Author Meets Critics: Before the West: Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

Session Submission Type: In-Person Author meet critics

Session Description

Before Defeat is about rethinking the problem of decline in world politics, and this roundtable will discuss the theoretical and political implications of such a rethinking.

In order to better theorise decline, Before Defeat first starts with a simple question: how would the history of international relations be written if we did not always read the ending — i.e. the Rise of the West and the decline of the East — into the past? It answers this question by ambitiously weaving a comprehensive account of world politics from a Eurasian perspective, focusing on the period from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. Within that period, it traces three world ordering universal empire projects emanating from ‘Asia’, starting with the Chinggisid Order created by the Mongolian Empires (13th-14th centuries), followed by post-Chinggisid rivalry of the Timurids and the early Ming (14th-15th centuries), culminating in the even more globally reaching ambitions of the post-Timurid empires in West Asia (16th century): i.e. the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals, tracing also their interactions with rivals in the west, north and east. It argues that the continuity between these Asian world orders came to a structural end with the ‘General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century.’ Asia recovered materially for the most part (at least until the 19th century), but it fragmented as ontologically, which generated a perception of decline.

This historical reconstruction has three primary payoffs for IR. First, it first helps us better understand the puzzle of Eastern decline. Recent historiographies have shown that the material gap between Europe and Asia before the nineteenth century has been retroactively exaggerated. Yet all throughout Asia, elites folded ontologically in the nineteenth century when faced with narratives of European civilisational superiority. This common response is even more surprising if we accept the standard IR narrative that it was the expansion of European society of states that connected different parts of Asia into an international order for the first time.

The second payoff is for IR’s theorisation of decline. IR has focused on the ‘rise’ and ‘decline’ of ‘great powers’ almost exclusively at the expense of other, broader understandings of decline. The alternative historical account offered in Before Defeat shifts our focus instead to the decline of world orders and to structural change, especially of social hierarchies that underwrite orders and give meaning to terms such as ‘great power’ in a given period. Before Defeat identifies three different levels of analysis for ‘decline’ and is able to demonstrate each through historical examples: the first scale is at the level of actors, i.e. great power or hegemonic decline (and their eventual replacement by other similar actors); the second scale is at the level of orders, i.e. decline of a world order (and its eventual replacement by another international order); the third scale is structural, i.e. systemic (and the emergence of new systemic conditions). Before Defeat offers way of thinking about how these levels may relate to each other.

The third payoff is for contemporary debates about the potential decline of the West. When it comes to what the end of the Western order would look like, IR has little to say, unless it is defined very narrowly to be equated to the rise of China. But as the level of analysis discussion above makes clear, power transition or even the end of the liberal international order should not be conflated with the decline of the West. The historical account offered in Before Defeat allows us to make comparisons to a normative shift of a similar scale, and makes it clear that that kind of change does not result from agency, rise or decline of any particular actor.

Before Defeat is under contract with CUP based on the first three chapters, and it will go out to clearance review in January 2021. Assuming all goes well, it should be in editing or production during APSA. Once it goes out to review, I will be working on an article which draws parallels between our current period and ‘the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’. I am happy to present this as part of the panel, if needed. Panel members were put together with the idea that they would address theoretical and policy related implications of payoffs 2 and 3 as explained above. In creating the roundtable, I tried to be mindful of gender balance and global geographic representation, but the latter is harder to secure in current pandemic environment, so I had to draw most panelists from the USA. The panel also has paradigmatic, epistemological and methodological pluralism; this will be a conversation that should interest a broad audience.

Sub Unit

• Division 43: International History and Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 20: Foreign Policy

Chairs

• Ayse Zarakol University of Cambridge

• Brent Steele University of Utah

Presenters

• Daniel H. Nexon Georgetown University

• Ian F. Hurd Northwestern University

• Nora Fisher Onar University of San Francisco

• Frederic Merand Université de Montréal

• David A. Lake University of California, San Diego