This article was downloaded by: [Michigan State University]

On: 30 December 2014, At: 09:07

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Security Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20

The Normative Foundations of Hegemony

and The Coming Challenge to Pax
Americana
Charles A. Kupchan
Published online: 16 May 2014.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Charles A. Kupchan (2014) The Normative Foundations of Hegemony
and The Coming Challenge to Pax Americana, Security Studies, 23:2, 219-257, DOI:
10.1080/09636412.2014.874205

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2014.874205

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
 Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014
 Security Studies, 23:219–257, 2014
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 online
DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2014.874205

The Normative Foundations of Hegemony

and The Coming Challenge to Pax Americana

CHARLES A. KUPCHAN
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

The ongoing reallocation of wealth and power from the West to

the “rising rest” promises to produce a new pecking order over the
course of the next few decades. Although there is a well-developed
body of knowledge on the material dimensions of power transitions,
existing scholarship provides a much more embryonic intellectual
foundation on the normative dimensions of international change.
Transitions in the international distribution of power produce not
only novel hierarchies, but also novel brands of international order
that rest on the social and ideological proclivities of newly powerful
states in the system. This article explores the normative dimen-
sions of hegemony by examining the geopolitical, socioeconomic,
cultural, and commercial logics that inform different orders. The
normative foundations of hegemony are studied across four great
powers: the Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Great Britain, and
the United States. The cases reveal that as great powers rise, they as
a matter of course seek to push outward to their expanding spheres
of influence the norms that provide order within their own polities.
Accordingly, today’s emerging powers will not embrace the existing
international order erected during the West’s watch. On the con-
trary, China and other rising powers will seek to fashion alternative
orders based on their own cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic
trajectories. If the next international system is to be characterized by
a rules-based order rather than competitive anarchy, it will require
a new normative consensus that rests on toleration of ideological
and political diversity.

Charles A. Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, and

Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. During 2013–14, he
is also a senior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, D.C. His most recent
book is No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. A version of
this article will be published in G. John Ikenberry, ed., Power, Order, and Change in World
Politics (forthcoming).

219
 220 C. A. Kupchan

The ongoing reallocation of wealth and power from the West to the “rising
rest” promises to produce a new pecking order over the course of the next
few decades. Many journals of international relations are contributing to a
healthy debate over the potential for and consequences of a shift in the
global distribution of power.1 The attention devoted to the subject is well
deserved; transitions in the international distribution of power are usually
associated with instability and war. Scholarship on the subject is needed not
only to understand the pace and scope of the reallocation of power, but also
to help policymakers manage peacefully an era during which international
rivalries may be on the rise.
Fortunately for contemporary scholars and policymakers, the field of
international relations has a well-developed body of knowledge on power
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

transitions. A collection of seminal works, including Robert Gilpin’s War

and Change in World Politics and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers, provides a broadly accepted intellectual foundation for
studying international change.2 According to these works, the main cause of
the cyclical rise and decline of hegemonic powers is the inevitable shift in the
locus of power from the core to the periphery of the international system. As
the gap between reigning hegemon and rising challenger closes, the order
derived from hierarchy ultimately gives way to competition over position
and status. Order is again established when a new hierarchy emerges. This
account of systemic change serves as an intellectual pillar within the field of
international relations.
However, understanding and managing international change requires
examining not just shifts in material power, but also the associated contest
among competing norms of order. Transitions in the international distribution
of power produce not only novel hierarchies, but also novel brands of
international order that rest on the social and ideological proclivities of newly
powerful states in the system.
On this front—the normative dimensions of hegemonic order—existing
scholarship provides a much more embryonic intellectual foundation.3 The
reigning theories of international change rely heavily on material variables.

1 See, for example, Michael Beckley, “China’s Century? Why America’s Edge Will Endure,” Interna-

tional Security 36, no. 3 (Winter 2011/12); Robert Keohane, “Hegemony and After,” Foreign Affairs 91,
no. 4 (July/August 2012); Robert Ross, “Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China: Accommodation
and Balancing in East Asia,” Security Studies 15, no. 3 (2006); Stephen Walt, “The End of the American
Era,” National Interest no. 116 (November/December 2011).
2 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500
to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). There is a voluminous literature on power transitions. Other
foundational works include: A.F.K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); George Modelski,
Long Cycles in World Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987); Joshua Goldstein, Long
Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
3 Although works on the normative dimensions of hegemony are increasing in number, they do not

constitute a systematic and cumulative treatment of the subject. These works include: Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971); John Gerard Ruggie, “In-
ternational Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,”
 Normative Foundations 221

Their concentration on hierarchy as the main source of order is fully justified;

it is no accident that the most powerful states in a regional or global system
also happen to be the ones that establish and enforce the rules of the pre-
vailing order. Nonetheless, the material focus of most studies of hegemonic
transition has led to the scholarly neglect of other dimensions of order. As
Ayşe Zarakol aptly notes, “The lack of attention given to the particular cul-
tural and historical origins of the modern international system may just be the
most glaring oversight in mainstream International Relations.”4 Hegemonic
systems, whether coercive or more consensual, have a distinctive normative
character; order emerges not just from hierarchy, but also from packages of
ideas and rules that inform the nature of a given order and govern social
relations within that order.
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

These packages of ordering ideas and norms vary widely across dif-
ferent hegemonic systems, be they regional or global. Moreover, the norms
propagated by these ideational packages are consequential; they affect the
character, stability, and durability of hegemonic orders, and may well shape
the nature of the transition that ensues when one order gives way to another.
The “normative distance” between a particular hegemonic order and the one
that follows it could affect whether a change in hierarchy might fundamen-
tally disrupt the international system.5 The transition from Pax Britannica to
Pax Americana, for example, may have been uniquely peaceful because both
orders rested on an “Anglo-Saxon” package of ordering ideas and rules. It
may also be the case that the normative differences between successive or-
ders have diminished over time due to a convergence produced by systemic
pressures. Such issues will loom large in the coming decades. As China’s
ascent continues, the character of its relationship with the United States may
well turn on whether Beijing embraces, or instead seeks to overturn, the
ordering norms associated with US hegemony.

International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982); Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of
International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Robert Cox, Production, Power, and World Order
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, “Socialization
and Hegemonic Power,” International Organization 44, no. 3 (Summer 1990); David Skidmore, ed.,
Contested Social Orders and International Politics (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995); Daniel
Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and Inter-
national Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Peter Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in
World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); John Owen, The Clash of
Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–2010 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2010); Ian Clark, Hegemony in International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011); Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ted Hopf, “Common-sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World
Politics,” International Organization 67, no. 2 (April 2013).
4 Zarakol, After Defeat, 6.
5 On the relationship between ideological difference and the potential for conflict, see Mark Haas,

The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789–1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005);
Mark Haas, The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
 222 C. A. Kupchan

The content of the norms that shape international order may well be
more important today than at any previous point in history. Globalization has
fostered interdependence and diminished the consequences of geographic
separation. As Western primacy gives way to the onset of a world with mul-
tiple centers of power, the international system, for the first time in history,
will be globalized and interdependent—but without the normative anchor
afforded by the West’s material and ideological dominance.6 To be sure, pre-
vious historical eras played host to multiple regional hegemonies. During the
seventeenth century, for example, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire,
Mughal Empire, Qing Dynasty, and Tokugawa Shogunate each governed ac-
cording to its own rules and cultural norms. These imperial zones were,
however, largely self-contained; there was little interaction among them,
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

and thus little need to agree upon a set of common norms to preserve or-
der. The onset of globalization during the nineteenth century then coincided
with—indeed, was a product of—the West’s ascent, meaning that Europe
and, thereafter, the United States have overseen the international system in
place since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The next world will thus be the
first in which diverse orders intensely and continuously interact with each
other in the absence of Western hegemony. In a world that will be both
interdependent and multipolar, global governance will be more vital—but
also more elusive.
This article seeks to advance the task of unpacking the normative con-
tent of different hegemonic orders.7 It examines the norms shaping the social
relations that are the sinews of hegemony. In the service of developing an
anatomy of order-producing norms, the article explores four dimensions of
hegemonic order: (1) geopolitical logic—the metropole’s architecture of or-
der and hegemonic design; (2) socioeconomic logic—the structure of the

6 See Charles A. Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 46–73, 182–86.
7 With its focus on international norms and the social character of interstate relations, the construc-

tivist literature provides a useful foundation for pursuing this task. See, for example, Martha Finnemore,
National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Emanuel Adler and
Michael Barnett, eds., Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alexander
Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Patrick
Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2006); Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity,
and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
This article advances the constructivist literature by investigating in a systematic way the normative
dimensions of hegemony, a subject that has received relatively little attention from constructivists. It
also represents a synthesis of constructivist and rationalist approaches by demonstrating how ideational,
cultural, and material interests combine to shape the social purpose of hegemonic powers. Construc-
tivist scholars often distance themselves too far from materialist explanations, failing to appreciate that
ideational and normative preferences are often derivative of materialist incentives and socioeconomic
trajectories. Finally, this article advances the constructivist agenda by being primarily empirical rather
than theoretical in its focus. The study of norms and ideas can be empirically challenging; identifying
the different logics that shape hegemony and specifying their substantive content helps fill out the social
theory that informs constructivism.
 Normative Foundations 223

metropole’s socioeconomic order and its replication of that order within its
zone of hegemony; (3) cultural logic—the metropole’s approach to cultural
attributes (inclusive or exclusive on matters of race, religion, and ethnic-
ity); (4) commercial logic—the metropole’s structuring of economic relations
within and beyond its hegemonic zone.
The following section elaborates this article’s theoretical underpinnings.
The article contends that as great powers rise, they, as a matter of course,
seek to extend to their expanding spheres of influence the norms that pro-
vide order within their own polities. They do so to advance their ideological
as well as material interests. The article next provides empirical support for
this argument by exploring the substantive differences among the logics of
geopolitics, socioeconomics, culture, and commerce across four hegemonic
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

powers: the Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Great Britain, and the United
States. Investigation of these four cases affords considerable temporal, ge-
ographic, and cultural variation. The cases also offer potential insight into
the future, illuminating through historical inquiry the different approaches
to order that may prevail in the Middle East, China, and among Western
democracies. Indeed, the concluding section of the article draws on China’s
imperial past to reflect on how Chinese conceptions of hegemony might
evolve in the twenty-first century.
The article reveals the starkly different normative orientations of these
four hegemonic powers. Ottoman rulers governed through a hub-and-spoke
imperial structure that rested on vertical lines of authority; drawing on Islamic
tradition, the sultan wielded both temporal and religious authority, keeping
tight control over administration, commerce, and social inclusion. The long
era of Chinese hegemony in East Asia took the form of a highly ritualized
hegemonic order based on concentric circles of Sinicization; geopolitical
architecture depended more on cultural than material dominance, with Con-
fucian tradition providing the basis for normative consensus. In contrast, the
British Empire rested on horizontal linkages among a global network of pe-
ripheral strongpoints, reflecting its commercial origins as well as its cultural
universalism. The United States embraced different geopolitical architectures
in different theaters; it was motivated more by strategic necessity than com-
mercial opportunity. The United States upheld the British preference for a
liberal trading system, but the more open and consensual character of US
hegemony reflected America’s more egalitarian social order as well as its
ideological commitment to democratization.
Based on the normative diversity of these four hegemonic zones, the ar-
ticle concludes by challenging the proposition, popular among policymakers
and scholars alike, that emerging powers are likely to embrace the liberal in-
ternational order on offer from the West.8 Instead, today’s rising powers—as

8 See, for example, G. John Ikenberry, “The Future of the Liberal World Order: Internationalism after

America,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 3 (May/June 2011).

 224 C. A. Kupchan

have their predecessors throughout history—will craft hegemonic aspirations

informed by their own histories, cultures, and social norms. As Peter Katzen-
stein notes, societies are today following “different programs of modernity”
instead of “converging on a common path involving capitalist industrialism,
political democracy . . . and pluralizing secularisms.”9 China is a case in point.
As its economic and military strength grows, China will seek to push outward
to its sphere of influence its own ordering norms. China’s quest to restore a
Sinocentric brand of hegemony in East Asia, its adherence to one-party rule,
and its commitment to state capitalism at home and mercantilism abroad will
challenge the foundational norms of Pax Americana. Far from embracing
the current international order, China and other emerging powers will seek
to advance alternative norms that further their ideological preferences and
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

material interests.
If a rules-based global order is to emerge as multipolarity advances,
that order will have to reflect the cultural and political diversity of the major
powers that shape and comprise it. The pathway most likely to afford stability
may well be a more regionalized world, one in which multiple hegemonic
powers exercise material and normative sway in their respective spheres
of influence. Global governance would entail a mixture of tolerance and
coordination among these disparate regional orders.

NORMS AND SOCIAL RELATIONS IN HEGEMONIC ORDERS

Most work on the logics and structures of hegemony rests on rationalist and
materialist foundations. Gilpin’s War and Change and Kennedy’s The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers unambiguously identify shifts in the distribution
of material power as the underlying causal engine of the cyclical rise and
fall of hegemonies. Charles Kindleberger and Robert Keohane explore
the impact of material decline on hegemonic stability.10 Alfred Mahan
and Halford Mackinder debate the relative merits of sea power versus
land power in projecting hegemonic control.11 Ronald Robinson and John
Gallagher argue that indirect rule pays more handsomely than direct rule,
providing imperial powers with incentives to opt for formal, as opposed
to informal, empire only when resistance in the periphery forces them to
do so.12 John Ikenberry distinguishes between liberal hegemony (rule by

9Katzenstein, Civilizations in World Politics, 17.

10Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986); Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
11 Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (April

1904); Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1890).
12 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review,

2nd ser., 6, no. 1 (1953).

 Normative Foundations 225

consent) and empire (rule by command), and David Lake explores the role
of legitimate authority in sustaining hegemonic order.13 Ikenberry and Lake
both focus on the functional and material advantages afforded by strategic
restraint and the exercise of hegemony through authority rather than
coercion. Indeed, Ikenberry’s optimism that the Western order will endure
even as the West’s material primacy wanes arises from his confidence in the
functional advantages of its liberal character.14
Such efforts to unpack the material costs and benefits of different
dimensions of hegemony have yielded important insights; the character and
durability of hegemony indeed vary as a consequence of the functional
advantages of specific modes of control. The nature of hegemony, however,
is also shaped by normative dimensions of order. Gilpin, for one, recognizes
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

as much, noting that major states “enter social relations and create social
structures in order to advance particular sets of political, economic, or other
types of interests.”15 As Gilpin acknowledges, states that enjoy a preponder-
ance of power as a matter of course exercise their ability to structure social
relations within their hegemonic zones. These social structures serve as the
infrastructure of hegemonic order. They give hierarchy and hegemony social
character and enable the hegemon to assert its normative preferences. Put
differently, these social structures bring to life hegemonic rule in the same
way that ordering norms shape and inform political and social relations
inside a unitary state.
A chief objective of this article is to build on this core insight and
to demonstrate that hegemonic orders are shaped by normative as well
as material preferences. The allure of advancing security and prosperity
matters a great deal; material considerations provide the main incentives
for great powers to expand, and they heavily influence when and where
such expansion occurs. At the same time, normative preferences and social
and cultural orientations affect the character of hegemony and the nature
of the rule that metropoles exercise over their peripheries. Neither material
considerations nor norms are determinative. Rather, material incentives and
normative preferences work in tandem to shape hegemonic rule.
This article contends that the norms informing hegemonic orders are of-
ten derivative of the metropole’s own domestic order. As Martha Finnemore
and Karthryn Sikkink note, “Domestic norms . . . are deeply entwined with
the working of international norms. Many international norms began as do-
mestic norms. . . . ”16 For a number of reasons, metropoles export to their

13 See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American

World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); David Lake, Hierarchy in International
Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
14 Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, chap. 8.
15 Gilpin, War and Change, 9.
16 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,”

International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 893.

 226 C. A. Kupchan

zones of influence the norms and rules that prevail at home. They press
outward the norms that shape their domestic orders because hegemonies,
just like unitary states, are social entities, not just material instruments of
control; they reflect the hegemon’s own values and norms as well as its
preponderant power. Such norms are the sources of order and strength in
the metropole and are deemed appropriate to serve the same function in
the periphery. Moreover, the norms that provide order at home are the
ones that metropolitan elites know and practice. These elites as a matter of
course bring these norms with them when they exert power abroad, thereby
conveying the metropole’s social preferences to peripheral states.
Metropoles also replicate their own ordering norms throughout their
spheres of influence because it is in their material interest to do so. The Ot-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

tomans constructed a hub-and-spoke economy controlled from Istanbul; the

Soviets erected a command economy throughout the Eastern Bloc; and the
United States propagated market capitalism because fashioning the periph-
ery in the metropole’s image furthered its economic and strategic objectives.
If the metropolitan economy depends on controlled supply and prices, then
it stands to reason that imperial authorities would seek to erect compatible
economic structures in the periphery. If the metropole operates according to
market principles, then it would seek a hegemonic order whose economy
rests on similar economic norms and practices. By seeking to reproduce in
the periphery the socioeconomic order that prevails at home, the metropole
advances the interests of its own political and economic elites. In this respect,
hegemonic zones reflect both the social norms and material interests of the
states that construct and oversee them; social ideals intimately intertwine
with material incentives in shaping hegemonic order.17
In as much as hegemonies represent normative orders and not just
material hierarchies, hegemonic transitions entail competition over norms
and rules as well as position and status. As a great power rises, it seeks to
push outward to its expanding sphere of influence a set of ordering norms
unique to its own cultural, socioeconomic, and political orientations. The
defining characteristics of a particular hegemonic zone “bubble up” from
the normative proclivities of the great power that establishes it. For this rea-
son, hegemonic transitions are usually ideological contests, not just material
ones, as amply demonstrated by World War II and the Cold War, which
pitted fascism and communism, respectively, against liberal democracy.18 It
is also for this reason that the redistribution of power currently unfolding
will challenge not just the international pecking order, but also the founding
norms of Pax Americana. As China and other emerging powers ascend, each
will seek to propagate norms and rules that emerge from its unique domestic
milieu. Accordingly, the universalization of the Western order is not in the

17
See Ikenberry and Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic Power.”
18
On the ideological foundations of great power rivalry, see Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great
Power Politics.
 Normative Foundations 227

offing. On the contrary, if the coming transition in global power is to occur

peacefully, the West will have to make room for the alternative ordering
norms that emerging powers will press outward as they rise.
In mapping out the normative dimensions of hegemony, this article
focuses on four main logics of order: geopolitical, socioeconomic, cultural,
and commercial. Geopolitical logic—the architecture of order—varies widely
from one hegemony to the next.19 Some great powers erect a hub-and-
spoke pattern of control over subjugated peripheries; others build up their
peripheries as interconnected points of strength. Some hegemons construct
hierarchies consisting of concentric circles of control emanating from the
metropole; others exert control in a less uniform and more variegated fash-
ion. Some great powers aim to vanquish or transform challengers; others
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

seek primarily to balance against adversaries. These and other variations in

geopolitical logic are to some extent determined by geography and material
considerations. But they are also shaped by normative preferences and social
orientations.
The Ottoman Empire, for example, relied on a hub-and-spoke pattern
of rule radiating outward from Istanbul. The priority assigned to hierarchy
meant that the Ottomans generally sought to eliminate adversaries rather
than balance against them. This type of order had functional utility—the ef-
fective maintenance of imperial authority—but it also had normative origins.
Islam provided the sultan not only legitimacy, but also broad control over
virtually all aspects of imperial rule. Islamic norms of governance as well
as functionality shaped the architecture of empire. Britain’s architecture of
order represented a sharp contrast. Pax Britannica explicitly avoided direct
control of neighboring territory in continental Europe and rested instead on
horizontal linkages among peripheral strongpoints. The British also tended
to balance against adversaries rather than seek to defeat them. This geopolit-
ical logic was partly material in origin. As an island nation, Britain focused on
naval hegemony rather than contiguous continental expansion and normally
lacked the ground forces needed to conquer enemies. But this logic also
had social origins. The notion of “splendid isolation” from the Continent,
which came to anchor British grand strategy, emerged from a conception of
hegemony focused primarily on commercial rather than strategic objectives.
So too did the practice of balancing against other centers of power become
an embedded norm for Britain’s political class. The Ottoman and British
empires represent only two of many possible architectures of order.
Hegemonic zones also rest on a particular socioeconomic logic.20 Within
their spheres of influence, great powers tend to replicate the social hierar-
chies that shape the distribution of wealth and power in their own polities.
Metropoles with social orders in which wealth and status are highly restricted

19 On structures of empire and hegemony, see Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright, “What’s At Stake

in the American Empire Debate?” American Political Science Review 101, no. 2 (May 2007).
20 See Skidmore, Contested Social Orders.
 228 C. A. Kupchan

and concentrated are likely to encourage the same in their peripheries; in

such hegemonic zones, metropolitan elites tend to undermine independent
sources of wealth and status in the periphery. In contrast, metropoles with
more stratified social orders are likely to encourage similar social hierarchy
in their peripheries. In such cases, metropolitan elites tend to co-opt periph-
eral elites as collaborators.21 The tendency of great powers to replicate their
social orders internationally is partly a product of material interest—societal
compatibility facilitates control and trade. It is also, however, a consequence
of normative orientation; hegemons as a matter of course want their hege-
monic orders to reflect their own political and social values.
Wealth and power in the Ottoman realm were concentrated in the hands
of the sultan. Other imperial agents—administrators, ulema (Islamic schol-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

ars), the janissaries, the cavalry—all served at the pleasure of the sultan and
depended upon him for their status and income. Imperial relations with
the periphery followed. By stripping landed aristocrats of their holdings,
regularly rotating imperial administrators, and preventing the accumulation
of wealth in the provinces, Ottoman authorities ensured that no alternative
center of power would emerge as a counterweight to Istanbul. In contrast,
Britain sought to replicate its own stratified social hierarchy throughout its
empire. Colonial envoys cultivated peripheral collaborators, many of whom
were local notables. Britain also invested in a peripheral elite trained in
English and in British administration and law. London sought to build up
rather than undermine socioeconomic hierarchy in the periphery, using that
hierarchy as a source of local order. Both at home and in the periphery,
independent wealth was viewed as a key element of imperial strength.
Hegemonic zones also rest on a cultural logic that shapes the ordering
role played by religion, race, and ethnicity. Some hegemonies are particular-
istic and exclusive—they serve the interests of a privileged in-group. Others
are based on cultural inclusivity and a universalizing ambition. In general,
great powers that embrace an exclusivist conception of membership within
the metropole do the same throughout their hegemonic zones; peripheral
populations are subject to not just political subjugation, but also cultural
subjugation. Social inclusion runs along ethnic, racial, and religious lines.
Great powers that embrace an inclusive conception of membership within
the metropole do the same in their hegemonies; political subjugation is often
the pathway to social inclusion irrespective of ethnic, racial, and religious
differences. Such hegemonies are vehicles for the exportation of values and
identity across cultural dividing lines.
The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic polity for and of Muslims. The
expansion of the empire at times led to religious conversion—as in the
Balkans. But many non-Muslims also resided within the empire’s territorial

21 Social orders in the periphery as well as in the metropole shape the nature of the interface

between metropolitan agents and colonized elites. See Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 162–231.
 Normative Foundations 229

boundaries. Indeed, Byzantine Christians often rose to influential positions

within the imperial apparatus, and Armenians, Jews, and other minorities
were prominent merchants. These subjects were grouped along confessional
lines; social inclusion was defined by religion. In contrast, the British Empire
espoused universalist ambition and incorporated on an ostensibly equal basis
many races, religions, and ethnic groups. To be sure, Anglo-Saxons from
the metropole sat atop a de facto social hierarchy; Christian missionaries
proselytized in many parts of the imperial periphery; and Britain sought to
export its legal system, education system, and bureaucratic traditions. But
social inclusion ran along political and territorial, not cultural, lines.
Finally, trade and financial matters within hegemonic zones are shaped
by a particular commercial logic. Metropoles with command economies keep
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

tight rein over all aspects of imperial commerce, including prices, trade,
capital flows, and the accumulation of wealth. These great powers are usu-
ally mercantilist in their foreign economic policies. Other hegemons operate
according to market principles and support open trade at home, within
their zones of hegemony, and with other countries. In between lie hybrid
hegemonies that mix market principles with state control. Differences in
commercial logic reflect contrasting social norms toward the appropriate
relationship between states and markets and between public and private
wealth.
In the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul controlled virtually all aspects of com-
merce, setting prices for commodities, regulating trade, and blocking the
accumulation of wealth outside the imperial apparatus. Ottoman authorities
viewed independent wealth in the core as well as the periphery as a threat
to imperial rule. Financial instruments were rudimentary compared with the
innovations that emerged in Europe, due in part to Islamic law and tradi-
tions. In contrast, Britain during its imperial ascent abandoned mercantilism
in favor of a principled commitment to free trade. London not only backed
relatively open markets for trade and finance, but also provided the protected
sea lanes and other public goods needed for such markets to operate. This
switch in commercial strategy had material foundations in Britain’s search
for raw materials for its factories and markets for its goods. But it was also
precipitated by socioeconomic and ideational change—the growing political
power of Britain’s commercial class and the broadening influence of Adam
Smith and other economic liberals.
As stated above, the central claim of this article is not that normative con-
siderations alone determine these logics of hegemony; rather, social norms
and material conditions together inform the character of hegemony. For nor-
mative as well as functional reasons, great powers structure social relations
within their zones of hegemony in very different ways. The normative di-
mensions of hegemonic order are now examined in greater depth through
a discussion of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Great Britain, and the
United States. Table 1 summarizes the discussion that follows, identifying the
main normative characteristics of these four hegemonic powers.
 Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

230
TABLE 1 Logics of Hegemonic Order

Geopolitical Socioeconomic Cultural Commercial

Ottoman Empire Hub-and-spoke; vertical lines Rigid socioeconomic hierarchy; Islamic polity; inclusion Mercantilist; commerce and
of control; eliminate suppression of independent defined along confessional trade controlled by
adversaries sites of wealth or social status lines; pragmatic imperial authorities
incorporation of minorities
through millet system
Imperial China (Ming Concentric circles of control Rigid socioeconomic hierarchy; Confucian foundations; Mercantilist; government
and Qing Dynasties) centered on imperial core; Confucian exam system as assimilation in imperial control of markets, but
hierarchy a function of pathway to social mobility; core; Sinicization through with accommodation of
cultural more than material social order in empire tributary system free enterprise
dominance; Sinicize replicated through tributary
adversaries system
Great Britain Horizontal linkages among Class hierarchy at home Universalism; inclusion Initially mercantilist,
peripheral strongpoints; replicated abroad; cultivation determined by territorial subsequently laid
avoidance of continental and co-optation of peripheral boundaries; racial and foundation for liberal
commitment; balance collaborators; encouragement ethnic categorization; trading order
against adversaries of peripheral wealth spread of British culture,
language, and religion
United States Variable architecture Egalitarian aspirations in both Universalism; principled Free trade; dismantling of
dependent on strategic core and periphery commitment to colonial empires; erection
circumstances; transform self-determination; of international financial
adversaries democratizing ambition architecture
 Normative Foundations 231

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Geopolitical Logic
Imperial authority within the Ottoman realm was vested in the sultan, who
from the early sixteenth century onward also served as the caliph, the leader
of the Islamic world. The sultan enjoyed a divine mandate and wielded abso-
lute power through the interpretation and implementation of sharia, which
informed not only religious affairs, but also matters of politics, security, and
justice. He controlled the imperial administration and all appointees—from
high-ranking advisers in Istanbul to low-ranking emissaries in the periphery.
The state held tight rein over economic, religious, political, and military af-
fairs, seeking to ensure that the provinces were run directly from Istanbul.
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Major trunk routes connected the center to the periphery, serving as conduits
of control and commerce. According to Karen Barkey, the empire operated
as a “hub-and-spoke network structure, where the rim is absent,” a system
that “made peripheral elites dependent on the center, communicating only
with the center rather than with one another.”22
This architecture of order, which was founded upon an Islamic concep-
tion of absolute authority and the merging of religious and secular power,
had a profound effect on social relations within the empire. Power ran ex-
clusively along vertical lines, with authority extending downward from the
sultan, through the imperial bureaucracy, to cavalry and administrators in
the periphery. Officials assigned to the provinces rotated to new areas ev-
ery three years to ensure that they would not develop strong ties to the
local population and organize potential resistance to central authority.23 Nei-
ther merchants nor local notables were able to amass wealth or build lo-
cal political or commercial networks.24 Istanbul deliberately forestalled the
development of horizontal social linkages that could have developed into
counterweights to the sultan’s power. To be sure, the imperial administration
did not always succeed in extending central authority to remote locations.
But instances of regional autonomy were generally the product of distance
and local resistance, not imperial design.
The maintenance of hierarchical order similarly informed Ottoman strat-
egy toward adversaries beyond imperial territory. After the Safavid dynasty

22 Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 9, 17–18.
23 Ibid., 93–95.
24 This system changed over the course of the eighteenth century, when local notables (ayans)

were granted life tenure as tax collectors. This reform increased central revenue but also gave rise to a
provincial elite that was able to amass wealth and challenge imperial authority. The growing power of the
ayans was then followed by a period of recentralization in the 1800s. See Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey,
Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010),
28–29; Kemal Karpat, “The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908,” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 3, no. 3 (July 1972): 243–81.
 232 C. A. Kupchan

came to power in Persia in 1501, Istanbul spent the better part of the six-
teenth century seeking to defeat its new rival on the battlefield. To their west,
the Ottomans went to war against the Venetians, Hungarians, Austrians, and
other Europeans, in 1683 making their final unsuccessful attempt to conquer
Vienna—long prized by Istanbul as the strategic key to controlling central
Europe. The Ottomans were generally intent on dominating their adversaries,
not on establishing a stable balance of power with them.

Socioeconomic Logic
Ottoman society was patrimonial in structure; the sultan sat atop the social
hierarchy, and both civil administrators and the military effectively served
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

as his personal staff. The sultan and his court enforced the vertical exercise
of authority by adopting strategies of governance that neutralized alternative
sites of wealth and status. Istanbul not only blocked horizontal social linkages
from forming, but also undermined the power base of social sectors that
could potentially challenge the sultan’s authority. Imperial administrators
expropriated the land of aristocratic families and converted it to state-owned
property. Land and wealth could no longer be passed from one generation
to the next. The power of the landed elite was effectively transferred to
administrators and cavalry, to whom the sultan assigned the right to draw
revenue from farms. In return for their service, imperial appointees could
tax agricultural production, keeping some of the income for themselves and
sending the rest to the central treasury.25
Merchants, artisans, and professionals operated only within the confines
of the hierarchical state. They were unable to accumulate significant wealth
or to raise their social status. Some government functionaries were able to
amass considerable savings. They were, however, firmly ensconced within
the imperial apparatus, depended upon their posts for their affluence, and
could not pass their assets on to their offspring. These restrictions prevented
the evolution of powerful and wealthy family lines.
Even the janissaries—the sultan’s personal army—were recruited in a
manner intended to prevent their potential emergence as a threat to imperial
authority. Initially, the ranks of the janissaries were filled by young men of
Christian background who were prisoners of war. In the early fifteenth cen-
tury, a system of conscription (devsirme) was put into place. The janissaries
were not permitted to come from Muslim families or to marry; these pro-
scriptions ensured that this elite corps could not develop into a hereditary
warrior class capable of undermining the sultan’s authority. On the contrary,
the janissaries’ unique privilege and status engendered loyalty to the sultan.
Over time, the strict protocols that sustained this trustworthy militia be-
gan to loosen; during the later empire, the janissaries were allowed to marry

25 On changes to land tenure over time, see Findley, Turkey, 51–56.

 Normative Foundations 233

and have children. As the court had initially feared, a loyal imperial guard
developed into a hereditary institution that became a potent counterweight
to the sultan. This threat to centralized control eventually evoked a harsh
reaction. In the early nineteenth century, Mahmud II abolished the janissary
system and killed most of its serving members. Istanbul rigidly enforced
socioeconomic hierarchy as a means of preserving imperial unity.

Cultural Logic
In keeping with Islamic tradition, the Ottoman realm made no distinction be-
tween the secular and the sacred. Ulema were key advisers to the sultan, and
sharia profoundly shaped imperial governance. Islamic law informed virtu-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

ally all aspects of daily life, including commerce, education, and the justice
system. Membership and status within the empire were defined by religion;
the cultural foundations of hegemony were particularistic, not universal, in
scope. The Ottoman realm was a Muslim polity.
Despite its religious foundations, the Ottoman realm did not exclude
non-Muslims. On the contrary, the Ottoman court bolstered hierarchical rule
by embracing religious heterodoxy. Osman, who founded the empire and
ruled from 1299 until 1324, forged political compacts across religious bound-
aries, incorporating into the empire not only Muslims who embraced diverse
traditions, but also Orthodox Christians from the Byzantine Empire—some
of whom enjoyed influential positions within the imperial administration.
Sunni doctrine and practice were dominant throughout the Ottoman realm,
but Shiites and Sufis were generally treated with tolerance.26
Accommodations were also made for non-Muslims. The millet system
allowed non-Muslim communities to retain their own religious and political
institutions even as it incorporated them into the empire’s hierarchical system
of control. Armenians, Greek Orthodox, and Jews, for example, maintained
separate courts and religious laws.27 At the same time, the heads of these
minority populations functioned as intermediaries between imperial authori-
ties and their local communities; minority leaders directed their allegiance to
Istanbul even as they enjoyed significant autonomy on matters of communal
governance. The millet system was a pragmatic response to the reality that
Ottoman territory was host to a varied population. By defining political sta-
tus along confessional lines, the Ottomans were able to balance the Islamic
character of the empire with the religious diversity of its subjects.

26 William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 626. The toler-

ation of religious diversity gradually diminished after the Safavid dynasty came to power in neighboring
Persia in the early sixteenth century, putting Shiites in control of a principal geopolitical competitor to
the Ottomans. Thereafter, Ottoman authorities no longer viewed Shiites as just religious dissenters, but
instead saw them as a direct internal and external threat to the empire.
27 Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2002), 73.

 234 C. A. Kupchan

Commercial Logic
The Ottoman Empire pursued a mercantilist economic policy. Istanbul’s con-
trol of commerce was as tight as its oversight of imperial administration. Im-
perial officials set the prices of goods and regulated the flow of trade, in no
small part to fill the central treasury and ensure that the government could
secure commodities at preferential cost.28 Foreign trade was somewhat less
regulated than commerce within the empire, but it was handled primarily by
Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and other non-Muslims. Moreover, the Ottomans
did not develop a modern banking system—a consequence of the constraints
imposed by Islamic legal practices—instead relying on informal networks of
lending and, eventually, on European financiers doing business in Ottoman
lands.29 The Ottomans thus subcontracted specific commercial functions to
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

outsiders who would not threaten imperial power or contravene Islamic

traditions—meanwhile keeping tight control of commerce among the bulk
of the population.
Ottoman reliance on centralized control of religious, political, and eco-
nomic life preserved imperial unity for centuries. Istanbul’s hub-and-spoke
mode of rule, its enforcement of a rigid socioeconomic hierarchy, its ap-
proach to managing confessional diversity, and its mercantilist economic
policies had clear functional utility. At the same time, they were imbued
with norms derived from Islamic traditions. Indeed, the staying power of
those normative orientations became clear over the course of the nineteenth
century, when Ottoman rulers resisted change even after the realm’s eclipse
by a rising Europe had exposed the disadvantages of the Ottoman approach
to hegemonic rule. The Tanzimat reform movement sought to import Eu-
ropean practices in order to revitalize the Ottoman realm, but the empire’s
social norms were too deeply embedded and its institutions too inflexible.
By the late 1800s, the rigidity of the normative order, rather than preserving
imperial unity, was contributing to hegemonic decline.

IMPERIAL CHINA

Chinese hegemony in East Asia spans many centuries. Its origins date to the
Shang era in the fifteenth century BCE. China’s last imperial dynasty—the
Qing—officially collapsed in 1912. Over the course of the centuries in

28 Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1994), 16; Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007),
16–17, 94, 156.
29 For a comprehensive study of Ottoman commercial and financial practices, see Timur Kuran, The

Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2011). Kuran’s main argument is that “the Middle East fell behind the West because it was last in adopting
key institutions of the modern economy” (ibid., 5).
 Normative Foundations 235

between, different dynasties embraced varying approaches to managing

hegemony. Nonetheless, the evolution of the tributary system and the nor-
mative anchor provided by Confucian conceptions of order and governance
made for important continuities. This section provides a distillation of China’s
logic of imperial management, drawing heavily on the Ming (1368–1644) and
Qing (1644–1912) dynasties. In important respects, these final dynasties rep-
resent the culmination of the tributary system and the long era of Chinese
domination of East Asia.30

Geopolitical Logic
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

The tributary system established a hierarchical order in which hegemony

was arrayed in concentric circles around the imperial core. In the inner-
most circle—China proper—imperial authorities and soldiers exercised di-
rect control. The empire did not maintain fixed borders: they waxed and
waned as continuing struggles with nomadic peoples in the north and west
produced fluid frontiers. Expansion was particularly pronounced during the
Qing, which more than doubled the size of the territory that had been un-
der direct imperial rule during the preceding Ming.31 When such expansion
occurred, imperial authorities exercised tight vertical control by extending
the central bureaucracy into new areas. In order to forestall the emergence
of local centers of power that could challenge central rule, top provincial
officers had to come from regions other than the one in which they served.
As in the Ottoman Empire, they also rotated to new posts every three years.32
Although central authorities maintained strictly vertical lines of rule, the
imperial bureaucracy was limited in size and governed with a relatively light
touch. The Chinese army was also comparatively small given the size of
the territory under its protection. Confucian tradition placed considerable
value on lean and efficient governance—in the words of John Bryan Starr,
“a minimal state with maximal reach.”33 Beyond imperial territory, China
exercised only indirect rule over subordinate parties; hierarchy was more the
product of deference and legitimate authority than of coercive control of the
sort exercised within the Ottoman Empire. As William Wohlforth and his co-
authors conclude, order within the tributary system rested on a combination

30 See Yongjin Zhang and Barry Buzan, “The Tributary System as International Society in Theory

and Practice,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 5, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 22–23; Mark Mancall, “The
Ch’ing Tribute System: An Interpretive Essay,” in The Chinese World Order, ed. John Fairbank (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 66.
31 William Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2009), 1.
32 Ibid., 38–39.
33 John Bryan Starr, Understanding China: A Guide to China’s Economy, History, and Political

Structure (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 41.

 236 C. A. Kupchan

of “a unipolar distribution of capabilities centered on China with a ramified

cultural and normative overlay.”34
The tributary system was strictly bilateral; it created a hub-and-spoke
pattern of relations with peripheral states. Delegations from these states reg-
ularly visited the Chinese court to pay tribute. The gifts brought by these
delegations did not represent an onerous tax but were primarily ritualistic
and symbolic in nature—a sign of respect and acknowledgement of China’s
material and cultural dominance.35 In return, tribute states enjoyed the bene-
fits of inclusion in China’s hegemonic sphere of influence, including lucrative
trade links and military protection. Nonetheless, these states enjoyed signifi-
cant autonomy over their own domestic affairs and foreign policy. Imperial
China treated tribute states as subordinates but did not seek to control them.
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Cultural, more than geographic, proximity determined whether tribute

states stood in the inner or outer circle of Chinese hegemony. Japan, Ko-
rea, the Ryukyu Islands, and Vietnam were in the inner circle. These states
all embraced significant elements of Chinese script and vocabulary, Confu-
cian learning, and China’s exam system and meritocratic bureaucracy. Japan,
which was more determined to resist Sinicization than Vietnam and Korea,
was accorded lower status and permitted to send fewer tribute missions to
China.36 States in the outer ring, such as Cambodia, Borneo, Burma, Siam,
and Indonesia, were significantly less Sincizied than states in the inner ring.
The geopolitical structure of the tributary system was thus heavily informed
by cultural norms. According to Yongjin Zhang and Barry Buzan, “There
was clear acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the authority of Chinese
hegemony derived from its cultural achievements and not from material
power.”37 David Kang agrees that “cultural achievement in the form of status
was as important a goal as was military or economic power.”38
The geopolitical logic that informed Chinese conceptions of hegemony
also allowed for considerable flexibility as to inclusion. The boundaries of
the empire fluctuated regularly. While some non-Han populations were Sini-
cized and incorporated into imperial territory, others exited, and the imperial
frontier was adjusted accordingly. The tributary system was similarly flexi-
ble; states could begin or end their participation at will. As Zhang and Buzan
note, “The tributary system . . . has open access and is also inherently elas-
tic.”39 Such malleability was in part a function of the cultural content of

34William Wohlforth, et al., “Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History,” European Journal
of International Relations 13, no. 2 (June 2007): 173.
35 See Joseph Esherick, “China and the World: From Tribute to Treaties to Popular Nationalism,” in

China’s Rise in Historical Perspective, ed. Brantly Womack (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),
19–20.
36 David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2010), 59–60.

37 Zhang and Buzan, “The Tributary System,” 25.
38 Kang, East Asia Before the West, 8.
39 Zhang and Buzan, “The Tributary System,” 19.
 Normative Foundations 237

Chinese conceptions of hegemony. Since Chinese power stemmed more

from political and moral suasion than coercion, states exiting China’s sphere
of influence were demonstrating their own cultural shortcomings, not posing
a challenge to Chinese authority.
China’s unique conception of hegemonic order and the elasticity of
that order had distinct pacifying effects. Although both the Ming and Qing
engaged in regular skirmishes with nomads along the imperial frontier, war
among major states in the tributary system was, by comparative standards,
quite rare. Between the middle of the fourteenth century and the middle of
the nineteenth, there were only two brief wars: China with Vietnam from
1402 to 1428 and Japan with Korea from 1592 to 1598.40
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Socioeconomic Logic
The socioeconomic order of Imperial China was highly stratified. Qing soci-
ety consisted of five classes: aristocrats, officials, degree-holding literati, free
commoners, and debased persons (such as criminals, beggars, and prosti-
tutes). The upper classes were thinly populated, and entry was highly restric-
tive. The main vehicle for upward mobility was the exam system, and only
a select few were able to pass these rigorous tests of Confucian learning.
During the later Qing, the expansion of markets and the spread of literacy
opened up new opportunities for social advancement. But a nascent middle
class remained within the confines of the traditional social hierarchy. Indeed,
imperial authorities co-opted newly empowered actors—such as wealthy
families and merchant and artisan guilds—to reinforce social control at the
local level.41
The Confucian emphasis on patrilineal traditions and the centrality of the
nuclear family played a significant role in producing social stasis. A societal
order deeply rooted in ritual and normative consensus preserved hierarchy
even in the face of commercialization and greater opportunities for upward
mobility. As William Rowe notes, imperial authorities were adept “in the
use of normative and ritual means for social control.”42 Ritualized practice
and normative consensus mattered more than the distribution of wealth in
shaping China’s domestic socioeconomic order.
China’s socioeconomic order in many respects served as a blueprint for
the tributary system; the metropole pressed outward to its zone of hegemony
the Confucian norms that provided order at home. According to Brantley
Womack, the moral, ritualistic, and hierarchical character of China’s own
social order was a model for the norms, rituals, and hierarchical order that

40 See Kang, East Asia Before the West, 82–106.

41 William Rowe, “Social Stability and Social Change,” in The Cambridge History of China: The
Ch’ing Empire to 1800, vol. 9, pt. 1, ed. Willard Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
473–562; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 33.
42 Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 33.
 238 C. A. Kupchan

informed relations with tribute states.43 Within the empire, as well as within
China’s broader zone of hegemony, order was the product of cultural and
social norms at least as much as the exercise of preponderant material power.

Cultural Logic
Imperial China’s claim to hegemony rested on a logic of cultural superiority
as well as material primacy. Indeed, the Chinese saw themselves as repre-
senting not just a higher civilization, but the civilization—the global standard
bearer.44 The empire was traditionally referred to as Zhongguo, which means
“central kingdom” or “center of civilization.” In keeping with this culturally
informed conception of imperial power, the civil service exams—the main
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

pathway to a post in the imperial apparatus—tested primarily knowledge of

Confucian texts and poetry, not matters of administration or policy. School-
ing in Chinese culture and morality was the principal qualification for po-
sitions of leadership and responsibility.45 In similar fashion, participation in
the tributary system entailed deference to Chinese culture and the embrace
of Chinese ritual. As mentioned above, states that were part of the tribu-
tary system were divided into two categories depending upon their level of
Sinicization. “Cooked” or “inner” barbarians, such as the Koreans, adhered
more closely to Chinese culture. “Raw” or “outer” barbarians, such as the
populations of Southeast Asia and Central Asia, were seen as more distant
culturally and thus of lower status within the tributary system.46
Sinicization took place not just through the tributary system, but also
through imperial expansion into China’s borderlands. Indeed, it was along
the imperial frontier that China most intently pursued cultural assimilation.
Imperial authorities at times aspired to “turn the frontier into a fixed border
and expand institutional control outward from the center.”47 But Tibetans,
Uighurs, Mongols, Khitans, Manchus, and other nomadic groups confronted
China with a daunting ethnic and cultural diversity. Accordingly, imperial
administrators sought to ensure that China’s language, marriage and burial
rites, patrilineal customs, and education system—along with other cultural
practices—moved in step with the frontier. The Ming dynasty put particular
emphasis on inter-marriage; although the provision was not always enforced,
minorities were required to marry Han Chinese.48 The Qing orchestrated mi-
gration of Han to the periphery, encouraged frontier populations to embrace
Confucian ritual, and usually paired officials of non-Han background with a

43Brantly Womack, “Introduction,” in China’s Rise, 4.

44Zhang and Buzan, “The Tributary System,” 11.
45 Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 45–46.
46 Ibid., 133–34. See also Kang, East Asia Before the West, 47–54.
47 Kang, East Asia Before the West, 157.
48 Ping-ti Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski’s ‘Reenvisioning the Qing,’ ”

The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (February 1998): 141.

 Normative Foundations 239

Han counterpart. The central government also arranged pilgrimages, trade

missions, and participation in the Imperial Hunt as means of drawing non-
Han populations into China’s cultural sphere of influence.49
Acculturation was, of course, not a one-way street. The practices and
rituals that emerged in frontier regions represented a cultural amalgam, not a
pure form of Sinicization. As the empire expanded, Han populations not only
propagated their rituals in the borderlands, but also absorbed the traditions of
nomadic peoples. Some outlying regions also enjoyed a significant measure
of cultural autonomy. Mongols and Tibetans, for example, tended to main-
tain their own systems of local administration. Frontier regions were thus
characterized by complexity and fluidity on matters of culture, identity, and
ethnicity.50 Nonetheless, borderlands that enjoyed relative cultural autonomy
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

were the exception; Imperial China for the most part pursued a purposeful
and determined strategy aimed at Sinicizing its non-Han populations.
It is also the case that even military victors over China acquiesced to
Chinese culture rather than vice versa. The Manchus that ruled during the
Qing era adopted the Chinese language, jettisoned their own marriage and
burial ceremonies in favor of Chinese practices, and accepted the Confu-
cian canon as the foundation for governance and the civil service exam.
According to Evelyn Rawski, “No one can deny that the Manchus portrayed
themselves as Chinese rulers.”51 Ping-ti Ho agrees that “Manchu success at
[governing] . . . was achieved in large measure by drawing upon a Chinese
tradition of policies and institutions.”52
Imperial China had little regular contact with states beyond the tribu-
tary system until the late Qing. Such states were beyond the Sinic sphere
of influence—and hence alien. From this perspective, Imperial China em-
braced a particularistic, not universalistic, conception of its culture. Through
assimilation and/or subordination, other peoples—barbarians of one sort or
another—could enter China’s sphere of hegemony. But China had no inter-
est in exporting its political system or values beyond the tributary system.
Unlike Britain and the United States, which embraced universalizing creeds,
Imperial China adhered to an exceptionalist notion of its cultural uniqueness
and superiority.

Commercial Logic
Imperial China was broadly mercantilist, and the central government over-
saw a command economy: economic activity was to serve the purposes of

49 Rowe, “Social Stability and Social Change,” 507; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 38–40.
50 Evelyn Rawski, “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period
in Chinese History,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (November 1996): 833, 841–42; Rowe, “Social
Stability and Social Change,” 511.
51 Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” 834.
52 Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization,” 125.
 240 C. A. Kupchan

the state. The main source of imperial revenue was taxation of agricultural
production. Tribute missions, official trade (commerce under the auspices
of the tributary system), and private trade (which was subject to duties)
also contributed to imperial wealth. Even though Qing authorities oversaw
a command economy, they were less intrusive and rent-seeking than their
Ottoman counterparts. Confucian standards of governance encouraged the
central government to be sensitive to the material wants of its population.
Moreover, the need to increase agricultural production to keep pace with
the population growth of the Qing era prompted imperial authorities to tap
market incentives. Local merchants and prominent families had expanding
latitude to engage in private commerce. By the end of the eighteenth century,
roughly 10 percent of grain production and 25 percent of cotton production
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

were traded on the open market.53 The same approach applied to foreign
trade. The central government generally looked askance at private commerce
with foreign parties but nonetheless permitted it.54
Even as private markets expanded, however, they did so within the
context of a command economy and a socioeconomic order shaped by Con-
fucian tradition. Wealthy merchants sought not to overturn or circumvent
that order, but to ascend the social hierarchy by joining the educated elite.55
As markets for grain and other commodities grew, imperial authorities inter-
vened to stabilize prices and to oversee their distribution. In Rowe’s words,
“The Qing strategy was to use the market to control the market.”56 China thus
has a long tradition of intermixing commercial markets with state control.
China’s long run of hegemony in East Asia rested on a highly ritualized
order informed by Confucian norms. Its geopolitical architecture consisted
of concentric circles radiating outward from the imperial core; hierarchical
control was a function of China’s cultural dominance as much as its material
superiority. A stratified and ritualized socioeconomic order at home was
replicated abroad through the tributary system. A particularistic conception of
inclusion informed the character of Chinese hegemony, with assimilation and
Sinicization serving as key elements of social and political control. Imperial
China embraced a hybrid commercial logic that mixed state control with
market mechanisms.

GREAT BRITAIN
Geopolitical Logic
In contrast to the Ottomans and Chinese, who built contiguous, hub-and-
spoke imperial zones, the British erected a seaborne empire that rested
on naval mastery and a network of horizontal linkages among far-flung

53 Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 123.

54 Dwight H. Perkins, “China’s Pre-reform Economy in World Perspective,” in China’s Rise, 111.
55 Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 127–33.
56 Ibid., 56.
 Normative Foundations 241

peripheral strongpoints. London deliberately eschewed strategic commit-

ments on its neighboring landmass. Instead, the British relied on diplomacy,
assistance, and occasional and temporary bouts of military intervention to
maintain an equilibrium of power on the Continent that would leave Britain
free to keep its army small and focus its attention and resources on the
imperial periphery. Also in contrast to the Ottomans and Chinese, who of-
ten sought to eliminate or assimilate adversaries, Britain regularly sought to
maintain stable balances of power—not dominion—in key strategic theaters,
including Europe, the western Atlantic, and the Far East.
This hegemonic architecture was heavily influenced by geography. Eng-
land was an island nation afforded protection by the Channel, and seaborne
expansion would play to its comparative advantage. In the early sixteenth
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

century, Henry VIII’s advisors spelled out a principle that would guide the
country’s grand strategy for centuries to come: “Let us in God’s name leave
off our attempts against the terra firma. The natural situation of islands seems
not to consort with conquests of that kind. England alone is a just Empire. Or,
when we would enlarge ourselves, let it be that way we can, and to which
it seems the eternal Providence hath destined us, which is by the sea.”57
As shipbuilding and navigation improved in quality, English merchants and
emigrants, eventually backed by the Royal Navy, ventured ever further from
the home islands.
Geography alone, however, is not sufficient to explain the evolution
of a hegemonic architecture resting on seaborne linkages among peripheral
strongpoints.58 Other island nations—Japan, for example—pursued imperial
ambitions on neighboring mainlands. Britain’s unique imperial structure was
in part a product of its distinctively commercial origins. From the outset,
imperial expansion was meant to be a paying proposition. Colonies were to
provide markets and raw materials for the metropolitan economy. Indeed,
India, the “jewel in the crown,” was for decades under the administration
of the British East India Tea Company and became a formal colony only in
1813. Unlike the Ottoman Empire, which was structured primarily to maxi-
mize hierarchical control, the British Empire was more regularly structured
to maximize profits.59 London cherry-picked territories that would provide
commercial opportunities and afford the Royal Navy control over the main
transportation chokepoints. Linkages among these chokepoints produced
the horizontal strategic network that stands in stark contrast to the vertical,
hub-and-spoke lines of control maintained by Ottoman authorities.

57 J.H. Rose, A.P. Newton, and E.A. Benians, The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 1

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 95.

58 On the foundations of Britain’s imperial architecture, see Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback,

Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mark Brawley, Liberal Leadership: Great Powers and Their Challengers
in Peace and War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
59 The Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century was a notable exception. Rapid British and

French expansion was motivated in large part by strategic rivalry.

 242 C. A. Kupchan

It is also the case that British reliance on sea power and the notion of
“splendid isolation” from the Continent became a deeply embedded norm in
the official and public mind. The degree to which avoidance of continental
commitments was a social norm that imbued strategic culture—and not just a
rationalist strategy born of material conditions—became clear after Germany
unified in 1871 and soon thereafter overturned a stable balance of power in
Europe. In the years leading up to World War I, the British government main-
tained ambiguity about its readiness to undertake a continental commitment,
principally out of fear of a political backlash. London’s stance, even if inad-
vertently, encouraged German adventurism; Berlin’s decision to launch the
invasion that started World War I presumed British neutrality.60 Britain’s at-
tachment to overseas empire and aversion to continental commitments were
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

even more costly during the inter-war period when London directed avail-
able resources to peripheral defenses and woefully neglected preparation for
a land war against Nazi Germany. Following the toll taken by World War I,
the British embraced a “never again” attitude toward participating in armed
conflict on the Continent while remaining heavily invested—psychologically,
politically, and materially—in overseas empire. Britain defended its imperial
possessions even when doing so came at the expense of the security of
the metropole.61 Social norms were overriding a rationalist calculation of
material interest.
Unlike the Ottomans and Chinese, who generally preferred to deal
with adversaries and enforce order through the application of preponder-
ant power, the British regularly relied on a balance of power as a key
source of order. In the words of Esme Hoard, balance-of-power thinking
was “a corner-stone of English policy, unconsciously during the sixteenth,
subconsciously during the seventeenth, and consciously during the eigh-
teenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”62 The Peace of Westphalia in
1648 effectively institutionalized as an ordering norm the maintenance of
power balances in Europe. At the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815,
London operationalized this norm through the Concert of Europe, securing
a rules-based order that both preserved a stable balance on the Continent
and enabled Britain to concentrate its resources on the imperial periphery.
It also accepted, and even encouraged, stable balances of power in primary
overseas theaters. At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain made way
for US naval primacy in the western Atlantic and welcomed America’s arrival

60 See Scott Sagan, “1914 Revisited: Allies, Offense, and Instability,” in Military Strategy and the

Origins of the First World War, ed. Steven Miller, Sean Lynn-Jones, and Stephen Van Evera (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 126.
61 See Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the

Era of the Two World Wars (London: Ashfield Press, 1989).

62 Sir Esme Hoard, “British Policy and Balance of Power,” The American Political Science Review

19, no. 2 (May 1925): 261; Victoria Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 3.
 Normative Foundations 243

as an imperial power in the Pacific. In the Far East, Britain fashioned a naval
alliance with Japan in 1902 in order to maintain an effective balance against
France and Russia. The British Empire certainly fought its fair share of wars,
but London frequently resorted to either balancing against or co-opting other
centers of power—not defeating them.

Socioeconomic Logic
In Ottoman and Chinese societies, wealth and political power were highly
concentrated. In contrast, wealth and power in Britain were more broadly
distributed across the monarchy, landed aristocracy, and commercial class.
Following England’s seventeenth-century civil wars and the Glorious Revolu-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

tion (1688) that brought the conflicts to an end, Parliament not only checked
the power of the monarchy, but also increasingly represented the interests
of the rising commercial class. The monarchy needed to tax the commer-
cial elite to fund the modern state but in return had to grant this new elite
more political voice. Britain’s emergence as a leading imperial power thus
coincided with the evolution of a social order resting on a compact among
monarchy, aristocracy, and rising bourgeoisie—the three principal agents of
social power.63
Britain replicated such socioeconomic compacts in its periphery.
Whereas the Ottomans and Chinese undercut sites of social power that could
challenge imperial authority, the British actively cultivated social hierarchy
in their periphery. In instances of formal empire, colonial governors ruled
through local elites who were often schooled in Britain’s language, laws, and
administrative traditions. In instances of informal empire, colonial emissaries
worked through collaborators—existing political and economic elites—in the
periphery. Britain’s system of colonial rule reflected the social stratification
and horizontal compacts among privileged sectors that anchored metropoli-
tan society.
It is also the case that changes in Britain’s socioeconomic order trans-
lated into changes in imperial management. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, Britain had switched from mercantilism to free trade. The main
driver of this shift in commercial strategy was the rise of the country’s in-
dustrial and financial class and the consequent formation of an influential
constituency in favor of open markets. Urbanization and industrialization
had shifted political power away from monarchy and aristocracy—defenders
of statist policies—toward social sectors that would most benefit from free
trade. The result was Britain’s readiness to provide the open markets and
protected sea lanes essential to establishing a liberal international trading

63 On the evolution of this social order, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain

1603–1714 (New York: Penguin, 1997).

 244 C. A. Kupchan

order. A changing socioeconomic order in the metropole was producing an

accompanying change in the practice of hegemony.64

Cultural Logic
The British Empire was home to peoples of diverse religion, ethnicity, and
race. Unlike the Ottomans, who accommodated minorities within an Islamic
polity, and the Chinese, who sought to assimilate minorities, the British were
culturally inclusive and embraced a universalizing mission; they sought to
export across cultural dividing lines their own language, religion, and way
of life. According to Percival Spear, “Britain’s supreme function has been
that of a cultural germ carrier. . . . The introduction of the English language
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

provided a vehicle for western ideas, and English law a standard of British
practice. Along with English literature, came western moral and religious
ideas, and the admission of missionaries provided, as it were, a working
model of western moral precepts.”65 Peripheral collaborators were to serve
as the main source of cultural transmission. In the words of Lord Thomas
Babington Macauley, “We must at present do our best to form a class who
may be interpreters between us and the millions who we govern, a class
of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in
morals, and in intellect.”66
Despite its cultural inclusivity and universalizing ambition, matters of
religion, race, and ethnicity still had a significant impact on Britain’s man-
agement of its imperial domain. Throughout much of the imperial periphery,
the British categorized populations into new communal categories—a prac-
tice of social engineering that had lasting effects.67 In addition, the British
Empire rested on a political and cultural hierarchy imbued with the notion of
Anglo-Saxon superiority.68 Colonies and former colonies whose populations
were primarily of European extraction consistently enjoyed a privileged re-
lationship with the metropole. During rapprochement with the United States
in the late nineteenth century, for example, both sides of the Atlantic were
awash with talk of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race. Concurrently,

64 See Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1998).
65 Percival Spear, The Oxford History of Modern India, 1740–1975, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1978), 7. See also Stanley Wolpert, India, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005), 44–55.
66 Angela Partington, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1991), 435.

67 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-

alism (London: Verso, 1991), 163–85.

68 See Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations,

1894–1904 (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1981); Peter Katzenstein, Anglo-America
and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities beyond West and East (New York: Routledge, 2012).
 Normative Foundations 245

Britain was fashioning a naval alliance with Japan, but that relationship en-
joyed none of the cultural affinity that helped foster Anglo-American amity.
Indeed, British officials complained that alliance with a non-European power
damaged British prestige. As Admiral Cyprian Bridge, one of the officers co-
ordinating the naval compact with the Japanese, remarked, “I feel no social
or moral affinity with them and I would rather live with any branch of the
Caucasian race, even the Russian, than I would with them.” When Britain
dropped the alliance in the early 1920s, race unambiguously played a part.
London’s ambassador to Tokyo argued in favor of alignment with “our great
White Outposts in the Pacific” and “our great White Neighbour”—the United
States.69
It is also the case that British enthusiasm for the inculcation of its values
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

among colonial populations was regularly tempered by peripheral resistance.

Even in India, where Britain made perhaps its most valiant attempts to An-
glicize the populace, setbacks eventually convinced London that socializing
Indians was a lost cause. After the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, for example, the
British scaled back efforts to export their culture to India. As Karuna Mantena
writes, the rebellion “would mark the decisive turning away from an earlier
liberal, reformist ethos that had furnished nineteenth-century empire its most
salient moral justification.”70
Cultural norms thus pulled the British in competing directions. On the
one hand, Britain embraced a universalistic conception of inclusion, and
expansion was guided by commercial and strategic considerations, not reli-
gious, ethnic, or racial ones. On the other hand, religious, ethnic, and racial
categorization informed imperial management, and key decisions about im-
perial strategy were shaped by cultural norms. So too did resistance in the
periphery ultimately call into question the effectiveness and utility of Britain’s
efforts at socialization.

Commercial Logic
The Ottomans, and to a lesser extent the Chinese, prevented the accumu-
lation of wealth outside imperial structures, kept tight rein over markets
and trade, and feared that economic gain in the periphery would eventually
generate challenges to imperial power. In contrast, the British, after initially
embracing mercantilist policies, supported generally free markets at home
and open trade abroad. Moreover, London viewed economic development
in the periphery as a desirable objective, one that would both further the
wealth of the metropole through trade and investment and promote stability

69 See Charles Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2010), 154–55.

70 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the End of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2010), 1.

 246 C. A. Kupchan

in overseas possessions. Effectively, Britain was the first hegemon to erect

and defend a global system of open markets and liberal trade.
The architecture and management of Britain’s empire was heavily influ-
enced by the commercial logic prevailing in the metropole. London’s concern
that empire was to be a paying proposition directed metropolitan agents to
lucrative peripheral markets. As Robinson and Gallagher argue, cost sen-
sitivity also meant that the British often preferred informal rule if possible
and formal rule only if necessary.71 Coincident with the mounting economic
and political power of Britain’s business community, London dropped mer-
cantilism in favor of free trade and began to focus not just on markets for
goods, but also greater investment opportunities for the surplus capital accu-
mulating in the metropole. As mentioned, Britain’s changing socioeconomic
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

order at home had a direct impact on the conduct of imperial strategy in

the periphery. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain be-
gan to fashion and enforce the rules-based liberal system that would later
provide a foundation for the integrated global economy associated with Pax
Americana.
Pax Britannica was based on a geopolitical architecture that relied on
the preservation of a stable balance of power in Europe coupled with a net-
work of horizontal linkages among peripheral strongpoints. Britain’s social
compacts at home were replicated abroad through social stratification in the
periphery and the nurturing of political and economic collaborators. The
British Empire embraced cultural universalism and was open to all ethnici-
ties, races, and religions, but cultural dividing lines nonetheless shaped the
contours of British hegemony. As for its commercial logic, the British Empire
was the first to promote free markets and an open system of international
trade. A combination of material conditions and social norms shaped these
defining features of British hegemony.

THE UNITED STATES

Geopolitical Logic
Rather than adhering to a unified geopolitical architecture, the United States
after World War II has constructed hegemony in parts, relying on different
geopolitical logics in different strategic theaters. In the Western Hemisphere,
America’s material preponderance, backed up by occasional bouts of in-
timidation and military intervention, has enabled the United States to exert
centripetal force throughout the region; hegemony follows naturally from hi-
erarchy. In a Europe threatened by the Soviet Union, Washington deployed
a sizable military presence on the Continent while also supporting multilat-
eral integration through NATO and the European Community. The United

71 Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade.”

 Normative Foundations 247

States served as an onshore balancer, and its security umbrella enabled its
allies to bind themselves to each other in pursuit of economic and political
union. The success of that strategy, despite Russia’s recent adventurism in
Ukraine, has permitted a marked reduction in the US presence in Europe. In
East Asia, the United States constructed a hub-and-spoke architecture based
primarily on bilateral alliances and offshore reservoirs of US power. As in the
Ottoman Empire, this hub-and-spoke structure lacked a rim; regional states
within America’s sphere of influence were encouraged to deepen ties with
the United States, not with each other. Elsewhere, Washington has relied on
strongpoint defense, using a mix of forwardly deployed forces and regional
proxies to secure its interests in strategically important areas. A primary ex-
ample of this logic has been security arrangements in the Persian Gulf.
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Such variation in geopolitical logic was in part a product of pragmatic

responses to geopolitical realities. In the Western Hemisphere, the United
States faced no peer competitors. It enjoyed hegemony by default. In Europe,
the United States needed a forwardly deployed military presence to help
protect the industrial heartland in Germany and France from potential Soviet
attack. Moreover, America’s European allies were ready to set aside their
rivalries and pursue regional integration, providing Washington a compelling
rationale for opting for a multilateral architecture. In contrast, Asia’s main
center of power—Japan—was offshore, and historical animosities stood in
the way of regional integration, favoring a hub-and-spoke structure. In the
Persian Gulf, the United States initially found willing regional proxies in
Iran and Saudi Arabia, enabling it to maintain a relatively small and largely
offshore military presence. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dramatically
increased the US presence in the region, but US strategy seems again headed
toward reliance on regional proxies and a largely offshore presence.
Social purpose, and not just pragmatic response to geopolitical reali-
ties, has informed the structure and character of US hegemony. In contrast
with Great Britain, whose empire was primarily commercial and extractive
in origin, American hegemony was founded on a combination of geopolit-
ical imperative and ideological ambition. Amid World War II and then the
Cold War, Washington’s primary objective in building a hegemonic sphere
of influence was to prevent the domination of major areas of economic and
military strength by a hostile power. Indeed, it took Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor to coax the United States out of its isolationist shell, and the peace-
time overseas presence that took shape during the late 1940s was a direct
response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The location and nature
of US commitments and the conduct of US strategy emerged accordingly.
To be sure, American corporations and the nation’s economic interests were
ultimately well-served by the era of US hegemony. But America’s hegemonic
ambitions arose as a check against peer competitors, not as a vehicle for
pursuing either public or private interests of a commercial nature.
 248 C. A. Kupchan

The character of US hegemony was also informed by ideological ob-

jectives. The British aimed to marshal sufficient strength to protect imperial
possessions and the sea lanes of communication that connected them to the
metropole. In contrast, the United States embraced strategies that required
the strength needed not just to balance against adversaries, but to vanquish
and democratize them as well. This objective meant that the United States
sought to amass preponderant power against enemies rather than an equi-
librium of power. The ambition to transform enemies stemmed in part from
a conviction that regime type was a potent determinant of a state’s foreign
policy; to spread democratic rule would be to advance the nation’s geopo-
litical interests. This objective was also grounded in a founding creed that
took the spread of freedom to be central to America’s identity and its role in
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

the world.72 The ideological and transformative ambitions of America’s hege-

monic order produced a more activist and expensive grand strategy than that
pursued by the British. This difference helps explain the relatively low price
of maintaining Pax Britannica, which at its zenith cost the metropole roughly
2 to 3 percent of national income.73 In comparison, US defense spending
has averaged about 5 percent of GDP since the 1960s.

Socioeconomic Logic
Since its founding era, the United States has sought to construct an egalitarian
socioeconomic order—one that would depart from Europe’s social stratifica-
tion and class immobility. This social norm has not only shaped the evolution
of American society, but also contributed to the transformational ambition
of US hegemony. When the United States occupied Germany and Japan at
the end of World War II, it set about dismantling Germany’s industrial car-
tels and Japan’s zaibatsu. Both were seen as contributors to militarism and
as socially regressive. The United States continues to demonstrate enmity
toward regimes marked by illiberal politics and economic oligarchy and on
occasion has resorted to the use of force to topple such regimes. Through its
dominating position in international financial institutions, the United States
has also sought to export the “Washington consensus,” propagating to the
developing world its neoliberal approach to economic policy.
The private sector played its part in shaping a brand of hegemony aimed
at exporting economic liberalism. Although they overstate their case, revi-
sionist historians of the Cold War provide ample evidence that the interests

72See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1968); Susan Matarese, American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Jonathan Monten, “The Roots of the Bush Doctrine:
Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy,” International Security 29, no. 4 (Spring
2005).
73 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: MacMillan, 1983), 150.
 Normative Foundations 249

of US companies did figure in the architecture of order that emerged af-

ter World War II, particularly in Western Europe. Commercial and financial
opportunities provided US companies strong incentives to expand their over-
seas presence, ultimately serving as a vehicle for the replication abroad of
America’s domestic socioeconomic order.74 Nonetheless, the private sector
operated within the confines of a geopolitical architecture primarily defined
by strategic and ideological objectives.

Cultural Logic
With a few notable exceptions—the burst of overseas expansion at the end
of the nineteenth century and the 2003 invasion and consequent occupa-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

tion of Iraq among them—the United States has opted for what Ikenberry
calls “liberal hegemony” rather than formal empire.75 More often than not,
Pax Americana has been enforced through persuasion instead of coercion.
This distinguishing feature of US hegemony rests in part on social norms
supportive of the autonomy of all peoples, regardless of their race, ethnic-
ity, or religion. From the eighteenth century onward, Americans embraced a
republican identity that set them against the imperial ambitions of Europe’s
great powers, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.76 As it became a major
naval power, the United States did colonize the Philippines in 1898 and used
brute force against the tenacious insurgency that followed. Congress and the
public, however, readily soured on the material and moral costs of formal
empire. Soon thereafter, President Woodrow Wilson began a campaign to
spread self-determination and end colonialism worldwide, a goal US leader-
ship ultimately brought to fruition with the dismantling of European empires
after World War II.
The United States is also an immigrant and multicultural nation and is
therefore, to use a phrase coined by Henry Nau, “at home abroad.”77 Like
Great Britain, the United States has embraced a brand of hegemony with
universalizing ambition and cultural inclusivity. Moreover, ethnic, racial, and
religious categories have figured less prominently in the character of US
hegemony than they did during the era of Pax Britannica. The British saw
themselves as steeping inferior peoples in British law, education, religion,
and administration—a process that would ultimately produce societies recre-
ated in Britain’s image. In contrast, the United States has seen itself as free-
ing foreign peoples to realize universal values. Shepherding the citizens of

74 See, for example, Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of

Western Europe, 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

75 See Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan.
76 See Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the

Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 2006), 40–46.

77 Henry Nau, At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2002).

 250 C. A. Kupchan

other countries to the ballot box has been an act of liberation, not one of
inculcation.
In this respect, the United States has long based its foreign policy on
a belief, perhaps naı̈ve, in the universality of liberal political values across
all cultures. The reproduction internationally of America’s defining creed
at home is regularly deployed as a justification for the sacrifice of blood
and treasure abroad. Such ambition has noble intent and has produced
many positive outcomes—for example, the defeat and democratization of
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But this transformational instinct has also
drawn the United States into some of its most frustrating episodes of nation-
building, the inconclusive conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq among them.
Americans have not always embraced such cultural universalism. In-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

deed, the impact of racial attitudes on US foreign policy has evolved in step
with societal attitudes toward race on the home front. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, racism acted as a major impediment to overseas expansion: Americans
did not want to incorporate into their union or rule over “inferior peoples.”78
A surge in feelings of Anglo-Saxon solidarity accompanied rapprochement
with Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early twenti-
eth century, the United States opposed including a racial equality clause in
the Versailles Treaty and imposed strict quotas on immigration. It was only
during the second half of the twentieth century, as the civil rights move-
ment advanced at home, that Washington became a major supporter of the
international promotion of racial and gender equality and deployed the na-
tion’s economic and military power in the service of building liberal societies
abroad.

Commercial Logic
The United States inherited from the British the task of providing the public
goods needed to sustain a liberal international trading order. But Washington
also implemented two significant changes to that order. First, as mentioned
above, it insisted on the dismantling of colonial empires, viewing them not
only as antithetical to its own political identity and values, but also as a main
cause of the economic nationalism that helped spawn World War II. Second,
Washington put new emphasis on the institutionalization of liberal multi-
lateralism, overseeing at the close of World War II the flurry of diplomacy
that ultimately produced the financial architecture born at Bretton Woods
in 1944. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs followed in 1947.
The United States was in important respects replicating internationally its

78 See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-

Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

 Normative Foundations 251

domestic reliance on a liberal and institutionalized framework for managing

trade and finance.79
As was the case with Britain, America’s preference for open trade was
conditioned by its underlying socioeconomic order. During the nineteenth
century, the United States imposed trade tariffs to protect its growing indus-
trial base. As industrialization proceeded and manufacturers became globally
competitive, protectionism gave way to free trade.80 This change of course
was further advanced by the development of a robust financial industry
strongly supportive of open commerce. Moreover, the pro-growth and anti-
monopoly policies that succeeded in ameliorating the class cleavages of the
New Deal era were exported to Europe after World War II with the aim of
speeding recovery and fostering social stability in America’s expanding zone
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

of hegemonic influence.81
American hegemony has been distinguished by its diversity. Motivated
primarily by the objective of checking and ultimately pacifying peer com-
petitors, the United States has applied different geopolitical logics in different
theaters. Its rejection of social hierarchy at home has been reflected in its
effort to promote more egalitarian social orders in the periphery. America’s
multiculturalism and democratizing creed have contributed to its univer-
salizing and transformational ambition abroad. And the US commitment to
free-market capitalism at home has produced a brand of hegemony aimed
at establishing an open trading order globally.

HEGEMONIC TRANSITIONS, NORMATIVE DIVERSITY,

AND THE RISE OF CHINA

This article has sought to shed light on the diverse set of ordering norms that
informed Ottoman, Chinese, British, and American brands of hegemony.
Each of these four great powers erected hegemonic zones that rested on
unique geopolitical, socioeconomic, cultural, and commercial logics. To be
sure, in these and all other cases of hegemony, power asymmetry provided
the essential foundation for hierarchical order. But this article makes clear
that hegemony also rests on packages of ordering norms and ideas that
affect its character, stability, and durability, as well as its relationship with
other centers of power. The pervasive effects of normative preferences and
socioeconomic structures on hegemonic order mean that transitions from
one hegemony to the next are not just about changes in hierarchy, but also
about changes in political and social norms.

79 See Brawley, Liberal Leadership.

80 See Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign
Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
81 Charles Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic

Policy after World War II,” International Organization 31, no. 4 (Autumn 1977): 609–18.
 252 C. A. Kupchan

In order to advance understanding of the normative dimensions of hege-

mony, this article has thus far examined different orders in isolation rather
than focusing on the interaction among them. However, extending the anal-
ysis to periods of systemic transition, when hegemons intensely interact with
one another, only confirms this article’s core claims. During hegemonic tran-
sitions, great powers compete not just over the international pecking order,
but also over the norms and rules that each power seeks to enforce interna-
tionally. After the Roman Empire split into eastern and western halves in the
fourth century, competition between Rome and Constantinople was about
governance, culture, and religious doctrine as much as status or territory. The
conflict that raged between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia during
much of the sixteenth century was rooted in competition between Sunni and
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Shiite traditions. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War were contests
over ideology as well as hierarchy and territory, with liberal democracies
generally lining up against monarchic, fascist, and communist alternatives. It
can hardly be accidental that the only peaceful power transition in history
occurred between Great Britain and the United States; the baton was passed
“within the family,” from one Anglo-Saxon great power to another.
It is of important geopolitical consequence that hegemony has norma-
tive dimensions and that power transitions entail clashes among competing
norms. The world is entering a period of transformation as power shifts
from the West to the rising rest. One school of thought—which dominates in
Washington—holds that emerging powers are poised to embrace the existing
international order; Western norms are universal norms, and the dictates of
globalization are ensuring their worldwide spread. According to Ikenberry,
“The United States’ global position may be weakening, but the international
system the United States leads can remain the dominant order of the twenty-
first century.” The West should “sink the roots of this order as deeply as
possible” to ensure that the world continues to play by its rules even as its
material preponderance wanes. “China and other emerging great powers,”
he concludes, “do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the
liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership
within it.”82
The analysis in this article suggests that such conventional wisdom is
illusory; emerging powers will not readily embrace the order on offer from
the West. Regardless of the presumed functionality of the current order from
a liberal, transactional perspective, emerging powers—China, India, Brazil,
Turkey, to name a few—are following their own paths to modernity based
on their own cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic trajectories. Their nor-
mative and social orientations will produce quite disparate approaches to
building and managing international order. Unlike during earlier periods
of multipolarity, when different hegemonies often operated independently

82 G. John Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1

(January/February 2008): 25, 37; Ikenberry, “The Future of the Liberal World Order,” 57.
 Normative Foundations 253

of each other, in today’s globalized world, multiple hegemonic zones will

intensely and continuously interact with each other.
In light of its growing economic and military power, China is likely to
pose the most significant challenge to the ordering norms of Pax Americana.
It is true that China for now is not challenging many of the rules associated
with the Western liberal order, particularly when it comes to commerce. But
as all great powers have done throughout history, China will likely seek
to recast that order when it has the power to do so. Indeed, China is set
to become the world’s leading economy by the end of the next decade.83
Drawing on its historical, cultural, and socioeconomic trajectory, Beijing is
poised to bring to the fore a set of ordering norms that contrast sharply with
those of Pax Americana.
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

The normative orientation of China’s past approach to exercising hege-

mony is hardly a reliable predictor of the ordering norms that might shape a
Chinese sphere of influence in the future. Nonetheless, the historical record
provides a basis for informed speculation.84 China may well aspire to resur-
rect in East Asia a sphere of influence that is arrayed in concentric circles
around a Sinicized core. Through this tiered structure, China might attempt
to exercise a brand of regional hegemony modeled on the tributary system.
China’s material primacy would serve as the foundation for its economic,
strategic, and cultural centrality. Its neighbors would demonstrate deference
to Beijing through both policy and ritual, but they would maintain their au-
tonomy and their independent relations with each other. Nonetheless, China
would become the region’s strategic and economic hub, playing a role sim-
ilar to that of the United States in the Americas. Beijing could well unfurl its
own version of the Monroe Doctrine, laying claim to primacy in Northeast
Asia and guardianship of the region’s sea lanes. Indeed, Beijing has already
ramped up maritime activities in the East China Sea and South China Sea
and rejected Washington’s call for addressing the area’s territorial disputes
through multilateral negotiation.
Such a Sinocentric brand of hegemony in East Asia is of course in-
compatible with the current security architecture in which the United States
continues to serve as the region’s geopolitical hub. Accordingly, the United
States and China have strong incentives to turn to diplomacy to tame their
relationship over the course of this decade—before the naval balance in the
western Pacific becomes more equal. On the table will have to be both the
material and the normative dimensions of order. If Beijing and Washington
succeed in reaching a meeting of the minds, a peaceful power transition in
East Asia may be in the offing. If not, a historic confrontation may well loom.

83 Kupchan, No One’s World, 75–76.

84 On the growing influence of traditional strategic conceptions on contemporary Chinese policy, see
Fei-Ling Wang, “Between Tianxia and Westphalia: China Searches for Its Position in the World” (paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, Washington,
September 2011); Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the
Birth of a New Global Order (New York: Penguin, 2009), 369–99.
 254 C. A. Kupchan

Should diplomacy fail to avert rivalry, Sino-American competition may

nonetheless fall short of the bipolar enmity of the Cold War. China and
the United States are economically interdependent whereas the Soviet Union
and the United States carved out separate economic blocs. Moreover, China’s
geopolitical ambition, at least for the foreseeable future, seems focused pri-
marily on East Asia, suggesting that rivalry with the United States could be
more contained than the global competition that ensued between the United
States and the Soviet Union. China’s regional ambitions are, however, poised
to clash head-on with America’s determination to maintain strategic primacy
in Northeast Asia. Even if it does not match the hostility of the Cold War, the
resulting confrontation could well resemble the naval race between Great
Britain and Germany that commenced at the turn of the twentieth century.85
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Although Wilhelmine Germany did not threaten the global dominance of

the Royal Navy, its naval buildup in the European theater fueled a spiral of
hostility that culminated in World War I.
On the socioeconomic front, China has successfully fashioned a stable
compact between its ruling elite and its rising bourgeoisie. During the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, Imperial China was particularly adept at
co-opting a rising merchant class into the existing political order. The same
goes for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) today. The CCP has deliber-
ately incorporated China’s rapidly expanding middle class into the centralized
state, ensuring at least for now that the spread of private wealth does not
undermine the party’s unitary grip on power. As Kellee Tsai notes, “China’s
capitalists are pragmatic and creative but they are not budding democrats.”
“Economic growth,” she concludes, “has not created a prodemocratic cap-
italist class.”86 The status quo certainly faces challenges from economic in-
equality, corruption, environmental degradation, factional strife within the
CCP, and restive minority populations. But meritocratic entry into public
service, the continued competence of China’s leaders, and governance that
is broadly aimed at shared societal gains rather than rent-seeking augur in
favor of political stasis.
From this perspective, China’s ascent should not be expected to trans-
form its socioeconomic order along Western lines any time soon. On the
contrary, its domestic order is likely to continue shaping its economic and
geopolitical ascent, favoring policies that advantage the compact between
the party and the middle class. If so, China is poised to emerge as a hege-
monic power well before it democratizes, meaning that the world’s leading

85 On the prospects for naval rivalry between China and the United States, see Michael Swaine,

et al., China’s Military and the U.S.-Japan Alliance in 2030: A Strategic Net Assessment (Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 6 May 2013), available at http://carnegieendowment.org/
2013/05/03/china-s-military-and-u.s.-japan-alliance-in-2030-strategic-net-assessment/g1wh.
86 Kellee Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 4, 201. See also Bruce Dickson, Red Capitalists in China: The Party,
Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
 Normative Foundations 255

economy will not ascribe to the dominant political norms associated with
the Western liberal order. To be sure, the CCP’s partial embrace of a mar-
ket economy and its growing concern with legitimacy and accountability
do moderate the “ideological distance” between Beijing and Washington.87
Nonetheless, China and the United States remain miles apart on fundamental
norms, including human rights, the rule of law, and representative govern-
ment. That gap may necessitate international deliberation about what con-
stitutes legitimate forms of governance. One option would be to associate
legitimacy with responsible governance rather than procedural democracy.
States that govern so as to meet the needs and fulfill the aspirations of their
citizens, not just those that hold multiparty elections, would be considered in
good standing.88 Such revision to the normative foundations of Pax Ameri-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

cana may be needed to promote normative consensus as Western hegemony

wanes.
The ethnocentrism of China’s imperial past suggests that a new era of
Chinese hegemony would likely be characterized by cultural particularism,
not universalism.89 As it has already begun to do, Beijing will continue
to develop a worldwide commercial network affording the extraction of
raw materials and the development of export markets. But China shows
few signs of wanting to export globally its own cultural and ideological
norms—in sharp contrast with the universalizing ambition of both Britain
and the United States.
In this respect, China’s ascent may mean that cultural dividing lines will
matter more than they have during the era of American hegemony. China
would accept—and perhaps even encourage—a global order characterized
by pluralism. Whereas the United States has sought to construct an interna-
tional order that rests on universal rules, norms, and institutions, China might
favor greater diversity and the devolution of authority to regional bodies that
represent cultural groupings. Just as China has long argued that America’s
political and social values are not appropriate for the Chinese, so too would
a hegemonic China likely deem it inappropriate and unnecessary for the
Chinese to propagate their own norms beyond a Sinicized sphere of influ-
ence in East Asia. In this respect, a hegemonic China would likely welcome
a more variegated global order, with different regions guided by their own
cultural, social, and political norms. Contra Samuel Huntington’s prediction
of a clash of civilizations, regional groupings that fall along civilizational lines

87 For an optimistic view of the prospects for normative convergence between China and the United

States, see Edward Steinfeld, Playing Our Game: Why China’s Rise Doesn’t Threaten the West (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
88 On the need for revision of prevailing conceptions of international legitimacy, see Charles Kupchan

and Adam Mount, “The Autonomy Rule,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 12 (Spring 2009).
89 See Peter Katzenstein, ed., Sinicization and the Rise of China: Civilizational Processes beyond East

and West (New York: Routledge, 2012).

 256 C. A. Kupchan

are by no means destined to collide with one another.90 However, manag-

ing relations among them would require a level of political and ideological
pluralism inconsistent with the universalism of Pax Americana.
As for its commercial orientation, China’s ongoing economic success
rests on a hybrid economic model that combines state control with market
mechanisms. So-called “state capitalism” has afforded multiple advantages,
including long-range strategic planning, programmatic investment in infras-
tructure, and a regulatory framework that has helped mitigate the finan-
cial turbulence that has recently plagued the more open economies of the
democratic West. To be sure, the Chinese economy faces multiple vulner-
abilities, including unfavorable demographic trends; a relationship among
the state, industry, and finance that impairs competition; and a lack of en-
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

trepreneurial innovation. Nonetheless, success breeds continuity. Beijing will

likely continue to place a premium on the profitability of the export sector
and state-owned enterprises, which enriches party elites as well as private
entrepreneurs. It will also concentrate on expanding international access to
the energy supplies and raw materials needed to fuel its manufacturing and
industrial base. Its foreign economic policy is poised to remain extractive
and mercantilist, with little emphasis on using economic penetration as an
instrument of political reform.
State-planning at home and mercantilism abroad are set to be enduring
features of Beijing’s commercial strategy. As its economy continues to ex-
pand, China will remain interested in embracing, at least to some degree,
the rules of open multilateralism. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that
although China joined the World Trade Organization over a decade ago, it
is continuing to practice a state-led brand of capitalism—the state sector still
produces some 40 percent of the country’s GDP—and to exploit concessions
won during accession negotiations to use the body to its advantage.91 In this
respect, it would be illusory to expect Beijing to bend increasingly to prevail-
ing international rules as China’s power rises. On the contrary, as Chinese
power grows, Beijing will likely bend the rules to favor China’s political and
economic needs and norms—just as all great powers before it have done
as they emerge as hegemons. Indeed, China’s leading role in the Shanghai
Cooperation Council and the BRICS grouping, as well as its support for a
regional trade group that excludes the United States, reveals that Beijing is
already seeking to circumvent institutions dominated by the West, not work
within them.
China will not be alone among rising powers in pursuing a new brand
of international governance that reflects its own interests and normative

90 See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 2011).

91 Keith Bradsher, “China’s 10-Year Ascent to Trading Powerhouse,” New York Times, 8 December

2011.
 Normative Foundations 257

orientations. A key challenge for coming decades will be to forge a major-

power consensus that embraces a broad array of different ordering norms.
As Zarakol warns, “There may be a limit to how long the majority of the
world’s population will tolerate living under an international system whose
rules they have very little input in.”92 The West will have to make room for
the alternative approaches and visions of rising powers and prepare for an
international system in which its principles no longer serve as the primary
ideational and normative anchor. If the next international system is to be
characterized by a rules-based order rather than competitive anarchy, it will
have to be predicated on great power consensus and toleration of political
and social diversity rather than universalization of the liberal international
order erected during the West’s watch.
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:07 30 December 2014

Multipolarity and normative diversity suggest the onset of a more re-

gionalized international system.93 Major powers—or supranational polities,
as in the case of the European Union—would each seek to push outward
its normative preferences within its regional sphere of influence. In the in-
terdependent world of the twenty-first century, effective global governance
would require a combination of tolerance and coordination among such re-
gional groupings. As the world’s two leading powers, China and the United
States would have a unique role to play in shaping this hybrid order—one
that would at once recognize the political autonomy and normative diversity
of different regions but also rest on a working consensus among regional
groupings. China has a long tradition of regional hegemony. The United
States is skilled at constructing hegemony in parts and in acting as a hemi-
spheric power. These experiences may serve both countries well as they
seek to manage peacefully the transition to a new and more regionalized
international order.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank participants in seminars at Princeton Uni-

versity, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, and the
Transatlantic Academy for their helpful comments. He is grateful to the fol-
lowing individuals for their feedback on earlier drafts: Michael Barnett, G.
John Ikenberry, Adam Mount, Dan Nexon, Ayşe Zarakol, and the editors
and anonymous reviewers at Security Studies. The author also thanks Oliver
Bloom, Connor Mills, and Ludwig Jung for research assistance and valuable
contributions to the analysis.

92 Zarakol, After Defeat, 253.

93 See Joseph Nye, Peace in Parts: Integration and Conflict in Regional Organization (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1971); Charles Kupchan, “After Pax Americana: Benign Power, Regional Integration, and the
Sources of a Stable Multipolarity,” International Security 23, no. 2 (Autumn 1998); Peter Katzenstein, A
World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).