537364
research-article2014
MIL0010.1177/0305829814537364Millennium: Journal of International StudiesHobson
MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Keynote Address
The Twin Self-Delusions of
IR: Why ‘Hierarchy’ and Not
‘Anarchy’ Is the Core
Concept of IR
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2014, Vol. 42(3) 557­–575
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814537364
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John M. Hobson
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
This article deconstructs the twin ‘self-delusions’ of IR to reveal, first, the conventional axiom
that the discipline enquires into juridically-equal sovereign state relations under international
anarchy masks the dark hierarchical face of IR which promotes, defends and reifies, analytically
and/or normatively, Western civilisation over non-Western states, and, second, the conventional
axiom that IR operationalises a positivist and/or value-free cultural pluralism masks the dark
face of Eurocentric monism that constitutes the core ideological foundation of the vast majority
of IR theory. These emerge from IR theory’s deployment of the twin concepts of Eurocentric
hierarchy and the Eurocentric ‘standard of civilisation’, which yield the twin conceptions of
‘formal (imperialist) hierarchy’ and ‘informal (anti-imperialist) hierarchy’ alongside the notion of
‘gradated sovereignties’ in world politics. To illustrate this, the ‘formal-hierarchical’ conception is
traced in classical English School pluralism and neorealist hegemonic stability, while the ‘informalhierarchical’ conception is traced in neo-Marxism and classical English School pluralism.
Keywords
anarchy/sovereignty, Eurocentrism, hierarchy/gradated sovereignty, imperialist/anti-imperialist
IR theory, standard of civilisation, English School pluralism
Introduction
The 2013 Millennium conference reflected the fact that in recent years IR has developed
a growing interest in how the ‘standard of civilisation’ has constituted an important normative-organising property of the practice of world politics in the last two centuries.1
1. E.g. G.W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilisation’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon,
1984); Brett Bowden and Leonard Seabrooke, eds, Global Standards of Market Civilization
(London: Routledge, 2006).
Corresponding author:
John Hobson, University of Sheffield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK.
Email: j.m.hobson@sheffield.ac.uk
558
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
Simultaneously, a growing number of scholars have developed a parallel interest in the
concept of ‘international hierarchy’ and have enquired similarly into how we can account
for its empirical presence within world politics.2 And, not surprisingly, given their complementary themes, these two literatures have sometimes converged.3 However, these
literatures (including my own contributions) suffer from two key problems. First, they
buy into the conventional axiom that IR theory is primed with the mission to enquire into
the relations between sovereign, juridically-equal states that reside under international
anarchy. And second, I find problematic the common assumption that the Eurocentric
standard of civilisation in world politics, derived from Edward Said,4 necessarily implies
a Western normative-imperialist politics.
In this article I ply two unconventional and indeed counter-intuitive paths, the first of
which problematises the conventional axiom that IR as a discipline is primed to understand and explain the relations between juridically-equal sovereign states in an anarchic
world and therefore finds international hierarchy a conceptual blind spot. Rather, I want
to argue that, for the most part, IR- and international-theory exhibits an already built-in
hierarchical conception of world politics that is founded upon the analytical and/or normative Eurocentric conception of the standard of civilisation and a global regime of
gradated sovereignties. Accordingly, this means that we need to recognise that international theory has always operationalised a provincialised-hierarchical conception of
world politics that masquerades as the universal. The second path I tread explores how
much of international theory in its scientific racist and Eurocentric guises embraces an
anti-imperialist politics. From this it might be assumed that the hierarchical conception
of world politics derives only from the imperialist side of Eurocentrism (and scientific
racism), such that the anti-imperialist conception of world politics envisages a
non-hierarchical vision of world politics. But I argue that anti-imperialist Eurocentrism/
scientific racism no less embraces a hierarchical vision.
2. Recent contributions include: Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); S.J. Kaufman, Richard Little and W.C. Wohlforth, eds,
The Balance of Power in World History (London: Palgrave, 2007); Jack Donnelly, ‘Rethinking
Political Structures: From “Ordering Principles” to “Vertical Differentiation” – and Beyond’,
International Theory 1, no. 1 (2009): 49–86; D.A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
3. Recent contributions include: Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making
of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); J.M. Hobson and J.C.
Sharman, ‘The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics
of Hierarchy and Political Change’, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1
(2005): 63–98; Shogo Suzuki, Civilization and Empire (London: Routledge, 2009); Brett
Bowden, The Empire of Civilization (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); J.M.
Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012); Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010); Barry Buzan, ‘Culture and International Society’, International Affairs 86, no. 1
(2010): 1–26.
4. E.W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978/2003).
Hobson
559
To make sense of this I advance two conceptions of Eurocentric/racist hierarchy: an
imperialist standard of civilisation that implies a formal-hierarchical conception of world
politics and an anti-imperialist standard which implies an informal/subliminal hierarchy, the
definitions of which I supply in the first section. In essence, I argue that the prime mandate
of the major international theories, for the most part, focuses not on the sovereign state under
anarchy, as we are conventionally told, but engages in a social analysis whereby inter-state
relations are derived from various a priori Eurocentric-hierarchic conceptions of the ‘standard of civilisation’. Accordingly, this means that international theory has in effect focused
not on the level playing field of juridically-equal sovereign states but on the unequal field of
civilisational or racial hierarchy and ‘gradated’ sovereignties in world politics.
All in all, two critical upshots flow from my claim, the first being that if we deconstruct the first ‘self-delusion’ of IR – that the discipline enquires into juridically-equal
sovereign state relations under international anarchy – we can reveal how this conventional axiom constitutes an opaque veneer or an ideological veil that masks the dark
hierarchical face of IR which promotes, defends and reifies, analytically and/or normatively, Western civilisation over non-Western states. And here a second, or twin, ‘selfdelusion’ comes to the surface, wherein the conventional assumption that IR
operationalises a positivist and value-free cultural pluralism constitutes yet another mask
behind which stands the dark ideological face of Eurocentric monism.
In deconstructing these twin self-delusions of the discipline, my principal focus will
be on the post-1945 era of international theory though I shall, however, make reference
to its pre-1945 incarnations in the first section. The second section reveals how some of
the key post-1945 IR theories have embraced a ‘formal’-hierarchical conception of world
politics that is based upon various Eurocentric-imperial conceptions of the standard of
civilisation – using classical English School pluralism and neorealist hegemonic stability
theory as illustrative examples – while the third section considers some of the representative theories that embrace an ‘informal’, anti-imperialist Eurocentric hierarchical conception – specifically neo-Marxism and, once again, classical English School pluralism.
Note that I choose these theories on the grounds that they constitute hard test cases for
my core claim, as I explain later.
Hierarchical Conceptions of International Theory
While it is often thought that the ‘standard of civilisation’ is a concept that was invented
by positivist international lawyers during the 19th century, it in fact emerged within the
Eurocentric discourse that took on its mature form during the 18th and 19th centuries and
only later became endogenised within positivist international law. Elsewhere I have provided a sympathetic critique of Edward Said’s monolithic and reductive conception of
‘Orientalism’ by revealing it as a highly complex archipelago of discourses that comprises paternalist and anti-paternalist Eurocentric institutionalism, on the one hand, and
imperialist and anti-imperialist scientific racism, on the other, none of which can be
reduced to each other.5 Also of note is that after 1945 scientific racism largely dropped
5. Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, esp. chs. 1 and 13.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
out of international theory,6 while the existence of ‘manifest’ Eurocentrism that had
resided alongside scientific racism before the Second World War took on a much more
subtle guise thereafter in the form of ‘subliminal’ Eurocentrism. In this section I shall
explain briefly how the hierarchical conception of the standard of civilisation operates
within the Eurocentric-institutional international theory literature prior to 1945 (rather
than in the scientific racist literature, given that I will be examining the post-1945 era of
IR theory in the subsequent sections).
There are in essence four core analytical properties of Eurocentrism,7 the first of
which comprises the splitting apart of East and West and the subsequent elevation of the
West to the status of ‘civilisation’ and the demotion of the East to the realms of barbarism
and savagery. This derives from the view that Europe enjoyed a rational culture and
rational institutions (e.g. democracy, liberal capitalism, rational bureaucracy/rule of law,
individualism, science, etc.), while the East endured only irrational institutions (e.g.
Oriental despotism, patrimonial bureaucracy/no rule of law, domestic anarchy, collectivism, superstitious religions, etc.). Second, Eurocentrism presumes that the West’s exceptional institutions ensured that it would inevitably develop through the endogenous
Eurocentric logic of immanence, while it was thought either that the East’s irrational
institutions blocked its economic development (such that only a Western civilising mission could unblock the Eastern obstacles to capitalist development, as in paternalist
Eurocentrism), or that the East can develop but that it will do so only by following the
natural path that was trailblazed by the pioneering Europeans and which would necessarily culminate with the idealised Western civilisational terminus (as in the antipaternalism of Smith and Kant). Thus it was pre-ordained or foretold that the superior
rational institutions of Europe would ensure its autonomous and pioneering breakthrough
into modernity.8 Third, overlaid upon this is a three-worlds meta-geography based on the
Eurocentric standard of civilisation, comprising:
(a) the first world of civilised liberal European states and societies;
(b) the second world of barbaric Oriental despotisms;
(c) the third world of savage anarchic societies.
This culminates with the fourth core analytical property of Eurocentric institutionalism,
which entails the construction of a schizophrenic conception of sovereignty that yields
two twin-hierarchical conceptions of ‘gradated sovereignty’:
(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
6. But see Nicolas Guilhot, ‘Imperial Realism: Post-war IR Theory and Decolonisation’,
International History Review, Online First (2013): DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2013.836122.
7. Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, 3–10, 313–17.
8. For a critique, see J.M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Hobson
561
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
9. J.S. Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-intervention’, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXI,
ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984[1859]), 118.
10. Simpson, Great Powers, ch. 2.
11. Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, chs. 3–4 and 6.
12. See respectively Nicholas Onuf, ‘Levels’, European Journal of International Relations 1, no.
1 (1995): 49; Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Liberal Hierarchy and the License to Use Force’, Review
of International Studies 31, no. SI (2005): 71–92.
13. David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Introduction’, in Imperialism and Internationalism in
the Discipline of International Relations, eds D. Long and B.C. Schmidt (New York: SUNY,
2005), 1–21; Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy (New York: SUNY
562
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
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 culturalpluralist 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 post1945 international theory?
Imperialist ‘Formal Hierarchy’ within IR Theory, 1945–89
For the 1945–89 period I analyse classical English School pluralism and neorealist
hegemonic stability theory as representative illustrations of how the formal-hierarchical
conceptions of world politics play out within IR theory. I choose these theories on the
grounds that the self-proclaimed pluralism of the English School and the ‘scientific positivism’ of neorealism render them hard test cases for my core claim.
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
Press, 1998), esp. ch. 4; Bowden, Empire; Edward Keene, International Political Thought
(Cambridge: Polity, 2005); Robert Vitalis, The End of Empire in American Political Science
(forthcoming).
14. Keene, International Political Thought, 11.
Hobson
563
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
15. Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge, 2009[1992]),
chs. 13–18; see also Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), ch.
4; Hedley Bull, ‘The European International Order’, in Hedley Bull on International Society,
eds K. Alderson and A. Hurrell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000[1980]), 170–87.
16. Watson, Evolution, 214.
17. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, ‘Introduction’, in The Expansion of International Society, eds
H. Bull and A. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 2.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
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 ‘othergenerated 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
18. E.g. Hobson, Eastern Origins.
19. Bull, ‘European International Order’, 181 (my emphasis).
20. Hedley Bull, ‘The Emergence of Universal International Society’, in Expansion, eds Bull and
Watson, 122 (my emphasis).
21. Bull, ‘European International Order’, 181; Hedley Bull, ‘Justice in International Relations:
The 1983 Hagey Lectures’, in Hedley Bull on International Society, eds Alderson and Hurrell,
212–13, 231–3; Bull, ‘Emergence of Universal International Society’, 122–4.
22. Watson, Evolution, 273–4.
Hobson
565
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
23. W.A. Callahan, ‘Nationalising International Theory: Race, Class, and the English School’,
Global Society 18, no. 4 (2004): 305–23; Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism.
24. Gong, Standard; R.H. Jackson, The Global Covenant (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000).
25. See especially Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society; Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
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 nonimperialist/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.
26. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 106–15, 139.
27. Though he later qualifies this assertion in his Global Political Economy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 79.
28. Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books,
1975), 23, 34–6, 85–92; J.J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2001).
29. Isabelle Grunberg, ‘Exploring the “Myth” of Hegemonic Stability’, International Organization
44, no. 4 (1990): 431–77.
Hobson
567
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 AngloSaxon 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
30. Gilpin, War, 142–3.
31. Gilpin, War, 176.
32. Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, ch. 2.
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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
33. Niall Ferguson, Colossus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004).
34. Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1987).
35. Gilpin, War, 177.
36. See Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, chs. 4 and 6.
37. Gilpin, War, 198.
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569
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.
Anti-imperialist ‘Informal Hierarchy’ within IR Theory,
1945–89
While my conceptualisation of formal imperial-hierarchy/gradated sovereignty might
seem unproblematic in the context of imperialist/neo-imperialist international theory, my
reader might well have misgivings about extending this argument to the anti-imperialist
literature. For one might anticipate that the anti-imperialist thinkers would stand firmly
for an equalitarian conception of sovereignty and would advocate self-determination as
a universal principle. And this would be supported by the interrelated IR axiom that all
states are equally rational, even if some are more powerful than others. But as I explained
at the beginning, the problem is that in the Eurocentric (and racist) anti-imperialist conceptions of world politics the ideas of cultural pluralism and cultural self-determination
simply fail to apply, while rationality is thought to be the monopolistic preserve of civilised Western states. It is for these reasons, I argue, that most of anti-imperialist theory
turns out to invoke an informal hierarchical-Eurocentric conception of world politics
along with its associated idiom of gradated sovereignty. Because English School pluralism and neo-Marxism constitute particularly hard test cases, I shall focus on them here
to illustrate my claim.
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
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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 selfdetermination 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
38. Hedley Bull, ‘The Revolt against the West’, in Expansion, eds Bull and Watson, 217–28; Bull,
‘Justice in International Relations’.
39. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, ‘Conclusion’, in Expansion, eds Bull and Watson, 430; see
also R.H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
40. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), 33.
41. Buzan, ‘Culture’, 1.
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571
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/neoimperial 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 neoimperialism 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 neoMarxism 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
42. Bull, ‘Justice in International Relations’.
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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 worldempires’ 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 WorldEconomy, 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
43. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, I (London: Academic Press, 1974);
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 147–55.
44. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979).
45. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America’, New Left Review 67 (1971):
19–38; Theda Skocpol, ‘Wallerstein’s World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical
Hobson
573
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 worldempires 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
Critique’, American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 5 (1977): 1075–9; Robert Brenner, ‘The
Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review
104 (1977): 25–92; R.H. Hilton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New
Left Books, 1976).
46. Wallerstein, Modern World-System, I, ch. 3.
47. Ibid., 41–2.
48. Wallerstein, Politics, 153, also 6, 29, 37.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(3)
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 Westerndominated 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.
Conclusion
While I have argued that the Eurocentric-hierarchical standard of civilisation underpins
post-1945 IR theory by taking classical English School pluralism, neorealist hegemonic
stability theory and Marxist IR theory (specifically world-systems theory) as a representative sample, nevertheless my claim goes much wider. On the imperialist side of the ledger
I also include neoliberal institutionalism and much of post-1989 liberal cosmopolitanism,
as well as what I call ‘Western-realism’ (not to be confused with neorealism).49 And on the
anti-imperialist side of the ledger I include the Eurocentric cultural-realism of William
Lind and Samuel Huntington, as well as large swathes of critical IR theory.50 Accordingly,
then, this article has deconstructed the twin ‘self-delusions’ of IR to reveal the points that,
first, for the most, though not complete, part ‘civilisational hierarchy’ rather than international anarchy turns out to be the real analytical and/or normative go-to-concept of IR and
that, second, Eurocentric Western-centrism rather than positivism and cultural pluralism
constitutes the real go-to ideological basis of IR.
What wider ramifications does all this have so far as rethinking the discipline is concerned? First is the point that striving for objective and scientific theories of IR turns out
to be not just a chimera but, worse still, a ruse which conceals IR theory’s Westerncentric series of conceptions of world politics that celebrate or defend or justify Western
civilisation as constituting the prime focus of much of IR theory. Which means that IR
students, when engaging in an IR degree, should be warned that the theories they are
introduced to need to be understood as various rationalisations, witting or unwitting, of
Western power in the world. Second, the rich revisionist IR literature that has emerged
concerning the role of the standard of civilisation and international hierarchy within
world politics wrongly assumes that we need to recalibrate international theory to
49. Hobson, Eurocentric Conception, chs. 9, 11–12.
50. Hobson, ibid, chs. 10 and 11.
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575
account for (Eurocentric) hierarchy. But given that it is already present, even if it has
gone un-noticed, I want to argue that we need instead to reconstruct the foundations of
IR theory in order to produce a fully global account of world politics so as to counter its
extant lop-sided provincial representation that effectively equates the international and
indeed the global with Europe and the West. Equally noteworthy is that this problem
infects not just mainstream- but also large parts of critical-theory in IR.51 Remedying this
problem by developing alternative non-Eurocentric accounts and explanations of the
international system and global political economy is an urgent task for the next decade
of IR research, even if there are, inevitably, different ways of executing this.52
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
Author Biography
John M. Hobson is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield.
He has published eight books, including The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (CUP,
2012), Everyday Politics of the World Economy, co-edited with Len Seabrooke (CUP, 2007), and
The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (CUP, 2004). He is currently working on a project
entitled ‘Inter-civilisational Political Economy’, which is a book-length development of his twopart article published in the 20th anniversary edition of Review of International Political Economy
(vol. 20, no. 5, 2013).
51. J.M. Hobson, ‘Is Critical Theory Always for the White West and for Western Imperialism?
Beyond Westphilian towards a Post-racist Critical International Relations’, Review of
International Studies 33(SI) (2007): 91–116; Alina Sajed, ‘The Post Always Rings Twice? The
Algerian War, Poststructuralism and the Postcolonial in IR Theory’, Review of International
Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 141–63; Meera Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the Critique
of the Liberal Peace’, Security Dialogue 44, no. 3 (2013): 259–78.
52. Cf. Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, eds, Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations
(London: Routledge, 2003); Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations
and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2004); Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey,
‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’, Review of International Studies 32, no. 2
(2006): 329–52; Branwen Gruffydd-Jones, Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Siba N. Grovogui, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); L.H.M. Ling, The Dao of World Politics (London:
Routledge, 2013); Sanjay Seth, Postcolonial Theory and International Relations (London:
Routledge, 2013); Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).