The Twin Self-Delusions of IR: Why ‘Hierarchy’ and Not ‘Anarchy’ is the Core Concept of IR

(a) A formal-hierarchical regime of gradated sovereignties

This entails the conception of Western imperial-state ‘hyper-sovereignty’ and Eastern state ‘a-sovereignty’ before 1945 (or Eastern state ‘conditional’ sovereignty after 1989), whereby European states are awarded the mandate to imperially intervene in Eastern polities/societies in order to culturally convert them to the Western standard of civilisation. This general idiom was captured in John Stuart Mill’s well-known claim:

To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilised nation and another, and between civilised nations and barbarians, is a grave error … In the first place, the rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be depended on for observing any rules … In the next place, nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. ⁹

(b) An informal-hierarchical regime of gradated sovereignties

This entails an anti-imperialist conception of Western state ‘full-sovereignty’ and Eastern state ‘qualified/default sovereignty’, whereby although Eastern states must be free of Western imperial intervention, nevertheless they are normatively required to develop by becoming Western. Thus most anti-imperialists deny a key component of sovereignty – what Gerry Simpson refers to as ‘existential equality’, ¹⁰ or the ‘cultural self-determination’ of Eastern polities – because they reject cultural pluralism in favour of an intolerant Eurocentric monism. For example, Immanuel Kant, though clearly critical of European imperialism, was nevertheless especially scathing of savage societies, as became apparent in his debate with Johann Gottfried Herder. And much the same was true of the anti-imperialist scientific racists. ¹¹

Of course, it is the fact that the conventional axiom of IR assumes that international theory presupposes the ‘flattened territorialities of states’, existing within a culturally pluralist equalitarian/egalitarian sovereignty regime, ¹² that leads many IR scholars to assume that their discipline cannot, by definition, be imperialist, Eurocentric or racist. But the upshot of the discussion thus far is precisely the inverse conclusion: that before 1945 international theory’s Eurocentrism (and scientific racism) led it to assume a fully hierarchical conception of world politics that presupposes a procession of gradated sovereignties according to the Western standard of civilisation, whether these embody ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ conceptions of hierarchy. Interestingly, much of my analysis thus far dovetails with the claims made by David Long and Brian Schmidt, Brett Bowden, Robert Vitalis and Edward Keene, all of whom point out that many international thinkers in the 19th century, especially international lawyers, believed that civilised nations should behave differently in their dealings with uncivilised peoples than they should with regard to one another. ¹³ Most notably, Keene concludes that ‘the distinction between civilised and barbaric peoples was even more fundamental to [pre-1945] international political [and international legal] thought than the drawing of territorial boundaries between different sovereign states’. ¹⁴

The main claim I want to advance here is that this bipolar or schizophrenic conception has continued as a core property of post-1945 IR theory. That is, sovereignty never has been understood as an objective and universal fixed attribute of all states, but has always been constructed through an inegalitarian hierarchical discourse depending on the particular Eurocentric/racial conception of the standard of civilisation that underpins each theory. However, before I trace this, it is important to appreciate the point that in focusing on the post-1945 era my task is made all the more challenging by the fact that between 1945 and 1989 international theory took on various ‘subliminal’ Eurocentric guises. For while it is the case that, following the end of the Second World War, IR scholars rejected scientific racism, nevertheless they came to embrace not a racially tolerant and cultural-pluralist sensibility but a subliminal Eurocentric intolerance of non-Western polities/societies, a conception which reiterates many of the standard tropes of scientific racism and manifest (explicit) Eurocentrism but articulates them in terms that dare not speak their name, such as ‘tradition versus modernity’, ‘core versus periphery’, US hegemony and IFI intervention or, later still, rogue states/failed states and humanitarian interventionism. And it is this deeply subliminal form of Eurocentrism that has nourished the second ‘self-delusion’ of the discipline: that IR theory since 1945 has produced culturally pluralist, universalist categories that are based, at least within the mainstream, on a value-free positivism that is devoid of all Eurocentric bias. How, then, do the two conceptual forms of the hierarchical standard of civilisation find their place within post-1945 international theory?

English School Pluralism (I): The ‘Anarchical’ or Imperial ‘Hierarchical’ Society?

Within classical English School pluralism I identify two variants that co-exist in considerable tension, the imperialist-hierarchical strand being considered in this section while the anti-imperialist strand is reserved for the next section. Given the schizophrenic nature of English School pluralism, it finds itself stranded between an imperialist-Eurocentric rock and an anti-imperialist Eurocentric hard place. To preface this discussion, it is noteworthy that one of the tropes that marks a good deal of Western international theory is the ‘Eurocentric big bang theory of world politics’. This is broadly speaking a two-step narrative, the first of which envisions the Europeans single-handedly creating a capitalist and sovereign-state system within Europe as a result of their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius, while in the second step they export their civilisation in order to remake the world so far as possible in their own image through imperialism and/or imperial-hegemony. Put differently, in this imaginary the miraculous ‘big bang of modernity’ exploded autonomously into existence within Europe via the exceptional Eurocentric logic of immanence, before the Western civilisational frontier expands outwards through the ‘Genesis Effect’ to create an entirely new and fully Western earthly universe. How, then, does a formal imperialist-hierarchical conception of world politics exist within classical English School pluralism?

Adam Watson’s seminal book The Evolution of International Society, as well as his and Hedley Bull’s various chapters in The Expansion of International Society, in effect situate their retrospective pro-European imperialist posture within the imaginary of the Eurocentric big bang theory. Watson views Europe as exceptional, identifying the uniqueness of ‘European rational restlessness’ as constituting the driving force of European political modernisation. Here we encounter the first step of the Eurocentric big bang theory and the associated Eurocentric idiom of the exceptional European ‘logic of immanence’, which recounts the rise of the modern European state system/international society of states by focusing on an endogenous journey that passes through a linear series of familiar European way-stations. The journey Watson takes us on begins with the Italian city-state system and then proceeds on to the emergence of sovereignty at Westphalia, by way of the Renaissance and Reformation, to arrive in 1713 with the institutionalisation of the balance of power at Utrecht. ¹⁵ And from there the second step of the big bang narrative flows on ineluctably:

In the [19th century] the Europeans created the first international system to span the whole globe, and established everywhere a universalised version of the rules and institutions and the basic assumptions of the European society of states. Our present international society is directly descended from that universalised European system. ¹⁶

However, to the charge of Eurocentrism Bull and Watson reply by asserting that ‘because it was in fact Europe and not America, Asia or Africa that first dominated and in so doing, unified the world, it is not our perspective but the historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric’. ¹⁷ But there are two immediate problems here. First, the ‘historical record’ that they have chosen to consult excludes or elides the many Eastern contributions to the rise of Europe and to globalisation. Thus they choose to treat Europe as a self-constituting and exceptional entity that self-generated through the Eurocentric logic of immanence, thereby denying or eliding the dialogical notions of an ‘other-generated Europe’ and the poly-civilisational ‘logic of confluence’. ¹⁸

Second, if we dig beneath the surface, we encounter an implicit affirmation of the paternalist civilising mission. For while Bull clearly recognises that non-Western states had to meet the criteria of the standard of civilisation that Europe imposed as condition of entry into international society, nevertheless he maintains that these criteria were entirely reasonable and that, as such, they quite rightly constituted the normative gatekeeper of membership within European international society. Accordingly, he insisted that the diffusion of the standard of civilisation could not be viewed as constituting a vehicle of imperialist domination; to wit, Bull’s claim that

the most central rules of international intercourse do not depend for their validity on the special [i.e. imperialist] interests of one side but on reciprocal interests. The rules that treaties should be observed, that sovereignty should be respected, that states should not interfere in one another’s internal agreed frontiers, of immunity or inviolability of diplomatists … can in no sense be viewed simply as instruments of the special interests of a particular group. This, indeed, is why the Third World countries have sought actually to become part of the international order, even while sometimes purporting to denounce it. It is also what makes nonsense of the attempt to account for international law in terms of a class [i.e. ‘imperialist-exploitative’] theory. ¹⁹

Or again, ‘it could hardly have been expected that European states could have extended the full benefits of membership [within international society] … to political entities that were [unable] to enter into relationships on a basis of reciprocity’. ²⁰ But this returns us directly to John Stuart Mill’s paternalist-imperial axiom that when civilised states deal with each other, they should respect their sovereign independence, but that when civilised states come to deal with uncivilised Eastern states, the former are entitled to colonise the latter and to ‘civilise’ them precisely because uncivilised Eastern polities and societies cannot reciprocate with civilised European states.

Bull displays the familiar post-1945 liberal penchant for imperial self-denial by arguing that such a process is not imperialist because it was an entirely ‘voluntary act’ that presupposed Eastern polities’ consent in adhering to the standard. ²¹ Even so, Adam Watson is prepared to invoke the I-Word (imperialism) when he notes, albeit in passing, that ‘[t]he insistence on Western values … can reasonably be considered a form of cultural imperialism. It played an important part in the integrating process which established a European-dominated global international society’. ²² But beyond this pregnant taster he did not elaborate. Either way, though, Bull and Watson accorded Western-civilisational diffusion a ‘progressive functional sanction’ as a means to provide the global ‘political good’, insofar as it served to spread the ‘benefits’ of European international society to the non-Western world so that it too could come to properly join up and reciprocate on an equal footing with the European states within civilised international society. Such a claim dovetails perfectly with the pre-1945 liberal theory of paternalist-Eurocentric imperialism, wherein the expansion of Europe through the civilising mission would serve to emancipate the backward Eastern societies from barbarism and savagery so that they too could come to enjoy the benefits of civilisation. Moreover, this also makes clear that Bull is fencing with the wrong foe, given that the theory of imperialism need not imply coercion and exploitation, as he assumes, but that it can also take the form of a ‘benevolent’ or ‘benign’ paternalist programme – i.e. the imperial civilising mission – which enforces the cultural conversion of the Eastern Other to the Western Self so as to civilise the East.

However, it is notable that many Eastern countries sought to acquire these institutions not because they owed homage to Europe or merely aspired to its norms but rather as a means of protecting themselves against an imperialist and marauding West. Such a sensibility is conspicuous only for its absence within Bull and Watson’s accounts, ²³ though Gerrit Gong provides a notable exception, as does Robert Jackson. ²⁴ Thus Bull’s silence on this issue constitutes a further instance in which his argument both naturalises and retrospectively supports the imperial expansion of European international society.

All in all, this points to a bipolar construction of formal hierarchy in international society, where the ‘liberal principle’ of non-interventionism applies only to relations between civilised states (i.e. within Europe). Thus imperialist intervention in the East was not only permissible but constituted the progressive vehicle that would solve the ‘deviancy of the Eastern problem’. It is this move, therefore, that leads to the schizophrenic conception of international society in which on one side stands civilised Europe as an ‘anarchical society’, while on the other stands a global ‘hierarchical society’ with the barbaric and savage countries languishing below Europe. ²⁵ In sum, then, this aspect of English School pluralism embraces both analytically and normatively a Eurocentric formal-hierarchical conception of gradated sovereignty in world politics, such that the approach might be more aptly labelled as ‘English School Monism’.

Hegemonic Stability Theory: Anglo-Saxon Formal Hierarchy in World Politics

At first glance Robert Gilpin’s conception of neorealist hegemonic stability theory (HST) might appear to eschew any notion of Eurocentrism, given its emphasis on international anarchy as a structural force that socialises all states regardless of their culture or identity. But HST smuggles in a clear imperialist politics that is embedded within a paternalist subliminal Eurocentrism, though it is undeniably one which embraces only an extremely loose conception of the standard of civilisation. Of course, it might be replied immediately that Gilpin views British and American hegemony as constituting non-imperialist/benign securitisers of global order and economic development and, moreover, that he explicitly reserves the label of ‘empire’ for authoritarian/autocratic states such as those that preceded British hegemony within the East, as well as those such as the Soviet Empire that post-dated it. ²⁶ But even when taken in terms of the logic of his theory, both British and American hegemony are treated implicitly and explicitly as benign liberal empires.

The route into this alternative reading lies with the point that in order to celebrate British and American hegemony Gilpin is forced to suspend some of the cardinal axioms of neorealism. For a key property of hegemony is that, in securing world order and development for all states, this leads inevitably to the relative decline of the hegemon via the ‘free rider problem’. The immediate problem here is that neorealism, especially in its ‘offensive’ variant that Gilpin supported in the period when he developed HST (i.e. 1975 through 1987), ²⁷ asserts that states seek to maximise their relative gains over others. ²⁸ But it is clear that in HST this principle applies to all states bar the hegemon. Moreover, in this vision we are treated to a story in which the leading great power not only does not seek to enhance its relative power over others but instead sacrifices its power for the good of others, thereby contradicting the cardinal realist axiom – that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Accordingly, in Gilpin’s HST this cardinal realist axiom is precisely inverted: that ‘the weak do what they can and the strongest does what it must’.

That the hegemon is exceptional is clear, though why it is so is not explained other than through a circularity as well as through structural-functionalist reasoning – that the hegemon self-sacrifices because that is what hegemons do (i.e. the circularity), and that without the presence of a hegemon the world economy descends into recession and rising inter-state competition because the international system requires a hegemon to promote stability and world order (i.e. structural-functionalist reasoning). But simply asserting that the system ‘requires’ a hegemon for ensuring world order and stability does not explain why a leading great power chooses to become a hegemon in the first place, especially as all it can look forward to is its decline relative to those that it ‘helps’. ²⁹ In essence, then, there is no recourse within neorealist logic to explain the highly anomalous altruistic status that HST ascribes to the United States in the 1945–73 period and to Britain between 1845 and 1873.

Explaining this gap in the theory requires focusing on the presence of a subconscious American ethnocentrism and subliminal paternalist Eurocentrism that, I want to suggest, lies at the very base of HST. That is, US hegemony reflects the 19th-century discourse of ‘American exceptionalism’ and its accompanying neo-imperialist idiom of America’s ‘manifest destiny’. For the notion of helping all other states, especially those in the Third World, conjures up the idioms of the ‘civilising mission’ and the ‘white man’s burden’. And, of course, precisely the same mantras surrounded the idea of the British Empire in the 19th century. Thus I want to suggest that within Gilpin’s theory it is precisely this Eurocentric-imperialist discourse that underpins the explanation for why leading Anglo-Saxon great powers choose to become hegemons and why they sacrifice themselves for the good of all others. And, if nothing else, the theory provides the most robust rationalisation and justification of American and British hegemony found anywhere within IR theory between 1945 and 1989.

Still, while my reading thus far is based on logical deduction, nevertheless there is a clear slippage in Gilpin’s ‘positivist play of mimetic universalism’, where he makes explicit reference to hegemony as a benign imperial civilising mission. As already noted, Gilpin begins by differentiating hegemons from imperial powers. Although Gilpin argues that (with the exception of the Soviet Union) the modern world is governed by the progressive non-imperialist politics of liberal hegemons, this is immediately problematised by the obvious point that Britain was the greatest imperial power prior to 1945, much as the United States has been the greatest neo-imperial power in the post-1945 era. The critical point is that Gilpin attempts to circumvent this obvious inconsistency by explicitly resorting, paradoxically, to the 19th-century imperialist trope of the liberal civilising mission. To this end, he invokes Karl Marx’s paternalist civilising mission conception wherein modern European imperial powers transferred capital and technologies to the colonies not so as to exploit them, but in order to uplift them. ³⁰ Or again:

the dominant power helps to create challenging powers. Ironically, as Marx himself appreciated, one of the greatest forces for diffusion has been imperialism … The imperial power has stimulated the colonised peoples to learn its ways and frequently has taught them advanced military, political, and economic techniques. ³¹

Here, then, we encounter the key ‘paternalist-imperial’ civilising mission trope, where liberal empires take on the guise of a benevolent father who teaches his children – both directly and by way of example – to embrace and develop that which he had already pioneered so that his children can grow up and one day prosper.

Thus, in defending his ‘non-imperialist’ reading of hegemony, Gilpin, as does Bull, is addressing the wrong target. For his assumption is that imperialism is defined by the exploitation of the weak by the strong. What this misses, however, is that in Marx’s vision, as well as that of the paternalist Eurocentric liberals such as Mill, Angell and Hobson, ³² imperialism is conceptualised as a civilising mission precisely because it entails the West engaging in the ‘paternalist uplift’, rather than the coercive exploitation, of the East. Significantly, Niall Ferguson would later make almost the exact-same argument as Gilpin, though he explicitly rehabilitates the E-Word (empire) by openly celebrating the benign liberal empires of Britain and America. ³³

But the question remains as to the place that the Eurocentric standard of civilisation occupies in Gilpin’s HST. While the imperialist dimension of the theory is, I believe, relatively easy to reveal, nevertheless the standard is much more hidden within Gilpin’s subliminal Eurocentric approach and is undeniably articulated only in the very loosest of terms. For while it is clear that the Anglo-Saxon hegemons are placed at the apex of world politics, the critical issue is whether there is a distinction between all other Western states and Eastern states. Here HST’s arguments concerning the decline of hegemony become pertinent. For although all states are deemed to be free riders on hegemonic largesse, nevertheless throughout The Political Economy of International Relations Gilpin singles out East Asian states and especially Japan as the key free riders. ³⁴ Moreover, they are in effect awarded very high levels of ‘predatory’ agency, since their free-riding actions in particular have helped bring down US hegemony while simultaneously failing to provide a hegemonic alternative. It is in this context that Gilpin draws an analogy between US decline and the fall of the Roman Empire, where the ‘diffusion of Roman military skills to the barbarian Germanic tribes was a major factor in the collapse of the ancient Mediterranean civilization’. ³⁵

Here we encounter shades of the Yellow Peril trope that marked pre-1945 racist cultural realism (e.g. Lothrop Stoddard and Charles Pearson) and parts of racist realism (e.g. Mahan and Mackinder (1904)), in which Japan and China were singled out as the principal threat to Western civilisation and to world order. ³⁶ These earlier writers placed the Yellow Peril in the second world, one notch down from the civilised West and one notch up from the inferior black and red societies. Thus for Gilpin, while East Asian free riding has helped bring down US hegemony, nevertheless none of these states is deemed to be capable of assuming the mantle of hegemonic leadership, the result of which is that the decline of US hegemony at the hands of the Eastern free riders leads back to the dark age of the chaotic inter-war years. Significantly, Gilpin embeds this trope within the familiar discourse of the fall of the Roman Empire: ‘[t]he destruction of Rome by barbarian hordes led to the chaos of the [European] Dark Ages’. ³⁷ Accordingly, in this Eurocentric vision, we might refer to this not as the ‘free rider’ but the ‘free raider’ problem. And it is here, in the discussion of Japan and the East Asian NICs, that we encounter, albeit very tentatively, the second world of the standard’s civilisational league table – though clearly it is not a perfect match with the 19th-century trope. Equally, the whole argument about Western hegemonic international institutions and their paternalist civilising impact applies mainly to non-Western/third world states whose protectionism and indebtedness have been treated with the paternalist-Eurocentric hegemonic antidote of the cultural conversion of Eastern economies to the Western neoliberal standard of civilisation. In these ways, then, I want to suggest that there is, albeit extremely loosely, a highly subliminal imperialist/paternalist Eurocentric standard of civilisation lurking deep beneath the surface of HST alongside a very clear formal-hierarchical conception of world politics.

Thus while the formal-imperial hierarchical vision of world politics based on the Eurocentric standard of civilisation constitutes a core property of significant parts of post-1945 IR theory, equally in other parts we encounter an informal-hierarchical vision of world politics based on an anti-imperialist conception of the standard of civilisation, to a consideration of which I now turn.

English School Pluralism (II): The Anti-Imperialist Hierarchical Society

Many IR scholars might think that any slip into a pro-imperialist posture when discussing the pre-1945 world would merely comprise an awkward exception to Bull’s otherwise robust anti-imperialist political posture, precisely because his cultural pluralism presupposes that sovereign self-determining states that have their own cultural autonomy constitute the pillars of global international society, which, of course, is precisely why the approach is termed ‘pluralism’. But in fact when Bull analyses the postcolonial world, he once again contradicts his own pluralism because he smuggles in an informal-hierarchical conception of global international society that rejects an equalitarian sovereignty regime and embraces a cultural intolerance of non-Western states and societies. And this dimension of Bull’s pluralism means, once again, that the concept of the ‘anarchical society’ applies only to intra-Western politics, while an informal-hierarchical conception applies at the global level, thereby returning us to my earlier point that the approach might be more appropriately labelled ‘English School Monism’.

The cue for this alternative reading lies with Bull’s belief that cultural self-determination for Eastern polities is a major cause of the instability of modern global international society, precisely because Eastern states lack the fully rational institutions of the West. Thus he argues that in the ‘fifth revolt against the West’ many Eastern polities resist the West by seeking to maintain their own cultural autonomy/self-determination while many such states are either too despotic or simply too weak in an institutional sense to provide internal order – i.e. ‘failed states’ or what he calls ‘quasi-states’ – and it is this that presents a major challenge to the successful reproduction of global international society. ³⁸ Here Bull and Watson rehabilitate the idea of the ‘standard of civilisation’ for assessing contemporary global international society (as do the solidarists), with its implicit discourse of the three worlds of Western ‘liberal civilisation’, Eastern ‘despotic barbarism’ and Eastern ‘anarchic savagery’. Critically, they argue that the idea of equal sovereignty in world politics today is a myth, to wit:

A number of Asian and African states are more like the nascent or quasi-states that existed in Europe before the Age of Richlieu than they are like the modern Western … states of today … [Such quasi-states] still share some of the characteristics that led European statesmen in the last [i.e. 19th] century to conclude that they could not be brought into international society because they were not capable of entering into the kinds of [reciprocal] relationship that European states had with one another. The presence of these pseudo-states or quasi-states within the [global] international society of today, whether we regard it as good or bad, inevitable or avoidable, makes for a weakening of cohesion. ³⁹

The essential claim is that the contemporary existence of Eastern quasi-states (or anarchic savage societies) and modern-day equivalents of ‘Oriental despotisms’ serves only to undermine international cohesion through generating endemic conflict, much as the racist-realists and racist cultural realists had argued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This also links up with Martin Wight’s claim that ‘[w]e must assume that a states-system will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members’. ⁴⁰ Most significantly, as Barry Buzan notes,

Wight’s remark implies that ‘cultural unity’ is something distinct from international society and prior to it. Hedley Bull also accepted that the main historical cases of international societies studied by Wight ‘were all founded upon a common culture or civilisation’. ⁴¹

And it is this that leads to the ‘instability thesis’ regarding a global international society in which there is no single shared culture.

The normative antidote here lies with the claim that global order and stability can only be achieved once the recalcitrant Eastern polities undergo a full cultural conversion to the standard of Western civilisation, thereby creating a smooth and uniform (Western) globalised culture. Nevertheless, Bull refused to countenance Western imperial/neo-imperial intervention in the postcolonial East so as to effect this transformation (though he applauded it in the pre-1945 context); instead he insisted that Eastern polities must conform to the ‘developmental requirement’ in the postcolonial era – i.e. they must become fully Western. Accordingly, while Bull clearly rejects the role of neo-imperialism in the postcolonial world, nevertheless because he also denies full cultural self-determination to Eastern polities so he ends up by subscribing to an informal-hierarchical conception of qualified sovereignty in the East and full sovereignty in the West, a stance that reflects his anti-paternalist Eurocentric conception of the standard of civilisation. Thus, unlike his pro-imperialist prescription for solving the ‘Eastern problem’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, he had nothing to offer in terms of solving the contemporary ‘Eastern problem’. It is this dilemma that he found himself in near the end of his life, which is why, I believe, he flirted with the (neo-imperial) interventionist politics of solidarism in his Hagey Lectures, ⁴² even if in the end he reverted back to his preferred pluralism and even if it turns out that it took the form of a Eurocentric monism.

Neo-Marxism and Informal Hierarchy in World Politics/Economics

One objection to all this might be to turn to critical IR theory in general and invoke neo-Marxism in particular, which is, allegedly, consistent with a fully developed universalist conception of sovereignty that rejects any analytical or normative notion of the Eurocentric standard of civilisation and advances a fully global perspective, on the one hand, while being highly critical of the West and of Western imperialism, on the other. Here I shall consider world-systems theory (WST) because this is the variant that is most closely associated with just such a ‘global approach’. But my reply is that, for all the talk of a global approach, Wallerstein’s perspective turns out to be a Western provincialism masquerading as a radical universalism.

The standard reportage asserts that WST began with a critique of liberal modernisation theory, with Wallerstein attacking its assumption that development unfolds in an autonomous and more-or-less unilinear fashion within each national economy. Wallerstein’s approach, we are conventionally told, insists that national economies are shaped by external global forces, leading him to replace the endogenist conception of ‘tradition versus modernity’ with the globalist/externalist conception of ‘core versus periphery’, in which the core’s wealth is derived from the exploitation of the periphery. One might immediately assume from this that the focus on ‘the global’ as well as the interactive relationship between East and West or North and South would constitute a clear antidote to Eurocentrism, given WST’s apparent critique of the exceptional endogenous European ‘logic of immanence’. But Wallerstein’s WST constitutes an excellent example of what might be called ‘critical Eurocentrism’ that places the hierarchic standard of civilisation at its theoretical heart and fails to escape Eurocentrism owing, not least, to its elision of Eastern agency while also subscribing to the Eurocentric logic of immanence in the explanation of the Rise of the West.

First, the ‘core/periphery’ binary reiterates the ‘modernity/tradition’ divide insofar as it radically compartmentalises the world into two analytically separate entities, thereby reiterating the Eurocentric move of splitting East from West. Second, it turns out that this division reiterates the Eurocentric practice of endowing the West with superior attributes which ensure its autonomous or self-made breakthrough to modernity. And third, such an argument is advanced through the implicit deployment of the Eurocentric standard of civilisation. For when Wallerstein examines the situation in world politics around 1500 – the alleged watershed that divides world history between tradition and modernity – we encounter a tripartite meta-geography, wherein the West stands in the first world, being civilised in an economic sense, with regressive/barbaric ‘redistributive/tributary world-empires’ in Asia (or what is akin to the Eurocentric trope of barbaric Oriental despotisms) residing in the ‘second world’, and primitive ‘reciprocal mini-systems’ found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (or what is akin to the Eurocentric idiom of savage, anarchic societies) languishing at the bottom in the ‘third world’. How, then, is Europe portrayed as exceptional and how does the Eurocentric idiom of the ‘logic of immanence’ find its place in WST? The short answer is that, for Wallerstein, only the West or Europe could successfully make the breakthrough into capitalist modernity such that it would achieve this all by itself.

In the first volume of The Modern World-System and The Politics of the World-Economy, Wallerstein argues that Eastern tributary empires ultimately blocked economic development because they were unable to generate sufficient domestic surpluses and reverted instead to the method of extracting tribute from other states. ⁴³ Still, in the end these empires declined because they suffered from geopolitical overstretch, given that they could not generate sufficient domestic revenues to support such expansion. Primitive Eastern reciprocal mini-systems were technologically undeveloped and, being unable to generate domestic productive surpluses, were frequently swallowed up by tributary Eastern empires. Critically, this means that the second and third worlds were deemed to be incapable of developing into modernity such that ‘un-development’ rather than ‘under-development’ constitutes the inherent condition of these non-Western societies, the very claim that Wallerstein critiqued Rostow for! ⁴⁴ Conversely, Europe was the only region that could successfully develop as a result of its own exceptional properties.

Wallerstein’s theory is universally portrayed in the standard reportage and in the various Marxist critiques as reifying the role of extra-European long-distance trade as the prime factor in the rise of European capitalism. ⁴⁵ But it turns out, I argue, that it was largely a series of ‘exceptional’ intra-European developments that he focused upon, of which not only was trade merely one among many factors but it failed even to attain the ontological status of primus inter pares. These intra-European causal factors include the anarchic nature of the European inter-state system that not only made Europe ‘exceptional’ (given that in the East single ‘imperial state systems’ allegedly predominated) but also forced European rulers to promote capitalism in order to derive sufficient revenues to maintain their military power base in a system that was marked by near-continuous warfare. ⁴⁶ Wallerstein also singles out a further set of intra-European variables, which include the flight of the peasantry from the land, owing to the higher rates of exploitation that were imposed by the nobility in the aftermath of the Black Death; the rise of the towns as nodal points in long-distance intra-European trading circuits and as, above all, refuge harbours for the over-exploited peasantry; the primitive accumulation of capital through the beginning of the enclosure movement; and various technological innovations that enhanced agrarian production.

If nothing else, this reveals the point that the so-called ‘great divide’ (i.e. the productionist/circulationist debate) that allegedly differentiates Wallerstein, Paul Sweezy and Henri Pirenne, on the one side, from Robert Brenner, Ernesto Laclau and Maurice Dobb, on the other, turns out to be a vast oversimplification, if not an entirely false one that generated far more heat than light. For Wallerstein effectively agreed with Brenner, as well as Laclau and Dobb, against his so-called erstwhile ‘associates’ of Sweezy and Pirenne, when he asserted: ‘I am skeptical … that the exchange of [Asian goods] … could have sustained so colossal an enterprise as the expansion of the Atlantic world, much less accounted for the creation of a European world-economy.’ ⁴⁷ And this is reinforced further by Wallerstein’s virtual dismissal of the Atlantic world as a causal source of European capitalism, suggesting that it provided Europe merely with high calorific foods and fuel. In short, the role of the extra-European world in stimulating the rise of the West is pretty much conspicuous for its absence in Wallerstein’s theory, all of which means that this part of his narrative accords perfectly with the first step of the Eurocentric big bang narrative.

Having risen to the top of the world economic hierarchy by the mid-16th century through the Eurocentric endogenous ‘logic of immanence’, the second step of the Eurocentric big bang narrative cuts in immediately, to wit: ‘[i]n the sixteenth century, in Europe, a capitalist world-economy came into existence which eventually expanded to cover the entire globe, eliminating in the process all remaining redistributive world-empires and reciprocal mini-systems’. ⁴⁸ This Western imperialist expansion is inherent to the process of capital accumulation. Here we confront the opposite problem to that which we encountered with the English School in the last section. For while Bull and Watson present the expansion of Europe in highly consensual terms, thereby eliding the process of Western coercive imperialism, Wallerstein corrects for this deficiency but in the process bends the polemical stick the other way to produce a vision of a Leviathanesque, marauding-imperial hyper-agential West and a victimised agency-less East.

And so while the West’s superior economic power today rests on its exploitation of the East, nevertheless, in erasing Eastern agency from the story of the world political economy, we are treated to another tale of why the West is the sole agent in world politics and will inevitably remain so. From this it might be ventured that because he denies the prospects of Eastern agency, so he in effect eternalises and naturalises this Western-dominated capitalist world-economy (what I call the problem of ‘Eurofetishism’). Moreover, in the context of the modern global economy, Wallerstein reconvenes the Eurocentric tripartite standard of civilisation through the three-tiered structure that separates out the civilised-advanced Western ‘core’ from the second world (barbaric Oriental despotic) ‘semi-periphery’ and the Eastern third world (savage/primitive) ‘periphery’. And while it is undeniable that Wallerstein is highly critical of Western imperialism, nevertheless he ends up by subscribing to an informal-hierarchical conception of gradated sovereignties in world politics as a function of his subliminal Eurocentrism.