Forum Introduction

The World Imagined by Hendrik Spruyt presents a sweeping historical account of forms of inter-polity relations that both preceded and existed outside of the (so-called) Westphalian system based on sovereign territorial states. ¹ Spruyt discusses three historical alternatives – Sinocentric, Islamic, and Southeast Asian ‘galactic’ ways of ordering inter-polity relations – and how each of these traditions engaged and were engaged by European powers. All three of these alternatives lodged claims to political authority and legitimacy not in a territorially delimited space, but in broader notions that were in principle without territorial limit at all. The story Spruyt tells dispenses with the traditional accounts of the ‘expansion of international society’ ² in which a dynamic ‘West’ brought its sovereign-territorial way of ordering the world to regions outside of Europe and more or less imposed it on the ‘rest’. Instead, Spruyt offers the reader a very different account: the very core of the contemporary international system, ‘the fusion of territory and the nation, was made possible by an encounter with the non-West’ (328). ³ The world that we now inhabit was no simple linear extrapolation of European ideas or institutions, and the existence of alternative traditions reminds us that it could very well have been otherwise.

In so doing, Spruyt launches a powerful intervention into two existing lines of commonsensical thinking in ‘mainstream’ Anglophone international studies. One line of critique involves the concept of ‘international society’, which Spruyt wants to wrest away from the institutionalist focus and the Eurocentric character of traditional English School scholarship. The other line of critique involves the still-dominant focus on the material components of power and influence when it comes to explaining political and social order; Spruyt instead argues for the critical importance of collective beliefs when it comes to understanding questions of authority, hierarchy, and in general the whole texture of relations between polities. These critiques are linked, as Spruyt’s broadening of the definition of international society is intimately linked to his shift of focus from institutions to culture when it comes to questions of order. These two critiques are also jointly responsible for his reconceptualisation of inter-polity political order as something dynamic and fluid rather than fixed and static; instead of firm rules, what holds an inter-polity order together are shared understandings – which are themselves flexible enough to admit a variety of different implications and consequences.

Terminology is tricky here, because the traditional notions of an ‘international system’ or ‘international society’ involves the presumption of independent sovereign territorial states, and that notion is neither transhistorical nor transcultural. The notion of international society developed by the English School ⁴ was developed through a close historical reading of intra-European diplomatic practices, emphasising the shared practices and assumptions that allowed rival polities to coexist, even though that coexistence often led to wars and other violent rivalries. Order, not peace, was the goal. The seemingly rival notion of an international system – ‘seemingly’ rival because system and society share the same idea of order as being imposed rather than innate ⁵ – is no less based on a stylised formalisation of the high politics of the self-styled great powers during the 19th and 20th centuries: a depiction of the logic of the interactions between sovereign states in anarchy. ⁶ But the conceptual vocabulary of sovereignty and anarchy is historically and culturally specific; it is largely meaningless to talk about either anarchy or sovereignty when referring to, say, the medieval European arrangement of interpenetrated and overlapping authority claims, ⁷ and the persistence of intra-European empire and dynastic claims to rule make it difficult to affix the sovereignty/anarchy conceptual binary to actual patterns of European practice before the 19th century. ⁸ But our theoretical imaginations, at least in international studies, have been so shaped by these notions that they have become something of a default scientific ontology whenever we inquire into relations between polities. The opposition remains: hierarchy within, anarchy without, regardless of the kind of polity that we are defining as central to whatever system or society we are investigating. And then we debate the quality of anarchy and the character of the relevant polities, their causes and consequences, without ever really getting all that far away from the root international system/society metaphor derived from the European experience.

Spruyt tackles this problem of terminology, which is not merely a problem of terminology, head on. He regards ‘a group of individuals or a community of actors as constituting a society based on shared beliefs and common organization’, and emphasises the way that ‘intersubjective understandings. . .constitute’ societies of all sorts (53-4). He thus moves away from the historically contingent vocabulary of sovereignty and anarchy, and further erodes the default inside/outside dichotomy ⁹ by electing to use the term ‘state’ to ‘denote a form of polity that aggregates individuals above the level of chiefdoms and tribes’ (58, emphasis added). ‘Aggregates’ is the key word here, because Spruyt does not presume that a polity is necessarily based in a firm hierarchy, and in consequence, relations between polities need not be based in the absence of a firm and formal hierarchy, i.e. anarchy. Instead, the causal powers in Spruyt’s account are the shared cultural practices that characterise a group of actors, and serve both as a set of broadly-agreed parameters for acceptable action and as a bank of resources on which actors can and do draw when pursuing their various goals. This anthropological approach means that Spruyt is perfectly comfortable characterising Islamic and Southeast Asian regional orders as ‘international systems’, despite their lack of common regulatory institutions.

At the same time, Spruyt’s approach dispenses with the notion that the Sinocentric, Islamic, and Southeast Asian international societies were somehow constitutionally incapable of modification and change. Acknowledging the danger of essentialism and Orientalism that lurks within any facile general statement about collective beliefs, Spruyt suggests that we can avoid these traps by converting a characterisation of collective beliefs into ‘a question of observation and interpretation’ (72), and thus making it an empirical question whether and to what extent a given set of people and polities share beliefs that would suffice to describe them as belonging to the same cultural group. At the same time, he stresses the ways that collective beliefs change and adapt over time, such that ‘Confucian’ or ‘Islamic’ or ‘galactic’ notions constitute less an identifiable constant core and more a practical evolving consensus that draws on a shared past to envision a shared future. ¹⁰ As such, Spruyt’s rich empirical account identifies numerous times and places in which the encroachment of European powers into one of these regions – an encounter between the emerging European international system and the already-existing international society on the ground – resulted in a variety of exchanges and innovations. Sometimes the non-European international society borrowed and adapted a notion from the European interlopers; sometimes the encounter provoked a re-examination of traditional notions; and sometimes something completely new emerged, perhaps unintentionally. Indeed, Spruyt highlights the irony that:

The Westphalian sovereign, territorial states exemplified in principle the conceptual opposite of the universal empires of the Islamic and Asian polities. Authority was territorially circumscribed, and states were juridically equal. However, once the European states were powerful enough, they denied Asian and Middle East power the right to exist as independent polities. The territorial states, by deeming universal claims to empire incompatible with the Westphalian system, created a justification to become the very embodiment of universal empire themselves (343).

The contemporary world, Spruyt argues, is not the triumph of some universal thing called ‘international society’ without cultural modifiers or colouration. Instead, it is a very specific arrangement with historical roots both in a tradition of inter-polity relations in Europe and in the encounter between that tradition and a variety of others, of which he has analysed three. Calling all of these ways of ordering and organising inter-polity relations ‘international societies’ not only facilitates meaningful comparisons and contrasts, but it also expands our conventional vocabulary in ways that might facilitate a more nuanced historical account. Spruyt also shifts our attention to the practices of legitimating and justifying political authority, treating collective beliefs less as fixed drivers for action than as flexible ‘performative scripts’ (63); in this way his account also foregrounds agentic improvisation while not losing sight of continuities over time. The ‘imagined’ of Spruyt’s title is both an active process of imagination and the concrete historical trace of that imagining. The world, he argues, is both at once.

In their contributions below, each of the authors attest to the significance of Spruyt’s interventions, highlighting his expansive conception of international society and his attention to the central role of collective beliefs in organising relations between polities. Each contribution also raises important questions that press on these interventions, exploring the limits of an expansive definition of international society, querying Spruyt’s account of the specific international societies he examines and reconsidering the ultimate triumph of the Westphalian international order. From detailed engagements with the tribute system of East Asia to debates about the relationship between ideational and material elements of power, the range of conversations opened by these engagements is a testament to the breadth and depth of Spruyt’s field-defining book.

Andrew Phillips kicks off the conversation, noting that Spruyt’s expansive definition of international society is an important innovation, but wondering if the concept is stretched too far. While the extension of this concept to Sinocentric East Asia is compelling and persuasive, Phillips remains unconvinced that international society can be said to have existed in the case of the Islamic universal monarchies of Southwest and South Asia, and the galactic polities of Southeast Asia given the relative absence of institutional mediations of inter-polity interactions. Phillips is concerned about ‘the conceptual elasticity of “international society”, and the prospective universality of its application’. He wonders whether other terms like ‘world regions’ and ‘civilizational complexes’ might better capture the cultural commonalities at the heart of Spruyt’s study. This leads to Phillips’s second set of questions: ‘How do the collective beliefs that underpin international societies arise in the first place? And how are they contested and transformed, rather than endlessly reproduced?’ Phillips seeks to place greater emphasis on the ‘constructed and contingent character’ of cultural regimes and argues, drawing on his own award-winning volume edited with Christian Reus-Smit, that these questions might be addressed by examining how cultural difference is authorised and managed especially in the context of the imperial form like the Islamic and Sinocentric orders. The diversity regimes of these imperial formations help us better understand eventual European expansion into Asia. Western imperialism, Phillips argues, did not secure dominance only with blunt instruments of power, but instead imitated the ‘diversity regimes’ of the imperial formations they replaced. The Westphalian nation-state was in this regard only ‘one tool in the repertoire of Western domination’ and perhaps a limited one at best.

The contingent rise of the nation-state was the subject of Spruyt’s first book, The Sovereign State and its Competitors. In his contribution, Turan Kayaoglu argues that The World Imagined complements this early work, illuminating in new ways the alternative modes of organising political regimes and their relations to each other that prevailed before the triumph of the nation-state and its international correlate of a Westphalian international society. The World Imagined leaves unaddressed however, why the nation-state ultimately prevailed in the non-Western world. He asks ‘Can the logic for the success of the sovereign state in Western Europe be extended to explain the success of European expansion, or is military power more important in the latter case?’ Phillips asks a similar question and argues, in his review, that to answer this question we would have to attend more closely to non-Western actors, especially the Asian (and later African) anti-imperialists for whom the nation-state form became a particularly powerful tool for resisting European imperialists and consolidating power against their domestic rivals.

Like Phillips, Kayaoglu also probes the concept of international society, but where Phillips suggests that the conceptual extension might obscure different kinds of inter-polity regimes, Kayaoglu wonders whether the labelling of each instance of a non-Western international society in Spruyt’s book obscures internal divergence and contestation in service of an image of stability and coherence. He takes up this question with particular attention to the idea of an Islamic international society. Deploying the shifting status of the Hagia Sophia and current controversies over its reconversion to a mosque by the Turkish state as a touchstone, Kayaoglu argues that the label of Islamic international society mis-describes political regimes that stretched from the Ottoman Balkans to Mughal Bengal, and effaces the local influences and sedimentation of earlier collective beliefs that shaped this vast geography. At the core of Kayaoglu’s concern is that such labelling reinforces a foundationalist impulse. In the case of Islamic international society, that foundation is thought to be Shari’a law. To be sure Spruyt recognises the multivocality of Islamic law, but emphasising Shari’a as he does privileges the realm of jurisprudence and renders this arena the ‘default mode of Islamic legitimation’. For Kayaoglu, this leaves unattended other ways of understanding Islamic international society, particularly the idea of the umma: a globe spanning Muslim community. The umma also raises another question for Spruyt and scholars of international relations more generally. Even as Spruyt and others have pushed the field to extend our vision and include as international actors entities that do not conform to the model of the nation-state, do we remain too wedded to the autonomous polity as the basis of international society? We may ultimately need to relax this concern with discrete polities. Kayaoglu suggests that the umma might be an important starting point in the project for it includes individuals linked by faith that transcends the boundaries of states and empires as well as the interaction between Muslim polities.

Where Kayaoglu takes up Spruyt’s account of Islamic international society, Ji-Young Lee looks closely at Spruyt’s treatment of Sinocentric East Asia. Lee praises Spruyt’s emphasis on the ‘remarkable flexibility, diversity and heterogeneity’ of the tribute system. Central to his ability to capture these features, she maintains, is Spruyt’s use of an interpretivist method and practice-oriented approach which reveals the ways rituals are not an effect of power but constitutive of it. Focusing on the intersubjective scripts of the tribute system, The World Imagined brings into sharp relief questions of internal and external legitimation – of how, as Lee puts it, actors construct political authority and generate ‘local variations and instrumental interpretations’ of collective beliefs. Lee extends Spruyt’s insights in her contribution by offering a closer look at the heterogenous strategies of legitimation that differently positioned actors pursued vis-à-vis the Ming Empire. Given the strategic uses (even manipulation) of the intersubjective scripts in competing projects of legitimation, she argues that ‘tributary order’ is perhaps a better characterisation of the East Asian interstate society, rather than the term ‘Sinocentric’. The shift in terms makes clear that even the legitimacy of the hegemonic actor depended on the recognition of others and allows us to acknowledge how shared scripts are mobilised for divergent ends by a wide range of actors.

In his contribution, Yuan-Kang Wang also focuses on Spruyt’s engagement with East Asian international society, raising related questions about Sinocentrism. For Wang, the focus on the tribute system smuggles in a Sinocentric bias by obscuring other collective belief systems including the Mongol and Tibetan Buddhist systems. The tribute system is a recurring reference point and object of study in international relations, Wang argues, because it offers ready-made answers to the question of norms and institutions governing inter-polity relations. Readers will note an overlap here with Kayaoglu’s critique of the dominance of the polity as the unit of international society. The foregrounding of inter-polity relations for Kayaoglu and the ‘search for the underlying rules and norms’ for Wang suggest that even as we push beyond a Eurocentric vision of international society, we might remain beholden to its underlying concepts and orientations. Wang notes that Spruyt does discuss Mongol and Tibetan systems, but too quickly folds them into the tributary system and treats the later as ‘a coherent framework’. Alternative accounts of these systems suggest that the Mongol and Tibetan systems were not subsidiary to, but instead were situated alongside, the tribute system.

The emphasis on coherence and stability, Wang argues, also tends to overemphasise the relative peace of East Asian international society. Through the comparison of Sinocentric order with Islamic and Southeast Asian international societies, Spruyt seeks to show that shared collective beliefs can arise outside of imposition by a hegemonic actor and can lead to relative peace. Wang, however, is not persuaded by this point. He argues that this claim tends to confuse order and peace where the latter can include conflictual interactions as well as peaceful ones. According to Wang, ‘The World Imagined may have answered the question of how the collective beliefs underlying an order can still emerge without the material dominance of a hegemonic power, but it does not adjudicate the other question of whether cultural or material factors produced relative peace in historical East Asia’. A second issue with the claim that the East Asian tribute system was peaceful stems from the boundaries of this system. Spruyt extends the shared collective beliefs of the tribute system beyond the Confucian core (which included China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan) to include nomadic polities that, to various degrees, participated in the tribute system, but interpreted its meanings in ways that differed from Confucian states. Yet the relations between sedentary Chinese and nomadic peoples were characterised by a large number of wars, which undercuts Spruyt’s argument that the tribute system was capable of staving off conflict. That such interstate conflicts were so prominent suggests that unipolarity and material factors played a dominant role within East Asia.

The role of material factors in international society plays a limited role in Spruyt’s account for his main goal is to reconstruct the centrality of shared beliefs and practices. However, in the case of the rise and eventual global dominance of the Westphalian system, the role of force and power play a more prominent causal role. For Wang, this is an opportunity to examine the interactive relations between ideational and material factors and to pinpoint more surgically what role they each play, especially at crucial moments of transition.

In his generous and spirited reply, Spruyt dedicates a section to these questions about the role of material factors and their interactions with collective beliefs. Concurring with Wang that he has not demonstrated the causal priority of cultural factors, he nevertheless defends his efforts to attend to the role of ideas, culture and practices as key features that cannot be reduced to the epiphenomenal. Situating the Sinocentric tribute system alongside the Islamic and Southeast Asian systems illustrates that while a hegemon like China might impose its beliefs, such unipolarity is not always a necessary element for developing shared cultural frameworks within an interpolity system. More generally, Spruyt views his work not as an effort to displace arguments in which material factors have causal priority, but instead as an effort to suggest alternative interpretive possibilities beyond causation. He worries that ‘causal specification only raises the danger of essentialism, the reduction of complex features of a given society to some master variables that explain outcomes across time’. His aim instead is to proliferate interpretive frameworks in ways that capture the complexities of international societies. As he puts it, ‘generating alternative perspectives and rival accounts of the same empirical material should be the purpose of interpretive inquiry, rather than the winnowing of possibilities’.

This orientation also shapes the remainder of his response. In reply to Phillips’s call for a more delimited conception of what counts as an international society, Spruyt defends this loosening of the criteria of formal institutions. Even in the absence of such institutions which characterised the Sinocentric tribute system and the Westphalian regime, he argues that shared frames of reference can emerge from a range of cultural beliefs and practices. Moreover, these frames of reference can still accomplish the aims of formal institutions, including conflict regulation. It is by loosening the prioritisation of formal institutions in our definition of international society that we can come to appreciate how the range of practices and beliefs grounds shared frames of reference.

Yet, Spruyt concedes that The World Imagined did not take up in a systematic way how the collective beliefs that gave rise to these frames of references emerged, a question that appears in several of the forum contributions. He also takes up the question of whether this treatment of the three international societies is too essentialist – a point raised most prominently in Kayaoglu’s review. On the first point, Spruyt suggests some possible paths for investigating the origins of collective beliefs. On the second, he highlights his own attention to internal differentiation and complexity in The World Imagined. Spruyt is also sceptical that any term of categorisation – including Kayaoglu’s preferred term umma – can avoid the necessity of boundary making.

In a testament to the rich conversation spurred by the review, Sprut ends by indicating further lines of investigation. First, he draws attention to Lee’s recommendation of attending to practices alongside beliefs and views this is an important extension of research in this vein. Second, he calls for extending his approach to collective beliefs to the European state system by examining how the cosmological and religious beliefs that were dominant in medieval Europe changed and informed European international relations. Finally, given debates about the compatibility of Islamic concepts such as umma and the state-system and the revival of interest in Confucianism spurred in part by the People’s Republics invocations of Neo-Confucian justifications of their policies, he recommends an examination of the persistence of older collective beliefs that are no longer dominant, but continue to shape international relations.

In selecting The World Imagined as the 2020 Best Theory Book of the International Studies Association, the awards committee commented on how it spurs lively debate in the field and generates new lines of inquiry, especially in the study of international relations in the non-Western world. The conversation which follows is a concrete testament to these qualities.