rights or adjust its policy is the decision of
the [less powerful] sovereign state" (James 1999:464). Thus the actions of the less powerful state
can be influenced but its sovereignty cannot be diluted.
If this de jure device closes a window it
also opens a door. James goes on to say of
the less powerful state:
Were
it not sovereign, there would be another entity which, because of its own
constitutional dispositions, would be regularly entitled to have a controlling
or an overriding voice with regard to both the internal and external affairs of
the territory concerned. (James 1999:464)
The term "constitutional" in this
sense refers not to a written constitution (though it may include that) but to
the accepted mechanisms through which political authority is legitimately constituted
within a territory. (Malcolm 1991:17-20)
James's scenario prompts a practical question: is the United States
"regularly entitled to have a controlling or an overriding voice with
regard to both the internal and external affairs of" Grenada, or any other
country? Given James' criterion, the
answer depends entirely on the word "entitled," since the United
States regularly does exercise "a
controlling or an overriding voice with regard to both the internal and
external affairs of" Grenada -- along with many other countries. And though no international legal scholar
would say that the United States is constitutionally entitled to interfere in
other countries' affairs, many non-governmental organizations, media
organizations, policy pundits, human rights activists, and citizens of other
countries regularly call for just such interference.
That last group is crucial. It is often the case that a large and/or
influential segment of the population of a nominally sovereign country actively
calls for the United States (or another country) to exercise "a controlling
or an overriding voice" in the internal affairs of their own country. In such cases it should not be taken for
granted that the citizenry of the country constitutes a single body politic
conferring legitimacy on the existing constitutional arrangement of the
country. Accounting for such cases, the
number of cases of unproblematic constitutional order (and thus unproblematic
sovereignty) among the 193 member states of the United Nations may be
relatively small. Even among powerful,
long-established countries the adherence of domestic political elites to the
formal independence of the domestic constitutional order may be called into
question. When European elites place
their European identity ahead of their national identities, when East Asian
elites request an American military presence or advocate membership in the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, when Central Asian elites maintain their families in
Moscow, when Latin American elites call for American military intervention in
their own countries, and when Chinese elites seek American passports for their
children, they all call into question the bedrock certainty of James's
"key feature" that sovereignty must be a unitary condition, to say
nothing of legal and absolute.
The Westphalian system of sovereign states emerged
as a creature of the modern world-system.
The modern world-system created an environment in which powerful
individuals and organizations required the protection and support of state
entities to survive and flourish in an otherwise anarchic world-economy. (Spruyt 1994) The
formal sovereignty of these states arose out of the everyday practice of their peer-to-peer
interactions. Though James (1999)
considers the exchange of ambassadors to be three steps removed from
sovereignty (after recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations), from
an historical and dramaturgical point of view the exchange of ambassadors seems
more likely to have come first and to have ultimately given rise to the
practice of diplomatic relations and the de facto recognition of other states'
sovereignty. The long and difficult
struggles of Russia (Mancall 1971) and the United
Kingdom (Fairbank 1953) to convince China to accept their ambassadors supports
this point of view. However Westphalian
sovereignty arose, it was certainly exported from Europe to the rest of the
world through the agency of the core European powers. But in an enlarged post-colonial state system
dominated by the overwhelming power of the United States the Westphalian
conceit that interstate relations are fundamentally peer-to-peer relations is
no longer tenable, if it ever was. Now
that the material base of the Westphalian system has disintegrated, can the
phenomenological superstructure be far behind?
Post-Westphalian
sovereignty
In a development that seemingly went unnoticed
by international relations scholars, the Westphalian state system disappeared
some time ago. The crux of the
Westphalian system was that states would have only state-to-state relations
with other states; they would not "reach into" the internal affairs
of other states except through the mediation of the respective state
institutions. Wars between states might
result in the transfer of territory, the payment of indemnities, the and/or the
imposition of miscellaneous penalties.
They might even result in the installation of a new sovereign. But they emphatically did not aim at the
reconstitution of the society of the defeated state. The Thirty Years' War had begun as a
religious war, and the contemporaneous English Civil War had similarly strong
religious overtones. These were two of
the most (self-) destructive wars in European history before the twentieth
century. The Westphalian Peace that
followed may not have been much of a peace, but for some 300 years it resulted
in wars that were in the main fought between sovereign states for state
advantage in an anarchic interstate system.
The central conceit of international relations theory -- that states are
fundamentally external actors vis-à-vis other states -- ultimately derives from
the Westphalian principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign
states. (Lake 2008)
This principle ceased to operate in 1945. To see this, contrast the Treaties of
Brest-Litovsk (1918) and Versailles (1919) with the Yalta Conference of 1945
and its aftermath. The treaties that
ended World War One on both the eastern and the western fronts resulted in the
transfer of territories and the payment of indemnities. They also coincided with changes in
government. But they did not themselves
mandate changes in the constitution of political authority in the defeated
countries. The Soviet government that
ultimately arose in the east was an anathema both to the Germans who
facilitated its success and to the Western allies that defeated Germany. The political constitution of Germany also
changed between the signing of the Armistice in 1918 and the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Yet the new
Weimar Republic still had to accept full responsibility for the Kaiser's war. The fact that yet another German government
renewed hostilities a mere twenty years later had little to do with whether or
not the terms of the treaty were just or fair.
Hitler's Nazi government had the same kinds of Westphalian aims as
Wilhelm II's imperial government did a generation earlier, only more grandiose
and gruesome.
Similarly, the little-remembered Paris Peace
Treaties of 1947 imposed Westphalian-style conditions on the defeated minor
powers of World War Two. Italy and
Finland lost territories and paid reparations -- Italy to Yugoslavia and
Greece; Finland to the Soviet Union. But
they retained their constitutional autonomy.
Not so the main belligerents.
Germany and Japan lost territories, to be sure. But they were also occupied and their societies
radically reshaped by the victorious powers.
The political constitutions of both (West) Germany and Japan were more
or less dictated by the United States, which also imposed major economic
restructuring (including the breaking up of industrial monopolies, land reform,
and mass unionization), changes to school curricula, and formal war crimes
tribunals. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet
Union imposed even more extensive restructuring on the constitutions and
societies of the states that came under its control. These gross violations of Westphalian
sovereignty had been agreed in principle at Yalta and became the basis for the
postwar settlement. It can fairly be
said that the Westphalian system became a dead letter in 1945.
It remains a
dead letter today. In the early
twenty-first century five states have at least some real capacity to impose
regime change on other states -- the United States, the United Kingdom, France,
Russia, and China -- and the first four regularly exercise this power. It might be credited to the foresight of the
architects of the postwar settlement that these five states are the five
permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which in the United
Nations treaty system has the sole international legal authority to authorize
the waging of war. That the United
States and Russia routinely wage war in pursuit of the emphatically
non-Westphalian aim of constitutional change is acknowledged by Lake (2008:55), but the United Kingdom and
France have recently done so as well, albeit with support from the United
States. And interstate war is only one
tool of regime change. The United States
employs a wide range of policy instruments to install and maintain
constitutional orders that accord with its desires in countries around the
world, often in conjunction with its (many) allies. The Westphalian principle of non-interference
in the internal affairs of other states is repeatedly invoked in vain (if often
somewhat disingenuously) by Russia, China, and other states that fall outside
the American alliance system.
The breakdown of Westphalia does not apply
only in the peripheries of the world-system.
Though not threatened by forcible regime change, states in the
established core of the world-system also lack full constitutional independence. James' (1999) test of regular entitlement to "a
controlling or an overriding voice" in the affairs of another country
applies to the rich countries of Western Europe and the Pacific, though more
subtly. Powerful individuals and
organizations insist that their governments remain broadly in compliance with
the preferences of the United States.
For many national elites, continued access to the United States and its
amenities is more important than the sentimental bonds of nationhood. Their preferred course is for their countries
not to come into conflict with the United States, but where their countries'
constitutional arrangements do come into conflict with the demands of the
United States, the demands of the United States generally prevail. In the twenty-first century this has been
demonstrated repeatedly through other states' complicity in American torture
rendition programs, the acceptance of the extraterritorial enforcement of American
law, the observance of financial sanctions imposed by the United States on
third parties, the toleration of American intelligence collection on foreign
soil, the acceptance of American intellectual property standards, and of course
the routine hosting of American military forces.
If the Westphalian system of state
sovereignty truly did arise as a reaction to the emergence of the modern
world-system, the cessation of the Westphalian system may be seen as a reaction
to the dissolution of the modern world-system.
The modern world-system was a world-economy in which the economic system
was too large to be controlled by any one political entity. As a result the world-market was an
impersonal, exogenous force that placed hard constraints on all political
actors, including sovereign states. In
the modern world-system states may have been sovereign vis-à-vis each other but
were not sovereign vis-à-vis the world-market.
The eventual endogenization of the world-market under the control of the
United States started (clumsily) with the Bretton Woods system of managed exchange
rates and limited international trade.
It was temporarily set back by the 1970s oil crises but has now matured
to the point where all peak markets (oil, metals, money) are politically
managed by the United States and its collaborators. More importantly, the highest value economic
activities are no longer concentrated in market sectors at all. The commanding heights of the contemporary
global economy are in areas like telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and
entertainment -- areas that depend on state sponsorship through the protection
of intellectual property. The only state
with sufficient global reach to enforce global intellectual property rights is
the United States. Thus the global
economy is no longer characterized by the dominance of an overarching
world-market. The peak sectors of the
global economy have been endogenized under the political sponsorship of the
United States. (Babones forthcoming)
In this post-Westphalian world degrees of
sovereignty can be gaged by proximity to American power. Only the United States can be said to
exercise full state sovereignty, since only the United States is, practically
speaking, immune to all external "controlling" or
"overriding" voices originating in other states. Outside this American center, three broad,
hierarchical circles of more or less limited sovereignty exist in the post-Westphalian
state system. These might reasonably be
called shared sovereignty, partial sovereignty, and compromised sovereignty.
The closest allies of the United States may
not have any voice in the constitution of political authority within the United
States itself, but they do share with the United States some influence over the
shape of the world-system in which they are embedded. This ring of shared sovereignty consists of the
four major Anglo-Saxon allies of the United States: Canada, the United Kingdom,
Australia, and New Zealand. These four
countries are close collaborators in the project of American global governance,
or to use a less flattering description they are like barnacles on the American
whale. The citizens, companies,
non-governmental organizations, and governments of America's four Anglo-Saxon allies
participate directly in American global governance through their participation
in a common cultural space of opinion formation, their close integration into
the American economy (especially Canada and the UK), and their deep cooperation
with the American security services.
While these four countries are clearly "outside" the United
States itself they are to some extent "inside" the institutions of
American global governance. Their
inclusion in these institutions goes well beyond official intergovernmental
cooperation. For example, while think
tanks located in these four countries have virtually no influence on domestic
politics in the United States, they are closely interwoven with the American
foreign policy community. (Babones 2015)
Other allies of the United States enjoy
varying degrees of partial sovereignty in domestic affairs (subject to
currency, investment, and trade openness) while ceding nearly all decision-making
over foreign affairs. Included in this
category are the continental European NATO members, the East Asian treaty
allies of the United States, and a few other states scattered throughout the
world. These may be the only states in
the post-Westphalian system that more or less fit the Westphalian concept of
state sovereignty as interpreted by James (1999) and Malcolm (1991). They have voluntarily ceded to the United
States the authority to make many of the decisions usually associated with
sovereign authority -- and could in principle seize it back. The fact that the states that govern every
single developed country in the world today have chosen to align themselves,
formally or (in a few cases) informally, with the American military alliance
structure and the broader mechanisms of American global governance suggests
that there may not be much sovereign freedom of choice in this decision after
all. Nonetheless, the formal sovereignty
of the Western European and East Asian allies of the United States is clear. Partially sovereign in the post-Westphalian
system, these might be termed sovereign client states if viewed from a
Westphalian perspective. (Babones 2014)
The remaining states of the world are
subjected to compromised sovereignty: they (often loudly) proclaim the right of
full legal sovereignty but are often unable to make this right effective. Those states that accept compromised
sovereignty suffer peripheralization and economic colonialism. Those that do not accept compromised
sovereignty face strong external push-back and internal pressure for regime
change. From a definitional standpoint
the key fact here is not that these countries lack sufficient power to enforce
their sovereignty (this issue is fully accounted for in James 1999 and Malcolm
1991) but that the constitutional authority of the governments of these states
to govern their territories in the ways that they do is not unambiguously
accepted as legitimate by the populations they govern, and certainly not by
their national elites.
In the new, post-Westphalian state system, many
states -- perhaps the majority of states -- lack full political authority within
their own territorial borders for just this reason. In the developed countries of the West it
would be difficult to find members of the national elite who openly question
the constitutional legitimacy of the states of which they are citizens and
rarer still to find any who seek support from foreign governments and organizations
to assist them in changing the constitutional orders of their countries. The fact that such support is often
forthcoming in less developed countries regularly prompts their states to
accuse the United States (and the "West" more generally) of violating
international law by interfering in their internal affairs. When a state's political authority is not
accepted as constitutionally legitimate by many of its own citizens, including
many of its intellectual elite, and when external states similarly question the
constitutional legitimacy of that state and actively seek to change the state's
political constitution to bring it more into line with their external
expectations, it seems only reasonable to consider the state's sovereignty to
be compromised.
Importantly, it is not only antisystemic
states whose sovereignty is compromised in such a way. All non-western countries host substantial
pro-western political elites. It may be
politically incorrect for a Western author to make such a provocative assertion. Nonetheless, it seems to be the case that (1)
large proportions of the elite citizens of African, Latin American, and
Eurasian countries question the constitutional legitimacy of the political
authority of the states under which they live and (2) many of these very elites
seek Western political interference in the internal affairs of their own
countries. If these two propositions
hold, and if James' (1999) constitutional interpretation of sovereignty
is accepted, the implications for the Westphalian system of state sovereignty seem
unavoidable. The passing of the modern
world-system governed by the ultimate power of an exogenous world-market and
the concomitant passing of the Westphalian state system organized on the
principle of unitary state sovereignty may be cause for sorrow or cause for
cheer. Either way, it is becoming
increasingly difficult in the twenty-first century to file new empirical
realities under the old conceptual labels.
An
American tianxia
The global world-system is in the midst of a
transition from the predominance of the global economic system (a
"world-economy") to the predominance of a global political system (a
"world-polity"). The
particular economic system that dominated the world in the second half of the
second millennium was the market system; thus the late world-economy might be
classified as a "world-market." (Babones forthcoming) Other peak economic systems could be
imagined, and often were. The particular
political system that is coming to dominate the world in the first half of the
third millennium is more difficult to classify.
The Wallersteinian term for a world-system in which the political system
is the predominant social system is a "world-empire," but world-empires
are weakly theorized in world-systems analysis. (Woolf 1990) In any case the word "empire"
itself does not accurately describe the ways in which the United States
exercises authority in the interstate system (Nye 2004) and its use has so many
meanings and connotations in English that it prompts objections from all
quarters (Khong 2013). The term "world-empire" is probably
best reserved for world-systems in which a single state exercises full
political jurisdiction over its entire world-system, such as the Roman Empire
in the first few centuries AD. Another,
less laden -- or differently laden -- term is required to describe the contemporary
world-policy.
The contemporary world-polity dominated by
the United States and its allies is unprecedented in scope but perhaps not in structure. It is a hierarchical polity composed of a
central state (the United States), a small collection of allied states that are
so closely identified with the central state that their military forces,
intelligence services, financial markets,
publishing houses, and intellectual communities are fully integrated with those of the central state (and have been for some
100 years), a large collection of treaty allies that broadly accept the
overarching ideological assumptions of the central state, and an even larger
collection of dependent states that generally accede to the existence of a
hierarchical state system that places them in a subordinate position. A small number of antisystemic states overtly
object to the hierarchical organization of the world-polity, but only three of
these states are strong enough to pursue somewhat independent foreign policies
(China, Russia, and Iran) while the few other antisystemic states are in
practice client states of one or more of these three.
This political configuration is strongly
reminiscent of the Roman world of the late Republic (c. 200-92 BC), with Rome
as the central state, the Latin allies sharing in Roman sovereignty, and
various Mediterranean powers enjoying partial sovereignty in alliance with
Rome, while the three Hellenistic successor states vied with Rome as
antisystemic powers. The structural
correspondence between the two systems is very close. Their trajectories, however, are very
different.
Unlike Republican Rome, the United States is
not (or at least is no longer) expanding its directly governed territory via
the conquest of its neighbors, and the United States is not on the road to
world-empire in the Imperial Roman sense.
Quite the contrary: the emerging American-centered world-system is
near-static in its state borders, with nearly all changes of border since the
end of World War Two consisting of the division of existing political entities
while the external borders of those entities remain intact. The very few external border changes since
the 1945 settlement have either been trivial (conflicts over maritime and
mountain frontiers where few if any people actually live) and/or of
unrecognized legitimacy (e.g., the annexations carried out by Israel and
Russia). The world map has changed
dramatically since 1945, but the borders that existed in 1945 have hardly
budged. In any case most people's
understandings of the world-system structure of the Mediterranean world of the late
Roman Republic are completely overshadowed by their impressions of the
world-system structure of the high Roman Empire. Though the first may have been a world-polity
without being an empire the second was unambiguously an empire and a world-empire.
East Asian history suggests a more
appropriate model. From AD 1271-1911 a
series of three dynasties (Yuan, Ming, Qing) ruled a united China that
dominated East Asia from the disintegration of Genghis Khan's Mongol empire
until the intrusion of European territorial colonialism. Throughout this period China was the central
state of the East Asian political system.
The modern Chinese name for China, Zhongguo, literally translates as
"central state," though it is customarily rendered in English as
"Middle Kingdom." Like China
itself, the political system of which China was the central state historically
did not have a name (as such), since in the Chinese conception of the world it
encompassed the entire relevant world. In
the words of Mancall (1971:3), "the Chinese
state was not a state at all in the conventional meaning of the word, but
rather the administration of civilized society in toto." Chinese scholars were certainly
aware of the existence of other civilizations -- including ancient India (Tianzhu) and Rome
(Da Qin) -- and of course India was
well-known to be the source of Chinese Buddhism. But geographical factors made these
civilizations politically irrelevant to the Chinese governance of the East
Asian political system. (Mancall 1971:7) To
the extent that the political system of which China was the central state had a
name, or at least a label, it might be identified with the Chinese word tianxia ("all under heaven").
Tianxia is an ancient concept in Chinese philosophy
(Yan 2011:43-46) but it reached its highest development as a practical guide to
the governance of a multi-state world-polity under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The Ming dynasty was a native Han Chinese
dynasty that directly exercised what might be called full state sovereignty
over the entire Han cultural area of the time, an area roughly corresponding to
contemporary China minus Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and
Tibet. The founder of the dynasty, the Hongwu emperor, implemented a neo-Confucian civil religion embodied
in a legal code that established the emperor as the embodiment of the mandate
of heaven (tianming)
under which all civilized peoples were to be governed. (Jiang 2015) The tianming concept was not new to the Ming dynasty, but its application
via Chinese law to the entire East Asian world-polity (tianxia) was. Wang
(2013:133) contrasts the Chinese concept of tianxia with the Latinate concept of imperium ("authority"), which is the root of the English
word "empire." He writes that tianxia "depicts an enlightened
realm that Confucian thinkers and mandarins raised to one of universal values
that determined who was civilized and who was not ... tianxia was an abstract notion embodying the idea of a superior
moral authority that guided behaviour in a civilized
world." Whereas the Roman imperium connoted an expressly delegated
political authority to command obedience, the Chinese tianxia encompassed a moral authority that entitled the state to
the obedience of its subjects and suzerains alike.
Those suzerains included three classes of
external sovereigns. To the east and
southeast of China were a ring of organized agricultural states that had
adopted Chinese state Confucianism as a governing principle, accepted the
Chinese astrological calendar (along with its cycle of official celebrations),
and used Chinese as the official language of government: Korea, Japan, the Ryuku Islands, and Vietnam.
These states occupied a position that is in some ways analogous to that
occupied by the partially sovereign developed democracies of today's world. They were clearly incorporated into and
actively participated in the Chinese tianxia. To the south and southwest of China were the
organized agricultural states of (what is now) Southeast Asia: Sulu (in today's
Philippines), Java, the Muslim maritime sultanates, the Khmer Empire, and
Thailand. These non-Confucian states nominally
accepted Chinese leadership and often turned to China for the settlement of
disputes but maintained independent foreign policies vis-à-vis each other. They occupied a position that is in some ways
analogous to the compromised sovereignty of today. And to the northwest and north of China were
a shifting collection of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribal societies, including
Jurchen, Mongolian, Turkic, and Tibetan groups.
Ming China engaged with these groups much as the United States today
engages with failed and conflict-ridden states.
Their chronic problems were to be managed through education in the
manners of Chinese civilization.
The political geography of the Ming tianxia exhibits only minor topical similarities to the political geography of the contemporary American-centered world-polity. Yet the governance structures of the Ming tianxia are strikingly similar. The main institutional mechanism through which the Chinese state managed the East Asian world-polity was the tributary system. In this system, the sovereigns of the other states (and quasi-states) of the East Asian world-polity regularly acknowledged the suzerainty of the Chinese emperor, who in exchange legitimized their rule over their various domains. Khong (2013:9-13) identifies six key features of the Chinese tributary system: Sinocentrism, hierarchy, cultural affinity, non-coercion, diplomatic rituals, and the conflation of the domestic and interstate spheres. Khong identifies close parallels between Chinese and American practices on all six dimensions, but the last dimension is key. In the Chinese tianxia, "the Chinese emperor is the 'governor' of not just China, but 'all under heaven'" (Khong 2013:28), the "paterfamilias of all mankind" (Mancall 1984:38). This implied that the Chinese emperor was ultimately responsible for the sound management of the internal affairs of the non-Chinese states within the Chinese tianxia. As a result, the "divergent interests of each tributary or of groups within each tributary were ... balanced by their common acceptance of the emperor's power to recognize local political authority." (Mancall 1984:39; emphasis added)
Khong (2013:29) draws an explicit parallel between the constitutional role of the Chinese emperor as "governor" of the East Asian world-polity and the constitutional role of the President of the United States as "leader of the free world." Khong does not use the actual word "constitutional" but the relationship is clearly constitutional in the sense spelled out by James (1999) and Malcolm (1991): like Ming China's Confucianism, contemporary America's political and economic principles are embedded in the political authority structures of its allied client states. In the American system, democratic governance and respect for private property rights are prerequisites for admission to the society of civilized states (though not necessarily in that order). In an echo of the external application of China's Great Ming Code to the entire Ming tianxia, the United States today projects outward to the dependent zones of its world-polity a human rights regime that is overwhelmingly tilted toward the protection of the rights of identity groups that are politically mobilized in the United States. The extraterritorial application of statutory American law is widespread, and frequently demanded by elites in subordinate states. (Cabranes 2015) Recent high-profile financial and sports corruption cases have even seen the extraterritorial application of American law in Western Europe.
Writing about the potential for a renewed Chinese tributary system in the twenty-first century, Yan (2011:204) claims that "the idea of sovereign equality among nations has become a universal norm of the contemporary world and it cannot be replaced with the hierarchical degrees of the tribute system." Yet Khong (2013) shows that this is exactly what has happened, albeit with the United States rather than China as the tribute-receiving and legitimacy-dispensing central state. And unlike Ming China, which demonstrated (or bought) its primacy by giving gifts to its tributaries that were of much greater value than the tribute received from them, the United States collects the ongoing tribute of dollar seigniorage while offering nothing of definite value in return. The emerging American tianxia is still taking shape, but already it reaches deep into the psyches of most of the world's educated elites through its preeminence in the universities, in entertainment, in business practice, and on the internet. As in Ming China, where non-Chinese elites "participated in a culture that transcended, and knew no specific reference to, particular boundaries or geopolitical institutions" (Mancall 1984:66), the emerging American tianxia is fast becoming "the common ideological heritage of mankind" (Fukuyama 1989:9). Liberal democracy married to commodity fetishism is no longer the American culture but the world culture. If not the end of history, this does at least constitute the end of an era -- and the beginning of new, millennial world-system.
A
post-modern world-system
The military, economic, and cultural power of
Ming China was unmatched in East Asia, but in general the successive Ming
governments did not seek to expand the territorial extent of the Chinese state
itself. Instead they sought to solidify
traditional state and quasi-state boundaries.
When disputes arose between subordinate states and quasi-states in the
East Asian system, the normal practice was for the aggrieved party to seek a
dispensation from the Chinese imperial center.
The conceit of tianxia was
that judgments from the center should in principle be obeyed at the
periphery. When the rulers of
subordinate states refused to obey the directions of the emperor, the general
practice was to attempt to force a change in the ruler of the offending state
rather than to use force against the offending state itself. Such a change could sometimes be accomplished
through the withholding or redirecting official patents of office -- in
essence, through the use of tools of diplomatic recognition (Mancall 1984:39)
Such spiritual tools were always backed up by temporal power, but the
final resort to temporal power was viewed as a failure of the proper management
of subordinates. Ming China sought to
accomplish via internal interference what other world-polities (notably the
Roman world-empire) accomplished via external coercion. Ming China acted as (forgive the anachronism)
the central state of a post-Westphalian world-polity. The result was a period of extraordinary
order and stability. (Kang 2010)
Similarly, the military, economic, and
cultural power of the United States is unmatched in the world today, but for
more than a century successive American governments have not sought to expand
the territorial extent of the American state itself. Instead they have sought to solidify
traditional state boundaries. When
disputes arise between subordinate states in the American system, aggrieved
parties often seek a dispensation from the American imperial center. When the rulers of subordinate states refuse
to obey the directions of the President of the United States, the general
practice is to attempt to force a change in the ruler of the offending state
rather than to use force against the offending state itself. Such a change could often be accomplished
through economic sanctions, bombing campaigns, or (in the final instance)
military occupation. The spiritual tools
of human rights reports, election certifications, and public pronouncements are
always backed up by temporal power, which is perhaps used more frequently than
it should ... but the system is still young and not yet mature. The United States is able to achieve via soft
power -- "attraction rather than coercion or payments" (Nye 2004:256)
-- the acquiescence that Ming China had to
purchase via subsidies and Imperial Rome had to enforce via conquest. The
United States is now the central state of a post-Westphalian world-polity. The result is likely to be a period of
extraordinary order and stability.
The stability of the American tianxia rests on the post-Westphalian
intertwining of internal and external affairs.
This has aligned the interests (and world-views) of decision-makers
toward cooperation and self-restraint. (Chan 2012) The Westphalian use of force in sub-imperial
interstate relations is rarely considered by state leaders to be a realistic
policy option. The legitimate use of
force is reserved instead to the United States. (Babones 2015) Though the present and increasing dominance
of the United States in global affairs may not be apparent in conventional
quantitative indicators like time series data on national proportions of global
GDP, it should be remembered that economic preponderance is merely an enabler
of power. (Nye 2015) It does not itself
constitute authority, imperium, or tianming. This is made clear by the fact that even
though the preponderance of the United States in global GDP was much larger in
1955 than in 1995, the preponderance of American hegemony over the world as a
whole was clearly much greater in the 1990s.
In any case much of the economic activity that contributes to the
dominance of the United States occurs outside the territorial borders of the
United States. For example, the global
internet, finance, and energy sectors have been to varying degrees endogenized
under American control. (Babones forthcoming)
China's Ming dynasty did ultimately collapse
in 1644, to be replaced by the Qing dynasty.
While the Chinese concept of tianxia
was appropriated by the Manchurian Qing dynasty, the East Asian world-polity
that was the Ming tianxia did not
survive as an independent world-system.
Beginning in the (long) sixteenth century and with the Ming-Qing
transition of 1644 as a symbolic inflection point, the East Asian world-polity
was absorbed into the expanding modern world-system. This transition is reflected in the fact that
whereas the high Ming emperors self-confidently embraced interactions with the
wider world (including the presence of Jesuit missionaries at the Ming court)
the Qing emperors threw up a cordon
sanitaire to exclude, isolate, or neutralize external influences. Contacts with the non-Asian world were
strictly limited and delimited. Though
Qing dynasty sought to exclude Western influences, the long-distance trade by
land and sea that integrated East Asia into the modern world-system created new
patterns of interstate relations throughout the region. The Qing dynasty itself retained full
independence until 1840, did not fall until 1911, and often prospered over the
267 years of its reign. But it was never
the unchallenged central state of a distinct world-system. Its erstwhile client states had important
interactions with external powers over which the Qing emperors held no
authority. Whatever their rhetorical
pretensions, the Qing emperors knew full well that their tianming did not encompass all under heaven.
The American tianxia is likely to last much longer, if only for the simple reason that there are no other world-systems for it to encounter. Barring science fiction scenarios, the American tianxia will play out strictly according to its own internal logic. Understanding that logic should be a major goal of the social science of the twenty-first century. Fukuyama (1989) should be read as prescient first attempt to achieve just such an understanding. It might be said that the American tianxia is the universal homogeneous state that Fukuyama was looking for but did not quite find at the end of history in 1989. Its civil religion of liberal democracy is more expansive, more universal, and (one might say) more attractive than the Ming civil religion of state Confucianism. Whereas Ming China exported governing ideas, the United States exports governing ideals. As a result, the "American tianxia... has a missionary drive that is backed by unmatched military power and political influence. Compared to the Chinese concept, it is not passive and defensive; rather, unlike other universal ideals, it is supported by a greater capacity to expand." (Wang 2013:135) The anarchic modern world-system of constant interstate conflict lasted five hundred years. The hierarchical millennial world-system of regime management may last a thousand.
Pronouncements
of thousand year reichs are always ripe for ridicule,
perhaps rightfully so. But (as
Wallerstein recognized) world-polities are highly stable systems. The Roman polity persisted over a continuous
history of 2206 years (753 BC - AD 1453).
It was a world-polity spanning the entire Mediterranean basin for more
than 800 years, from the defeat of Carthage to the rise of the Caliphate. The Yuan-Ming-Qing
polity lasted 640 years (AD 1271-1911), including perhaps 250 years as the
central state of a much larger world-polity that spanned all of East Asia. In the absence of contact with the larger
world-economy the Ming world-polity would certainly have continued in
existence, or have transferred over into the next dynasty. As history actually did unfold the only
factor compromising the Qing dynasty's preponderance over East Asia was the
intrusion of the European maritime powers.
Other, less paradigmatic cases of world-empire were similarly
long-lasting -- despite the lack of modern transportation and information
technology. By comparison a world-polity
that has the capacity to monitor substantially all global communications has
awesome powers of stabilization indeed.
Increasing computing power and the advance of machine learning will only
reinforce the concentration of political power at the center. Whether or not genuine political authority will
follow is to be seen.
The Westphalian system of state sovereignty
arose in the context of the 1640s consolidation of the modern world-system. Using conventional symbolic dates, the period
from its emergence (1492) to its consolidation (1648) lasted 156 years. The entire reign of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368)
might be considered the period of consolidation of the Ming world-polity,
giving 97 years from emergence to consolidation. The American tianxia may be said to have emerged in 1945 and consolidated after
2001: the Westphalian principles that were effectively discarded at Yalta were finally
disavowed after the September 11 attacks.
Thus in comparative and world historical terms, the new millennial
world-system is still quite young. The
states -- and people -- of the world are still learning how to inhabit it. The United States, long a magnet for the
energetic and ambitious, has in the twenty-first century become the destination
of choice for the world's elites, particularly for the Chinese elite. Just as Josephus and Peter made their way to
Rome, in the post-modern American tianxia
the elite citizen of the world is inexorably drawn to the United States. Wherever they live, and whatever their
opinions of the United States, elites recognize the value of being American. Fukuyama's liberal, universal, homogeneous world-polity
may not be the United States per se. It
is instead the American tianxia writ
large to cover the entire world.
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