Phillips & Reus-Smit 2020

Culture and Order in World
Politics
Edited by
Andrew Phillips
University of Queensland
Christian Reus-Smit
University of Queensland
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Culture and Order in World Politics
Understanding how cultural diversity relates to international order is an

urgent contemporary challenge. Building on ideas first advanced in
Christian Reus-Smit’s On Cultural Diversity (2018), this book advances
a new framework for understanding the nexus between culture and
order in world politics. Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collabor-
ation between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and
international relations scholars, it argues that cultural diversity in social
life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional, and demonstrates that the
organization of cultural diversity has been inextricably tied to the consti-
tution and legitimation of political authority in diverse international
orders, from Warring States China, through early modern Europe and
the Ottoman and Qing Empires, to today’s global liberal order. It
highlights the successive ‘diversity regimes’ that have been constructed
to govern cultural difference in these varied contexts, traces the exclu-
sions and resistances these projects have engendered, and considers
contemporary global vulnerabilities and axes of contestation.
a n d r e w p h i l l i p s is Associate Professor in International Relations at

the University of Queensland. His research concentrates primarily on the
historical evolution of international orders from 1500 CE to the present.
He is the author of War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of
International Orders (2011) and (with J. C. Sharman) International Order
in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean (2015), the latter of
which was co-winner of the International Studies Association History
Section’s 2017 Francesco Guicciardini Prize in Historical International
Relations, and also co-winner of the 2017 American Political Science
Association’s International Politics and History Best Book Prize.
c h r i s t i a n r e u s - s m i t is Professor and Chair in International Rela-
tions at the University of Queensland, and Fellow of the Academy of the
Social Sciences in Australia. Among his other books, he is the author of
International Relations: A Very Short Introduction (2020), On Cultural
Diversity (2018), Individual Rights and the Making of the International
System (2013), American Power and World Order (2004) and The Moral
Purpose of the State (1999), and co-author of Special Responsibilities:
Global Problems and American Power (2012). He has been awarded the
ISA Theory Section Best Edited Book Award (2018, with Tim Dunne),
the Susan Strange Book Prize (2014), the BISA Best Article Prize
(2002) and the Northedge Best Article Prize (1992).
LSE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Series Editors
George Lawson (Lead Editor)
Department of International Relations, London School of Economics
Kirsten Ainley
Department of International Relations, London School of Economics
Ayça Çubukçu
Department of Sociology, London School of Economics
Stephen Humphreys
Department of Law, London School of Economics
This series, published in association with the Centre for International

Studies at the London School of Economics, is centred on three main
themes. First, the series is oriented around work that is transdisciplin-
ary, which challenges disciplinary conventions and develops arguments
that cannot be grasped within existing disciplines. It will include work
combining a wide range of fields, including international relations,
international law, political theory, history, sociology and ethics. Second,
it comprises books that contain an overtly international or transnational
dimension, but not necessarily focused simply within the discipline of
International Relations. Finally, the series will publish books that use
scholarly inquiry as a means of addressing pressing political concerns.
Books in the series may be predominantly theoretical, or predominantly
empirical, but all will say something of significance about political issues
that exceed national boundaries.
Previous Books in the Series
On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference,
Christian Reus-Smit
Contents
List of Contributors page viii

Preface xiii
Part I Introduction 1
1 Introduction 3
andrew phillips and christian reus-smit
2 Culture and Order in World Politics 23
Part II Historical Orders 47

3 The Ottomans and Diversity 49
ayş e zarakol
4 Qing and Twentieth-Century Chinese Diversity Regimes 71
james a. millward
5 Cultural Diversity and Coercive Cultural
Homogenization in Chinese History 93
victoria tin-bor hui
Part III The Modern ‘Liberal’ Order 113

6 Cultural Diversity within Global International Society 115
andrew hurrell
7 Liberal Internationalism and Cultural Diversity 137
g. john ikenberry
vi Contents
8 When Liberal States Bite Back: The Micro-politics of Culture 159

ellen berrey
9 Global Institutional Imaginaries 182
ann swidler
Part IV Constitution and Contestation 205

10 Universal and European: Cultural Diversity in
International Law 207
arnulf becker lorca
11 The Jewish Problem in International Society 232
michael barnett
12 Recognizing Diversity: Establishing Religious
Difference in Pakistan and Israel 250
maria birnbaum
13 Gender, Nation and the Generation of Cultural
Difference across ‘The West’ 271
ann towns
14 Governing Culture ‘Credibly’: Contestation in the
World Heritage Regime 294
elif kalaycioglu
Part V Conclusion 317

15 Conclusion 319
References 329
Index 367
This project was supported by the Social Trends Institute (STI), a non-
profit international research centre dedicated to fostering understanding
of globally significant social trends. To this end, STI brings together the
world’s leading thinkers, taking an interdisciplinary and international
approach.
Currently, STI’s areas of priority study are family, bioethics, culture
and lifestyles, governance and civil society. Findings are disseminated to
the media and through scholarly publications.
The individuals and institutions that support STI share a conception
of society and the individual that commands a deep respect for the equal
dignity of human beings and for freedom of thought, as well as a strong
desire to contribute to social progress and the common good. STI is
grateful for the Saxum Foundation’s interest and support in the area of
cultural diversity.
Carlos Cavallé, PhD, is President of the Social Trends Institute.
Founded in New York City, STI also has a delegation in Barcelona,
Spain. Visit www.socialtrendsinstitute.org.
Contributors
Michael Barnett is University Professor of Political Science and Inter-

national Affairs at the George Washington University. His most recent
books are The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of
American Jews and Paternalism beyond Borders (edited). His current
research projects include an examination of the global governance of
humanitarianism and the relationship between suffering and progress
in the Western order.
Arnulf Becker Lorca is a Research Professor at Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Valparaíso, School of Law. He is Visiting Faculty at
Brandeis University and has taught at King’s College London, Brown
University and Amherst College. He received his doctoral degree from
Harvard Law School. His research examines the global intellectual
history of international law. His book, Mestizo International Law:
A Global Intellectual History, 1842–1933, published in 2015 by Cam-
bridge University Press, was the winner of the 2016 Book Prize of the
European Society of International Law.
Ellen Berrey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of
Toronto and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation.
Her research examines the cultural politics of law, racism, inequality
and organizations. She is the author of two award-winning books: The
Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice
(2015), which received the 2016 Herbert Jacob Book Prize of the Law
& Society Association, and Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimin-
ation Law Perpetuates Inequality (2017, with R. Nelson and L. Nielsen).
Her work has also been published in numerous journals, including Du
Bois Review, Law & Society Review and Theory & Society. Her Salon
article, ‘Diversity Is for White People’, has been circulated on social
media more than 33,000 times.
Maria Birnbaum received her doctorate from the European University
Institute in Florence and is currently Post-Doctoral Fellow at the
viii
List of Contributors ix
University of Oslo. Her dissertation, Becoming Recognizable: Postcolo-

nial Independence and the Reification of Religion, studies the recognition
and politics of religion in British India and Mandatory Palestine. Her
research interests include international politics of religion and culture,
colonial history, international political theory and conceptual history.
Her recent publications address the conceptual history of religion in
international theory and history, and the conditions of epistemological
change, as well as questions of pluralism and pluralization. Her work
has been funded by the European Research Council, as well as the
Swedish and Norwegian Research Council.
Victoria Tin-bor Hui is Associate Professor in Political Science at the
University of Notre Dame. She received her PhD in Political Science
from Columbia University and her BSSc from the Chinese University
of Hong Kong. Hui’s core research examines the centrality of war in
the formation and transformation of ‘China’ in the long span of his-
tory. She is the author of War and State Formation in Ancient China and
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She is cur-
rently working on “China” Made in War. As a native from Hong Kong,
Hui also analyses Hong Kong politics and has published ‘Hong Kong’s
Umbrella Movement: The Protest and Beyond’ in the Journal of
Democracy.
Andrew Hurrell is Montague Burton Professor of International Rela-
tions at Oxford University and Fellow of Balliol College. He was
elected to the British Academy in 2011 and to the Johns Hopkins
Society of Scholars in 2010. His research interests cover theories of
international relations, theories of global governance, the history of
thought on international relations, comparative regionalism and the
international relations of the Americas.
G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and
International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of
Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs. He is also Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for International
Security Studies. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at
Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2013–2014 he was the
72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Professor
Ikenberry is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
During 2018–2019 Ikenberry was Visiting Fellow at All Souls College,
Oxford. He is the author of seven books, including Liberal Leviathan:
The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (2011).
His book After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding
x List of Contributors
of Order after Major Wars (2001) won the 2002 Jervis-Schroeder

Award. He is writing a book on liberal internationalism and the rise
of the modern world order.
Elif Kalaycioglu is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota’s
Political Science Department. Her research interests lie in the areas of
world orders, global governance and the politics of expertise and value.
Through the important yet underexplored site of UNESCO’s world
heritage regime, her research focuses on the intersection of world
orders and global governance, to analyse how increased divisions
within the world order around questions of shared value raise key
challenges of legitimacy and authority for liberal global governance.
She holds an MSc in European Studies from the London School of
Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Political Science from
Vassar College.
James A. Millward is Professor of History at the School of Foreign
Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and
world history. He is also Affiliated Professor in the Máster Oficial en
Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His
specialities include the Qing Empire, the Silk Road, Eurasian chordo-
phones and music in history, and especially Xinjiang. His publications
include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian
Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History:
The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004) and Beyond
the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). He
follows and comments on contemporary issues regarding the Uyghurs
and PRC ethnicity policy, and his articles and op-eds on contemporary
China appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books,
The New York Review of Books and other media.
Andrew Phillips is Associate Professor in International Relations and
Strategy at the School of Political Science and International Studies at
the University of Queensland. His research concentrates primarily on
the historical evolution of international orders from 1500 CE–present.
He is the author of War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of
International Orders (Cambridge, 2011) and (with J. C. Sharman)
International Order in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean
(Cambridge, 2015).
Christian Reus-Smit holds the Chair in International Relations at the
University of Queensland, and is Professorial Research Associate at
the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Among his other books, he is author of International Relations: A Very
List of Contributors xi
Short Introduction (2020), On Cultural Diversity (2018), Individual

Rights and the Making of the International System (2013), American
Power and World Order (2004) and The Moral Purpose of the State
(1999), and editor of The Globalization of International Society (2017,
with Tim Dunne) and The Politics of International Law (2004). Profes-
sor Reus-Smit is Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in
Australia.
Ann Swidler is Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Soci-
ology at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently working on
religious and political institutions in Africa, she is studying chieftain-
cies and religious congregations in Malawi. She is the author, most
recently, of A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS
Altruism in Africa (Princeton, 2017), with Susan Cotts Watkins.
Ann Towns is Professor in Political Science at the University of Goth-
enburg and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow. She is currently conduct-
ing a large research project on the intersection of gender and
international hierarchies in diplomacy, with generous funding from
the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Research
Council (https://gendip.gu.se). Her work on diplomacy was awarded a
Bertha Lutz Prize from the International Studies Association in 2018.
She is the author of Women and States: Norms and Hierarchies in
International Society (2010, Cambridge University Press). Her research
has also appeared in journals such as International Organization, Euro-
pean Journal of International Relations, Millennium, Party Politics and
many other venues.
Ayşe Zarakol is Reader in International Relations at the University of
Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her current research
interests are the evolution of East and West relations in the inter-
national order, stigmatization, declining and rising powers, and the
foreign policy choices of non-Western regional powers. Her publica-
tions include After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West
(2011) and Hierarchies in World Politics (2017).
Preface
This book is the second of three volumes on cultural diversity and

international order, and it follows Chris Reus-Smit’s monograph, On
Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference.1 A central
theme of that first book was the disconnect between the arguments of
international relations (IR) scholars about the nature and role of culture
and the views of cultural specialists, particularly in anthropology, cultural
studies, history, political theory and sociology. With notable exceptions,
IR scholars continue to write about culture as though nothing new has
been said since the 1950s. For their part, cultural specialists have done
little to apply their more recent insights to the issues that most concern
IR scholars, not least questions of international order. On a critical issue
of our time, therefore – the relationship between cultural diversity and
international order – there has been virtually no conversation (let alone
cross-fertilization) between these key fields of scholarly inquiry: a classic
case of academic silos.
This book confronts this siloing head on. It is edited by two IR scholars
and addresses debates most prominent in IR; its primary (but hopefully
not only) audience is scholars of international relations. It is the product,
however, of a unique exercise in intellectual engineering. We decided to
bridge the silos by bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars
of international order with pioneering specialists on cultural diversity
from other fields. We assigned the former a list of readings on culture,
the latter a syllabus on international order, and asked both to write short
papers on cultural diversity and international order that straddled the two
literatures. The papers – first presented at a workshop in Barcelona –
were nothing short of remarkable, challenging the most fundamental
assumptions undergirding debates in IR. The conversation continued
at a second workshop in San Francisco and as we worked our way
1
Reus-Smit 2018a.
xiii
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xiv Preface
through four to five drafts of full chapters. The arguments and analyses
presented in the following pages are the result.
Our greatest debt is, of course, to our extraordinary contributors.
Without them there would have been no new conversation, none of this
volume’s collective insights, and we would have never seen our authors’
rich, highly innovative individual chapters. We asked them to step out of
their disciplinary comfort zones, to engage with unfamiliar literatures and
debates and to think afresh about diversity and order. They did this with
enthusiasm, creativity and patience (especially with their editors), and we
thank each of them: Michael Barnett, Arnulf Becker Lorca, Ellen Berrey,
Maria Birnbaum, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Andrew Hurrell, G. John Iken-
berry, Elif Kalaycioglu, James Millward, Ann Swidler, Ann Towns and
Ayşe Zarakol. We also thank Patrick Herron and Anne Norton for their
invaluable contributions to our discussions in Barcelona.
None of this would have been possible without the support of the
Social Trends Institute (New York and Barcelona), its President Carlos
Cavallé and its Secretary General Tracey O’Donnell. The Institute pro-
vided generous financial support for our first workshop in Barcelona
(30 March–1 April 2017), and hosted the event enthusiastically and
flawlessly. More than this, Carlos and Tracey did us the honour of
attending our sessions and offering keen insights at key points in our
discussions. The Institute has been enthusiastic about our interdisciplin-
ary project from the outset, and we are pleased to offer this book in
return.
The International Studies Association supported our second meeting
(in San Francisco on 3 April 2018) through the awarding to Andrew
Phillips of an ISA Research Workshop Grant. We thank the Association
for continuing to support the face-to-face meetings that are essential to
collaborative research, and express our gratitude to our authors who were
able to participate (the majority), as well as the outstanding scholars who
offered their thoughts as discussants: Elif Kalaycioglu (who later became
an author), Jacinta O’Hagan and Maja Spanu.
Projects such as this seldom succeed without a talented support crew,
and we have benefited from the assistance of several excellent young
scholars. Eglantine Staunton provided early research assistance, Ryan
Smith continued this work and compiled the bibliography for Chris’s first
volume, On Cultural Diversity, and Melinda Rankin did the heavy lifting
of preparing this manuscript for submission. We have relied heavily on
these three, and express our sincere thanks for all of their efforts.
Since the completion in January 2018 of On Cultural Diversity, Chris
has given seminars, lectures and workshops on cultural diversity and
international order at a variety of institutions, the feedback from which
Preface xv
has influenced the arguments advanced here. He thanks audiences at

Aberystwyth University, Monash University, the School of Oriental and
African Studies, London, the University of Birmingham, the University
of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, as well as participants in a
two-day workshop at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs,
Oslo. He also wishes to thank the students who, in 2018, participated in
the most recent of a series of masterclasses he has run on cultural diver-
sity and international order at the University of Queensland – an enrich-
ing testing ground for ideas if there ever was one.
A final word is needed on the image that graces the cover of this book.
One of our central arguments is that order builders have powerful incen-
tives to tame cultural heterogeneity, to define acceptable forms of cul-
tural difference and expression. These include social control and
coordination, but also what we term ‘self-location.’ Order builders’
legitimacy depends in part on positioning themselves in the cultural
landscape they curate and choreograph, casting their identities, practices
and objectives as culturally intelligible and acceptable. The Qing Chinese
emperors, who belonged to an ‘alien’ Manchu dynasty and who dramat-
ically expanded China to encompass peoples of diverse cultures, were
masters of this art of self-location. They carefully crafted and narrated
their cultural identity in ways that resonated not only with Han cultural
meanings and practices but also with those of other cultural and religious
communities. This wonderful image illustrates this artful practice of self-
location. It depicts the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796), not in his
imperial robes or in armour astride a war horse, but as Manjushri, the
Bodhisattva of Wisdom in Mahayana Buddhism. We thank the Smithso-
nian’s Freer Gallery of Art for permission to reproduce here such beau-
tiful and intriguing work.
Part I
Introduction
1 Introduction
Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit
The early twenty-first century has seen renewed concern over the
relationship between cultural diversity and international order – concern
fuelled by four intersecting trends. The first is the rise of non-Western
great powers, who many fear will seek to overturn the ‘Western’ order,
propagating their own distinctive values and practices.1 The second is
the advent of highly fractious forms of transnational identity politics.
Whether conceived around religious, racial, or civilizational affinities,
these exclusivist identities challenge both universal, cosmopolitan
identifications and the nation-state’s claim to priority over citizens’ alle-
giances.2 The third is the rise of Western nativism, which conceives
cultural diversity as a threat to civic unity and domestic order, and views
liberal internationalism and the order it supports with suspicion, if not
outright hostility.3 The fourth is the global refugee and migration crisis.
While animating, on the one hand, renewed humanitarian consciousness
and action, this multifaceted crisis has unsettled broad-based support for
national models for governing cultural diversity and prompted a far-
reaching securitization of migration issues.4 For many these trends raise
the spectre of a culturally fragmented globe, one that lacks the cultural
consensus needed to sustain international order in general, and the
Western liberal order more specifically.
Concerns about diversity and order are not new to international rela-
tions (IR). Indeed, fears about the weakening of Western cultural influ-
ence have animated the field from the outset. In the United States the
fear was racial: that an international order based on white supremacy was
threatened by rising black consciousness and African-American critiques
of the global colour line.5 In Britain fears were cast in civilizational terms
(even if race was never far below the surface). The modern international
order had distinctive Western-civilizational foundations, it was argued,
1
Jacques 2012; Ren 2016; Serfaty 2011; Gray and Murphy 2015.
2 3
Bhatt 2012; Kepel 2017. Milacic and Vukovic 2017; Crothers 2011.
4 5
Huysmans 2006. Vitalis 2015.
4 Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit
and the decolonization of Europe’s empires threatened to undermine

these foundations. Against this background, Samuel Huntington’s Clash
of Civilizations was but a restatement of old, well-rehearsed themes, and
current anxieties echo these themes in the context of new intersecting
trends. These anxieties have not gone unanswered, though. Institution-
alists have long argued that an international order based on sovereign
equality, non-intervention, and self-determination can accommodate
peoples of diverse cultural complexions: indeed, they claim that this is
precisely what this order was designed to do, emerging as it did from
Europe’s religious wars. Liberals go further, arguing that the modern
‘liberal’ order is ‘open and rules-based,’ admitting states of all cultures,
requiring only that they prosecute their interests within an agreed frame-
work of institutional rules and procedures.
These contrasting positions find expression well beyond the academy,
in media commentary and the pronouncements of policy makers. Liberal
political leaders are urgently extolling the virtues of the rules-based
international order, imploring China and other rising non-Western
powers to live and act within the rules, hoping that the order can accom-
modate not only conflicting interests but also contrasting values.
We must ‘renew the international system that has enabled so much
progress,’ President Barack Obama told the United Nations, as ‘human-
ity’s future depends on us uniting against those who would divide us
along the fault lines of tribe, sect, race, or religion.’6 Others, meanwhile,
are already sounding the order’s death knell. How, Henry Kissinger
laments, ‘can regions with such diverse cultures, histories, and traditional
theories of order vindicate the legitimacy of any common system?’7
Writing for Sydney’s Lowy Institute, Anthony Bubalo and Michael Full-
ilove have warned that we ‘need to get used to the idea that as new
countries rise, the rules of the international game will not always be made
by us, or by people like us.’8
This book, and the trilogy of which it is part, challenges the terms of
this debate.9 Undeniably, questions of cultural diversity have assumed
an uncomfortable new prominence in world politics. Yet the culturalist
side of the debate cleaves to a conception of culture long discredited in
specialist fields such as anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology – a
conception that sees cultures as primordial, unitary, internally coherent,
and bounded. And if this view does not hold in smaller-scale
social contexts, it is ill-suited to understanding the relationship between
cultural diversity and international order. Similarly, the institutionalist
6 7 8
Obama 2014. Kissinger 2014, 8. Bubalo and Fullilove 2014.
9
The first volume in this trilogy is Reus-Smit 2018a.
Introduction 5
alternative bears little scrutiny. As we shall see, institutions play an

important role in structuring cultural diversity, but they do not remove
cultural issues, practices, or politics from the international arena, push-
ing them down to the domestic level. Rather, international institutions
organize cultural difference, generating hierarchies and patterns of inclu-
sion and exclusion. Overall, mainstream debate in IR conceives cultural
diversity in either of two ways: as something subversive of international
order, or irrelevant to it. This restrictive framing ignores the complex
ways in which cultural diversity has historically been deeply constitutive
of international orders and remains so today.
This debate, and its problematic yet frequently articulated poles, is the
product of a host of factors, not the least being the legacy of civilizational
and racial conceits from the age of empire and, simultaneously, the
overconfident translation of liberal ideals of the national polity into
the international arena. It has been aided, however, by an extraordinary
lack of engagement between IR scholars on the one hand, and specialists
on culture (and cultural diversity) on the other. With notable exceptions,
IR scholars have written as though anthropologists and sociologists had
nothing to say about culture after the 1950s, repeating time and again
outmoded notions of cultures as coherent, unified, tightly integrated,
neatly bounded, and strongly constitutive. And even when newer under-
standings took root in the neighbouring subfields of political theory and
comparative politics, IR was fallow ground. Cultural specialists have
done little to bridge the divide. While anthropologists, cultural studies
scholars, and sociologists have stepped beyond the local and national to
address questions of globalization, they have shown little interest in the
relationship between culture and international order per se. Historians,
by contrast, have done much to illuminate this relationship, but have left
largely untouched the conceptual and theoretical issues that animate
much IR scholarship.
This book seeks to transcend this disciplinary divide, bringing into
conversation contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to con-
sider anew the relationship between cultural diversity and international
order. It is the product of a deliberate exercise in intellectual engineering,
in which we brought together some of the world’s leading scholars of
international order with eminent writers on cultural diversity, and asked
them to read each other’s work and to write chapters that bridged the
divide. The result is a unique interdisciplinary dialogue, one that chal-
lenges the most taken-for-granted assumptions about culture and order,
and yields a new, empirically informed account of this complex relation-
ship. Its interdisciplinarity has two dimensions. Among the IR scholars,
we included authors whose work already evinces interdisciplinary reach,
even if not to the study of culture specifically. These scholars brought to

the conversation established records of engagement with history, soci-
ology, law, and political theory, and special interests in gender, race,
religion, hierarchy and order, and world cultural heritage. It is the second
dimension of interdisciplinarity, however, that lifts the book out of the
ordinary, especially for a work in IR. Integral to the project have been the
contributions of leading sociologists, lawyers, historians, and political
theorists: Ellen Berrey, Ann Swidler, Arnulf Becker Lorca, and James
Millward.10 The work of Swidler and Millward has been foundational to
contemporary debates about culture (in sociology and Chinese history
respectively), and Berrey’s and Becker Lorca’s writings are at the cutting
edge of ethno-sociological and international legal research on cultural
diversity.
The benefits of such interdisciplinarity have been twofold. First,
there have been the conceptual and theoretical pay-offs. As explained
in Chapter 2, we enlist two key insights from specialist fields: that culture
is always heterogeneous and contradictory, and that social institutions –
themselves cultural artefacts – play a key role in patterning culture.
Moreover, institutions do not just order pre-existing cultural forms; they
interpellate them, bringing them into existence as actors tailor their
identities, normative priorities, and cultural practices in response to
prevailing institutional incentives, models, and scripts. Second, stepping
outside the disciplinary confines of IR has brought significant empirical
benefits. Traditionally, arguments about cultural diversity and inter-
national order have drawn on European historical experience, then gen-
eralized from a single (often poorly understood) case. By contrast, we
have been able to situate a revised understanding of the European case
within a broader array of cases: namely, the Ottoman and Chinese
orders. Interdisciplinary engagement has also exposed how culture and
order relate at levels normally ignored by IR scholars. Berrey’s chapter on
the anti-Agenda 21 movement in the United States brings to the fore how
domestic cultural contestation is shaping the United States’ orientation
to the liberal international order. Swidler’s chapter turns our gaze in the
opposite direction, highlighting the transnational cultural politics that is
generating a global order, above and beyond the more narrowly con-
ceived international order.
As previously noted, this is the second volume in a trilogy on cultural
diversity and international order. The first volume – Reus-Smit’s On
Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference – clears
10
Anne Norton played a key role in the early stages of project but was unable, for personal
reasons, to provide a chapter for this final volume.
Introduction 7
the theoretical terrain for the project, and sets out, in preliminary form,
an alternative framework for understanding diversity and order.11 IR is
not known for its analyses of culture. The assumed primacy of material
factors, and a preference for rational actor explanations, has discouraged
cultural analysis, with culture commonly portrayed as conceptually
ambiguous, empirically intangible, and causally unquantifiable. Yet IR
scholars of diverse theoretical persuasions make cultural assumptions all
the time, and the most prominent of the field’s theories – including
realism and rational choice – make arguments about culture, however
well or ill developed. On Cultural Diversity excavates these arguments,
showing that despite their different theoretical commitments, IR scholars
return time and again to the same outdated conception of culture, where
cultures are treated as coherent entities, clearly bounded and well inte-
grated, and constitutive in effect. Expressed in realist, English School,
constructivist, and rational choice theories, this default conception of cul-
ture has long been rejected in specialist fields, criticized for exaggerating
the boundedness and integration of cultural forms, ignoring their hetero-
dox and contradictory character, and neglecting the relationship between
power and culture. These criticisms are particularly damaging to cultur-
alist accounts of international order, challenging the very idea of unified
cultural contexts on which they depend. Building on more recent
insights from anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, Reus-Smit
offers a new account of how cultural diversity and international order
relate, one that takes heterogeneous cultural contexts as given, focuses on
the legitimation challenges that accompany order construction in such
contexts, and highlights the role that institutionalized ‘diversity regimes’
play in organizing cultural complexity.
The interdisciplinary collaboration that produced this volume unfolded
while On Cultural Diversity was being written, and the two shaped each
other in important ways. While the latter is primarily concerned with
excavating and critiquing how culture has been understood in IR theory,
the alternative perspective Reus-Smit sets out was deeply influenced by
this volume’s interdisciplinary discussions. At the same time, however,
Reus-Smit’s framework provides the rudiments on which the argument
advanced here builds. Key aspects of that framework remain largely
unchanged: the assumption of existential diversity, the proposition that
cultural heterogeneity poses particular legitimation challenges for order
building, and the argument that all international orders evolve diversity
regimes that simultaneously meet these challenges while structuring
11
Reus-Smit 2018a.
patterns of contention and struggles for recognition. Culture and Order in

World Politics goes well beyond these rudiments, though. It advances
new arguments about the multiscalar nature of diversity regimes,
how they change in relation to legitimation crises, the dynamics of
cultural interpellation and counter-interpellation, and the impact of the
centralization or diffusion of political authority on the exclusiveness or
inclusiveness of diversity regimes. It also adds empirical weight and
nuance to what was essentially a theoretical argument. Thanks to our
contributors, we can now see the nature and workings of diversity
regimes in the Ottoman, Chinese, and modern ‘liberal’ orders. And we
have new insights into the paired dynamics of cultural constitution and
contestation in the key areas of religion, gender, law, and global cultural
heritage. Several things emerge with considerable clarity: that the organ-
ization of diversity is a generic practice, common to all international
orders; that diversity regimes have taken many historical forms, and
that the Westphalian solution (so trumpeted by liberal pluralists) is but
one example, best understood in comparison; and that the centralization
of political authority – whether in an imperial court or in processes of
sovereign state formation – is all too frequently accompanied by the
institution of more exclusive diversity regimes and attendant practices
of cultural homogenization.
Our argument proceeds from foundational assumptions about culture,
cultural diversity, and political order. Instead of treating cultures as
homogeneous, tightly bounded, stable, and sharply differentiated
systems of meaning and practice, we see culture as constructed, hetero-
geneous, contradictory, fluid, and near impossible to isolate into discrete
units. This view of culture is predominant in the social sciences and
humanities beyond IR, and reflects this volume’s interdisciplinary foun-
dations. We treat cultural diversity as overwhelmingly the norm
rather than the exception, and hold that it is an inescapable background
condition that shapes the emergence, institutionalization, and, above all,
legitimation of all stable systems of power and authority. Moreover,
we assume that for would-be order builders – local and international –
cultural diversity acquires its political salience via active institutional
mediation. Political orders, at all levels, do not grow organically out of
a pre-existing monolithic cultural consensus. Nor do they rely on a
spontaneous correspondence between existing systems of authority and
conducive patterns of cultural difference. Instead, order builders self-
consciously organize and institutionalize diversity in ways that make
cultural difference legible and controllable, and that reconcile the recog-
nition claims connected to authorized forms of cultural difference with
existing structures of power and privilege.
Introduction 9
While these assumptions obtain across all forms of political order, we

are concerned here with how cultural diversity relates to international
order. In Chapter 2, we define international orders expansively, as ‘sys-
temic configurations of political authority, comprising multiple units of
authority, arranged according to some principle of differentiation: sover-
eignty, heteronomy, suzerainty, empire, or some combination thereof.’12
This definition is sufficiently broad to accommodate a wide range of
international orders, including the heteronomy of early modern Europe,
the suzerainty of Qing China, and the sovereignty of the late modern
order. And in emphasizing questions of political authority, it brings to the
fore the nexus between legitimation and the organization of cultural
diversity that lies at the heart of our argument. We argue that inter-
national orders are structured in significant ways by institutionalized
practices that Reus-Smit has termed ‘diversity regimes’, the central role
of which is to connect the organization of diversity to the legitimation of
power. These regimes perform three legitimating functions. They enable
order builders to assert a modicum of control by mobilizing preferred
meanings and identities, while limiting the scope for cultural innovation
by subaltern actors who might otherwise seek to challenge an order’s
legitimacy. They also enable order builders to narrate their own identities
and locate themselves within the cultural terrain they seek to organize.
And, finally, privileging certain forms of meaning and axes of identifica-
tion, diversity regimes help to generate the common knowledge needed
for social coordination, an essential priority of any system of rule.13 In all
of this, diversity regimes do more than license and constitute certain
cultural forms and expressions; they also sublimate, suppress, subsume,
or otherwise erase others, thus sowing the seeds for cultural and political
contestation.
As the following chapters show, diversity regimes shape the dynamics
of contestation in two key ways. First, they exert immense productive
power through a bundle of processes we term ‘interpellation’. They do so
by recognizing certain forms of cultural expression and identification
across authorized axes of differentiation, while also sidelining alternative
forms of cultural difference that do not map onto these prescribed
parameters. This differentially empowers actors who can mobilize
around recognized forms of collective identity, while disempowering
those who cannot. It also exerts a profound influence on the strategies
of recognition actors employ, encouraging them to craft these strategies
to resonate with authorized modes of identification and cultural
12 13
Ibid., 194. Ibid., 209.
expression. Second, because diversity regimes create cultural and polit-

ical hierarchies, and institute systems of inclusion and exclusion, they
can inspire grievances that cannot easily be accommodated within the
terms of the existing order. Exercised by these grievances, dissatisfied
actors will often articulate forms of cultural difference, construct new
collective identities, and assert novel claims to recognition that clash with
authorized axes of cultural difference. For the sake of consistency, we
characterize these practices as ‘counter-interpellation’, and see them as a
key force generating contestation within international orders (and, in
turn, their occasional transformation).
The institutional organization of cultural diversity is thus integral to
the constitution of international orders and to the patterning and dynam-
ics of contestation within them. Our contributors show this across a
range of historical cases, but our argument has particular relevance
for today’s modern ‘liberal’ international order. In contrast to cultural-
ists, we deny that cultural diversity is a new affliction of the modern
order: heterogeneity has been an enduring condition of its evolution.
And in response, the modern order has developed successive diversity
regimes, from the post–World War I licensing of ethno-nationalism in
Europe and civilizational hierarchy abroad, to the post-1970s embrace of
universal sovereignty and international norms of multiculturalism. It is
against this background that current cultural contestation should be
understood. We argue, however, that to properly understand the dynam-
ics of current struggles we must acknowledge the unique, multiscalar
configuration of the contemporary international order. The order,
as conventionally understood, exists at the interstate level, in the dense
network of institutions constructed to limit conflict and facilitate cooper-
ation. It is here that the principal norms of the prevailing diversity regime
exist. With the globalization of international society, however, the sover-
eign state has become a key locus for the organization of cultural diver-
sity. Added to all of this, the scope of the global governance challenges
facing humanity has spawned the development of transnational social
networks and processes, informed by a global institutional imaginary.
These global strata of the contemporary international order rest on
solidarities that can abrade sharply against those of established nation-
states. Because of the multiscalar character of today’s international order,
some of the most salient axes of contestation are now playing out not
simply between states, but at the intersection of the domestic, interstate,
and global domains.
Culture and Order in World Politics is divided into four main parts. Part I
introduces the volume and sets out its central argument. Part II examines
two historical international orders (the Chinese and Ottoman), exploring
Introduction 11
the heterogeneous cultural contexts in which they emerged, their con-

trasting diversity regimes, and how these changed over time. Part III
focuses on the modern ‘liberal’ order, concentrating on its evolution
from the early nineteenth century. And Part IV addresses issues of
constitution and contestation with regard to gender, law, religion, and
cultural heritage. In adopting this structure, we push back against a key
feature of contemporary debates about cultural diversity and inter-
national order: their ‘shock of the new’ quality – the tendency to speak
of cultural diversity as though it were a new condition in world politics,
presenting unprecedented challenges. By the time readers get to contem-
porary discontents they will be able to locate them within a longer and
broader history of cultural diversity’s relation to political order. The
book’s structure also challenges the Eurocentrism of current debates, in
which the present is set against a backdrop of Western cultural ascen-
dance and Westphalian political innovation. By opening with an exam-
ination of non-Western historical orders, we hope to particularize the
Westphalian case, to recast it not as the sole reference point for analysis
but as one among a number of historical ways of ordering cultural
difference.
The historical orders discussed in Part II were chosen for two reasons.
First, by the second half of the twentieth century the modern ‘liberal’
order was assuming the form of the world’s first universal system of
sovereign states, and among its principal antecedents were the European,
Ottoman, and Chinese orders. Europe’s imperial dominance integrated
the globe (albeit hierarchically) and left a legacy of transplanted insti-
tutional norms, forms, and practices, not the least being the sovereign
state, international law, and diplomacy. Yet the modern order only fully
took form with the collapse of three prior European, Ottoman, and
Chinese orders, and all of these left their marks on the universalizing
sovereign order. This shared connection with the modern order makes
these interesting points of comparison, and our second reason only
serves to reinforce this. Not only did these orders precede and give way
to the modern order, but all three emerged in heterogeneous cultural
contexts yet developed very different ways of organizing their complex
cultural universes. Moreover, they were doing this at roughly the same
time, or at the very least in overlapping periods of time.
Our analysis focuses on the Chinese and Ottoman cases, as the Euro-
pean or ‘Westphalian’ case has, to date, dominated discussions about
order and diversity; its broad contours are well known, and its purported
‘pluralism’ is addressed by Andrew Hurrell in Chapter 6. Restated
(however briefly), after more than a century of warfare, fuelled by the
religious conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, European rulers
instituted, through the Westphalian settlement of 1648, a nascent order

of sovereign states. In addition to transferring a bundle of rights from the
Holy Roman Empire to newly empowered local sovereigns, the settle-
ment formalized the fragmentation of Latin Christendom, recognizing
Catholicism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism as legitimate confessions,
granting monarchs the right to define which of these confessions were
dominant in their territories, while at the same time limiting their rights
to persecute religious minorities.14 In the terms employed here, the
Westphalian settlement instituted not only an emergent order of sover-
eign states (in Europe, if not elsewhere), but one characterized by a
distinctive diversity regime: one that upheld religion as the principal axis
of cultural difference, legitimated only select Christian confessions, and
related these to a particular European configuration of political authority.
This politico-cultural order was as hierarchical as it was equalitarian,
exclusive as it was inclusive, but it has been hailed by IR scholars as a
unique, inherently pluralist solution to the management of cultural
difference. For Henry Kissinger, the Westphalian order ‘reserved judge-
ment on the absolute in favour of the practical and ecumenical: it
sought to distill order from multiplicity and restraint.’15 It stands, Robert
Jackson argues, as ‘the most articulate institutional arrangement that
humans have yet come up with … to live side by side on a finite planetary
space without falling into mutual hostility, conflict, war, oppression,
slavery, etc.’16
Such claims are almost always made with little cognizance of (or
interest in) how other historical orders governed cultural diversity. Yet
the Qing Chinese and Ottoman orders existed at roughly the same time
as Europe’s Westphalian order, and they too evolved in heterogeneous
cultural contexts, developing their own distinctive diversity regimes.
Conflicting narratives exist about Ottoman cultural practices. On the
one hand, the empire is lauded for its tolerance of cultural difference,
with the famed ‘Millet system’ upheld as a model of institutionalized
cultural recognition. This sits side by side, however, with another view, of
an order ruled by repressive Islamists. In Chapter 3, Ayşe Zarakol
explains how both of these views are possible, arguing that ‘widely
different interpretations of Ottoman attitudes to diversity are possible
because the empire was not static in this regard over the course of its
more than six-hundred-year-old history.’17 As with the modern inter-
national order, Ottoman history is marked by successive diversity
14
Key accounts of the emergence of the Westphalian order include: Krasner 1999;
Osiander 1994; Phillips 2010; Philpott 2001; Reus-Smit 2013b; and Teschke 2003.
15 16 17
Kissinger 2014, 3–4. Jackson 2000, 181. Zarakol, this volume, 49.
Introduction 13
regimes, in which a generally ‘latitudinarian’ approach to the manage-

ment of diversity was punctuated by notable periods of cultural closure
and repression. To illustrate this, Zarakol focuses on two such periods,
which she terms the ‘long’ sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. These are
instructive because, first, they clarify the conditions driving change in
prevailing diversity regimes, and second, they highlight the shifting cri-
teria of cultural inclusion and exclusion. In both periods, the shift to
greater cultural intolerance and repression was propelled by ‘institutional
trends towards state centralisation,’ ‘interpolity completion involving
external actors with ties to internal groups,’ and ‘a governing (or legitim-
ating) ideology viewing heterogeneity as a threat.’18 It is crucial to note,
however, that the target of repression differed markedly in the two long
centuries. In the sixteenth century it was heterodox Muslim communities
that were targeted, with ‘the empire … thoroughly “Sunnitised”.’19 In
the nineteenth century, by contrast, it was non-Muslim communities that
bore the brunt of oppression, culminating most notably in the Armenian
genocide of 1915. What we see in these two cases, Zarakol argues, is that
‘the Muslim–non-Muslim divide, while always present in a legal sense in
the empire, may not have always been the most politically salient cultural
demarcation as far as the state was concerned.’20
Part II includes two chapters on the evolving Chinese international
order. The first, by James Millward, challenges the long dominant
understanding of the ‘Traditional Chinese World Order’, an understand-
ing that lives on in the civilizational rhetoric of the Chinese Communist
Party. ‘This model,’ Millward argues, ‘inaccurately, but influentially,
assumed an unchanging, continuous China-centred international order
and uniform Chinese diversity regime that functioned from antiquity
through the nineteenth century.’21 In reality, what is now narrated as
an historically coherent and continuous ‘China’ was a geographically
fluid ‘heterogeneous assemblage of monarchies occupying different parts
of the East Asian mainland at different times, or even simultaneously in
multistate systems, over the past three millennia.’22 Focusing on the
Qing order, Millward shows, first, the extraordinary cultural diversity
of the peoples it encompassed (as well as the Manchu of the Qing
themselves), and second, how, far from instituting an hierarchical tribu-
tary system glued together by Confucian values, the Qing ‘arranged the
socio-cultural realms of Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, and
Muslim (Uyghur) not in hierarchy, but as parallel, distinctly adminis-
tered sectors each linked to a universalist central ruling house.’23
18 19 20 21
Ibid., 50. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Millward, this volume, 73.
22 23
Ibid., 72. Ibid., 82.
Against this background, Millward examines the diversity regimes insti-

tuted by the Qing’s republican and communist successors. Where
Chiang Kai-shek republicans were assimilationist, promoting a singular
conception of the Chinese nation, the Chinese Communist Party until
recently adopted a form of ‘centralized pluralism’, ‘characterized by the
same pragmatic flexibility that the Qing displayed with its imperial plur-
alism.’24 Since the 1990s, however, this diversity regime has been
replaced by aggressive assimilationism, driven by elite perceptions that
the Soviet Union fragmented along ethno-national lines, that religion is a
source of separatism, that cultural differences are animating Hong
Kong’s resistance to Beijing’s control, and by the fact that nationalism
has now displaced socialism as a central element of the Communist
Party’s ideology. This turn, Millward concludes, has only intensified
minority resistance in China, and he calls for a reconsideration of the
integrative success of both the Qing’s imperial pluralism and the Com-
munist Party’s own history of centralized pluralism.
While James Millward explores diversity management under the Qing –
China’s last and most successful non-Han dynasty – Victoria Tin-bor
Hui examines the ancient origins of Han Chinese dynastic impulses
towards coercive cultural homogenization. Like Millward, Hui chal-
lenges China’s so-called outlier status, as a supposed exemplar of time-
less cultural uniformity and political unity. At the same time, however,
she acknowledges the centuries-long interpellation of a Sinic identity
under successive Han dynasties that has legitimized recurrent efforts to
either preserve Chinese unity or reassert it through universal conquest.
Rather than taking ‘China’ as an example of timeless unity, Hui reminds
us of the extraordinary brutality and coercive cultural assimilation that
brought China’s kingdoms together under the Qin dynasty at the end of
the Warring States Period, and that continued under the succeeding Han
dynasty. The Qin and Han dynasties’ precociously modern capacities for
direct rule enabled military-fiscal mobilization and conquest on a vast
scale. But the state’s extractive capacity was crucially entwined with a
diversity regime that coercively standardized subjects’ cultural identities,
making them more ‘legible’ and so susceptible to direct rule. The cre-
ation of a culturally unified service elite through the examination system;
the commissioning of a single dynastic history to the exclusion of alter-
natives; the standardization of written script – these were but some of the
practices through which the Qin and Han elites coerced a unitary ‘China’
into being. Having legitimized their rule by reference to the imperative of
24
Ibid., 87.
Introduction 15
preserving the unity of ‘all under Heaven’, Hui demonstrates that subse-
quent dynasties deeply internalized the Wightian presumption equating
cultural diversity with incipient political disunity. This presumption then
further entrenched a Janus-faced diversity regime marked by the coercive
homogenization of dynastic subjects within the empire, and by the exter-
nal consolidation of a civilized/barbarian dichotomy that stigmatized
those political communities beyond the Emperor’s reach that refused
to submit to his suzerainty. Rather than taking ‘China’ as a given, then,
Hui traces the historical origins and development of the diversity regime
that first interpellated a common Sinic identity into being. Just as import-
antly, however, she also excavates the ancient roots of Chinese rulers’
historic tendency to equate diversity with disunity – a legacy that to this
day shapes both China’s troubled relations with its domestic minorities,
as well as its vexed relationship with the contemporary global order.
Against this background of historical cases, Part III turns to the rela-
tionship between cultural diversity and the modern liberal international
order. Three things should be noted about our discussion. First, where
many understand this order in statist terms, focusing on the hegemony of
liberal states (in particular the United States) and the configuration of
international institutions they constructed, we adopt a broader view,
arguing that for most of the modern order’s history, the society of states
was formally embedded in a network of empires, and that a crucial aspect
of its evolution was the gradual emergence, through successive waves of
decolonization, of today’s universal international society. Second, this
conception demands a longer historical view than is common. Where the
narrower view allows a focus (in its most extreme form) on developments
since 1945, our conception demands attention at least back to the early
nineteenth century. Finally, the modern liberal order is embedded in
domestic and transnational social and political processes, and contribu-
tors to this section highlight the significance of these, with Ellen Berrey
detailing the internal cultural contestation shaping the United States’
approach to the international order, and Ann Swidler stressing the
development of a global civic order beyond the society of states.
Many who write on the post-1945 liberal order see it as an elaboration
of an historically prior Westphalian society of sovereign states, and that
this institutional foundation gives the liberal order a distinct and robust
pluralism, with the principles of sovereign equality, non-intervention,
and self-determination providing a unique framework for the protection
and expression of cultural difference. Expressed in diverse quarters, this
view receives most thorough articulation in the writings of pluralists of
the English School. In Chapter 6, Andrew Hurrell subjects these ideas to
critical scrutiny. He argues, first, that the institutions of the supposedly
pluralist international society have never provided ‘a religiously and

culturally neutral set of institutions able to mediate claims of difference
and conflicting values.’25 International law, for example, is deeply
informed by Western – particularly Christian – ideas and values, and
from the outset was inextricably tied to the prosecution of European
imperialism. Second, Hurrell questions the pluralist emphasis on the
nation-state, highlighting how the empires that were grafted onto the
evolving society of sovereign states were legitimized by ideas of civiliza-
tional hierarchy, and themselves instituted empire-specific diversity
regimes. Finally, he argues that global governance has gone well beyond
the pluralist international society imagined by scholars of the English
School, with states increasingly delegating authority to global institutions
to meet a host of functional and normative challenges. In the field of
human rights, this has in part been a response to the failures of pluralist
international society to deal with issues of cultural diversity. And, cutting
the other way, the expansion of global governance has itself provoked
culturalist backlashes. ‘The cultures of global governance,’ he writes,
‘have become ever more deeply implicated in the domestic politics of
all societies; and as the waterline of sovereignty has been lowered, so it is
hardly surprising that the politics of cultural diversity has risen in
salience.’26
In Chapter 7, John Ikenberry, renowned scholar of the liberal inter-
national order, explores how liberal internationalism, as the order’s
animating ‘regime of thought and action,’ has addressed the question
of cultural diversity. Ikenberry insists that liberal internationalism evinces
no ‘simple or singular theory about cultural diversity,’27 and that since
the nineteenth century four different approaches are apparent, combin-
ing, at distinct moments in time, to form what we see here as distinctive
liberal diversity regimes. These approaches are: first, to build a liberal
order on the pluralism of Westphalian sovereignty; second, to confine
issues of culture within domestic civil societies; third, to foster ideas of
modernization that would in time erase global cultural differences; and
finally, to construct ‘institutions of “exclusion,” manifest in political
hierarchies and, at the extreme, formal empire.’28 In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, civilizational and racial prejudices
informed how these approaches were interwoven, but by the end of the
Cold War these had been ‘replaced with more universalistic conceptions
of human rights, multiculturalism, and civic nationalism.’29 It was at this
very moment, however, that the now-globalized liberal international
25 26 27
Hurrell, this volume, 127. Ibid., 130. Ikenberry, this volume, 138.
28 29
Ibid., 140. Ibid., 141.
Introduction 17
order started to reveal its limits, Ikenberry argues. Modernity is clearly

not producing global cultural homogenization, and cultural ideas,
identities, and practices refuse to be contained within national civil
societies. More importantly, though, Ikenberry holds that ‘[l]iberal inter-
nationalism is caught in a world-historical dilemma’: its functional
success in solving global problems means that it cannot be confined to
the West, but at the same time its legitimacy is highly contested.30 When
liberal internationalism was the province of the West, it was sustained by
animating social purposes: collective security, growth through free trade,
economic stability through multilateral governance, and the fostering of
liberal democracy itself. But as the liberal international order has global-
ized, these purposes have thinned, leaving an increasingly unpopular
residue of neoliberal governance.
This last argument reflects a long-standing assumption in much of the
literature on the liberal international order: that the commitment of
Western states to the liberal order was sustained by broadly supportive
domestic cultural politics. In Chapter 8, Berrey challenges this directly,
focusing on the single most important case: the United States. Where
many of those who fear for the liberal order’s future emphasize the
cultural threats posed by rising non-Western powers, Berrey analyses
the ‘micro-politics of culture’ that is weakening America’s commitment
to the order it long sponsored. After 2010, an anti-Agenda 21 campaign
spread across the United States, mobilized by the burgeoning Tea Party
movement and assimilated over time by the Republican Party. Local
sustainability planning was portrayed as the leading edge of a United
Nations’ push for world government, ‘usurping American sovereignty
and the property rights and freedom of the American people.’31 Berrey
sees in this a clash between two ideal-type diversity regimes: the UN’s
regime of ‘globally motivated local governance,’ in which sustainability is
linked to multiculturalism and human rights, and the anti-Agenda
21 regime of ‘reactionary-nationalist local governance’ – one that
expressed and reinforced the hegemonic norm of American racial
politics.32 Berrey shows how this latter understanding came to influence
legislation at local and state levels, eventually finding expression in
President Donald Trump’s orientation to the United Nations and issues
of global governance. The net effect, Berrey concludes, is that ‘cultural
politics at the micro-level within the hegemon are having a destabilizing
influence on the liberal international order.’33
30 31 32 33
Ibid. Berrey, this volume, 160. Ibid. Ibid., 161.
Ikenberry’s concern that the social purposes that animated liberal

internationalism have weakened with its globalization is questioned
by Ann Swidler in Chapter 9. Over time, and in response to diverse
global challenges, the statist liberal international order has become
embedded within a broader global order of transnational and supra-
national agents, institutions, and practices, at the heart of which is a
nascent global polity. Not only is this polity animated by social purposes –
broadly cosmopolitan in nature – it also champions a distinctive diversity
regime, one centred on the moral primacy of the individual. Focusing on
six dimensions of the emerging global polity (governing refugees and
displaced peoples, global economic regulation, the provision of global
health and welfare services, the emergence of informal modes of
global coordination, the development of global justice institutions, and,
at the centre of these activities, an emphasis on human rights principles),
Swidler reveals a global diversity regime in which ethnic, religious, and
other forms of cultural difference are legitimate, but only so long as these
differences do not ‘compromise the fundamental equality and autonomy
of the persons who stand as global citizens.’34 The global polity – and
the order it is generating – is an outgrowth of the liberal international
order, a product of its inability to address key challenges of global
governance. A ‘fundamental tension’ has emerged, however, between
the global polity and the liberal order – a tension centred on the limits
of the nation-state system.35
In the final part of the book, Part IV, we turn to the paired dynamics of
constitution and contestation in the evolution of the modern, liberal
international order. By ‘constitution’ we mean the complex social and
political processes that have shaped this distinctive global configuration
of political authority, with particular emphasis on its shifting diversity
regimes: those institutional arrangements that link legitimate forms of
political authority to authorized forms of cultural difference. Movement
from one regime to another, and incremental changes within regimes,
have been driven by contestation, by politico-cultural discourses and
practices that challenge hegemonic conjunctions of authority and differ-
ence, and that seek their revision or transformation.
One of the principal sites in which the modern order’s diversity
regimes have been institutionalized is international law: its role in codi-
fying the nineteenth-century ‘standard of civilization’ being the most
well-known example. In Chapter 10, Arnulf Becker Lorca explains
how international law has both organized diversity in the evolving
34 35
Swidler, this volume, 199. Ibid., 201.
Introduction 19
international order, and evolved its own internal social institutions that
‘organizes global cultural difference.’36 The first of these roles is the most
discussed, and Becker Lorca takes this further, examining how inter-
national law has moved from substantive discrimination on the basis of
race and civilization to a seemingly more neutral practice of governing
cultural diversity by simultaneously sanctioning sovereign autonomy
while limiting its exercise with rules.37 More provocatively, however,
Becker Lorca examines how internally international law disciplines diver-
sity. He shows how international lawyers have employed a distinctive
reconciliation of the universal and the particular, casting international
law as at once universal and a Western innovation. This has been chal-
lenged, however, with non-Western, often formerly colonized states
crafting their own styles of argument within the law. ‘[I]ntersubjective
legal meanings have evolved around the practice of international lawyers
from the West or the core of the international system; others have
emerged around practices of non-Western or peripheral lawyers.’38
Becker Lorca’s analysis charts the transition from the nineteenth-century
internal ways of defining and structuring cultural difference through to
the patterned nature of contemporary repertoires of international legal
arguments (illustrated by the Australia–Japan whaling case in the Inter-
national Court of Justice).
An enduring feature of the modern liberal order’s successive diversity
regimes has been the privileging of the nation-state both as a unit of
political authority and a perceived solution to the ‘problem’ of cultural
difference. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the nation-
state coexisted with empire as sanctioned units of authority, the latter
delegitimized and dismantled only with post-1945 decolonization. And
over the long course of this history, ascendant ideals of what constitutes a
nation deserving sovereign statehood have changed markedly, shifting
from ethno-national to civic conceptions (now challenged on multiple
fronts). In Chapter 11, Michael Barnett explores the deeper workings
of this national component of modern diversity regimes, showing
how, from the nineteenth century onward, differences between Western
‘civic’ conceptions of nation and Eastern ‘ethnic’ conceptions affected
profoundly the fate of Jewish peoples. These differences not only
affected how ‘the Jewish Problem’ was understood and addressed by
non-Jews; they also affected Jewish self-understandings and strategies
for survival. In clear examples of how diversity regimes interpellate
cultural identities, Barnett shows how Western Jews responded to
36 37 38
Becker Lorca, this volume, 209. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 221.
prevailing civic conceptions of nation by joining the civic nation and

confining their Jewish identity to the private realm of religion, while
Eastern Jews, who could never join the ethnic nation-states in which they
found themselves, fled, walled their communities, or embraced Jewish
nationalisms, the most notable form of which is Zionism.39
How international orders define and organize religious diversity has
been an enduring challenge for order builders, seen most prominently in
Europe’s wars of religion and the Westphalian settlement. In conven-
tional accounts, religion was displaced in the nineteenth century by
civilization and nation as key axes of cultural identification. Yet as
Barnett shows, these simply became the ideational frameworks through
which legitimate religion was conceived and disciplined. In Chapter 12,
Maria Birnbaum explores this further. Using the international recogni-
tion of Israel and Pakistan as case studies, she probes the terms of
recognizability in the modern liberal order, asking how religion, a notori-
ously protean concept, became a recognizable criterion for sovereign
statehood. Birnbaum digs deep below the workings of the post-1945
diversity regime, arguing that, epistemologically, religion came to be
knowable within the dominant frame of ‘nation’, but in the process it
would become ‘increasingly hollowed out and emptied of content, while
simultaneously be tied to the thick, essential idea of collective
belonging.’40 Placing the recognitions of Israel and Pakistan in the con-
texts of their imperial pasts, and analysing the two international commis-
sions that shaped their statehood (the Radcliffe Commission in British
India, and the Peel Commission in Mandate Palestine), she shows how
emerging modes of cultural recognition ‘built on and sedimented very
particular versions of “religion”’ and funnelled certain aspects of social,
political, and cultural life in these societies into ‘coherent, representable
and recognizable forms of Muslim and Jewish religious difference, indef-
inite and changing in character.’41
Debates about cultural diversity and international order are almost
always gender-blind, in the sense that gender is seldom seen as a politic-
ally salient axis of cultural difference or organization, unlike the headline
axes of religion, civilization, nation, or race. Yet the centrality of gender
is there for anyone who opens their eyes to see: evident, at the very least,
in the gendered symbolism that has sustained racial, national, civiliza-
tional, and religious identifications and hierarchies. In Chapter 13, Ann
Towns explains the centrality of gender to the successive diversity
regimes that have structured the modern liberal international order.
39 40 41
Barnett, this volume, 237. Birnbaum, this volume, 250. Ibid., 269.
Introduction 21
In Chapter 2, we highlight the legitimation challenges that order builders

face in heterogeneous cultural contexts, and Towns shows how gender
features in institutional efforts to meet these challenges. Moreover, all
diversity regimes create social hierarchies and patterns of inclusion and
exclusion, and gender inequalities have been a near-constant aspect of
these hierarchies. Yet gender inequality has not just been a principal
feature of successive diversity regimes. Towns shows, through an analysis
of the emerging transnational anti-gender movement, how traditional
gender identifications and role prescriptions have been mobilized in
opposition to more recent aspects of the liberal diversity regime: multi-
culturalism, gender equality, and human rights. Finally, where Western
debates often present gender emancipation as a liberal democratic
achievement, Towns argues that ‘cultural differences on gender equality
do not align neatly along ethnic, national, or civilizational lines’42 –
something she demonstrates through an analysis of cultural cleavages
around gender equality now evident within the West.
The 1970s saw the last great shift in the liberal order’s diversity
regimes, as empire collapsed as a legitimate form of political authority
and civilization lost its status as an authorized axis of cultural difference.
A new diversity regime emerged at this point that sanctioned the
sovereign state as the principal (if not sole) unit of legitimate political
authority, privileged civic forms of national identification, and prescribed
multiculturalism through dedicated international norms, bolstered by
human rights. Culture, in this regime, was acknowledged as inherently
diverse (globally and within states), and in all its rich diversity it was cast
as the heritage of humankind, not particular nations or civilizations.
In Chapter 14, Elif Kalaycioglu examines the institution dedicated to
the narration, curation, and preservation of this heritage: UNESCO’s
world heritage regime. We argue in Chapter 2 that diversity regimes do
not just privilege existing cultural identifications, they interpellate them.
The world heritage regime, Kalaycioglu argues, seeks ‘to interpellate a
common humanity and foster identification with this humanity and its
cultural history.’43 Since the end of the Cold War, however, the regime
has become the site of intense cultural contestation. UNESCO grounded
the credibility of its universalist cultural curation on scientific and tech-
nical expertise, but after 1994 a paradigm shift occurred, in which
‘representation’ became a criterion for inclusion on the World Heritage
List. Ironically, the impetus for this shift came from a recognition of the
inherent heterogeneity of human culture, but over time representation,
42 43
Towns, this volume, 272. Kalaycioglu, this volume, 294.
as a test of credibility, has undercut the authority of international scien-

tific expertise and privileged local cultural expertise, a move easily
exploited to serve state interests. The situation is complex, though.
Kalaycioglu shows how these ‘contestations are not … a series of paro-
chial, idiosyncratic national interests or a turn away from the world stage.
To the contrary, they have two key characteristics: a shared substance in
the invocation of cultural value as constitutively local, as well as a
common orientation to the world stage as the proper location for the
acknowledgement of such value.’44
We conclude the volume with a discussion of two issues. The first
concerns the value of our argument and analyses for fields beyond IR.
We have drawn heavily on insights from anthropology, cultural studies,
history, and sociology, and have enlisted the intellectual labour of some
of their leading and most innovative scholars. But what does a book like
this offer in return? We point to three valuable contributions: an
emphasis on international order as a locus of the politics of cultural
diversity; the concept of diversity regimes as a way of grasping the
relation between authorized forms of difference and configurations of
legitimate authority, whether locally or globally; and a distinctive
approach to ‘the global’ – one that avoids narrow state-centrism on the
one hand, and amorphous globalism on the other. The second issue we
address is the relevance of our argument for understanding the issue of
cultural diversity and international order today. After a brief discussion
of the modern order’s hybrid evolution, we emphasize two insights of
contemporary relevance: the resilience that characterizes an order born
of many hands under enduring conditions of cultural complexity; and the
dangers that attend the multiscalar nature of the modern order, in which
overlapping forms of cultural contention threaten liberal practices of
cultural ordering: domestically, internationally, and globally.
44
Ibid., 295.
2 Culture and Order in World Politics
Disciplinary debates get stuck in ruts. Arguments about the most funda-
mental issues take on routinized, even ritualistic forms – as conceptual
assumptions sediment, theories become identities, debates look more
and more like set plays, and foundational commitments no longer
require defence. Nowhere is this more apparent today than in main-
stream debates in international relations (IR) about culture and inter-
national order, debates replicated among policy makers and in media
commentaries. On an issue of critical contemporary importance, debate
is stuck between two equally unsatisfactory positions, both deeply
rooted in the intellectual and political history of the field. As the Intro-
duction explains, on the one hand there are the culturalists, who think
that international orders emerge only in unified cultural contexts and
that cultural diversity undermines order. On the other hand there are the
institutionalists, who hold that modern pluralist institutions, from sover-
eignty and non-intervention to international law and multilateralism,
neutralize cultural difference as an international political issue by confin-
ing questions of culture to the national/domestic realm. The first of these
flies in the face of everything we now know about the heterogeneous
nature of all cultural formations, including the cultural contexts in which
the world’s major international orders have evolved, and the second fails
to see that international institutions do not neutralize culture, they
organize it.
This book, and the trilogy of which it is part, seeks to jolt IR out
of its unproductive and unsustainable debate about culture and order.
Our approach draws insights from other disciplines, first to expose
the limits of existing understandings, and then to advance a more
compelling alternative. This second volume of the trilogy is the inter-
disciplinary engine house, where leading IR scholars, sociologists,
historians, and lawyers together reconsider the relationship between
cultural diversity and international order. This chapter presents the
overarching argument that frames these scholars’ individual chapters. It
is divided into four main parts. We begin by clarifying our use of two key
23
concepts: international order and culture (and cultural diversity). We then

revisit – albeit in amended form – several theoretical propositions set out
by Reus-Smit in On Cultural Diversity. As noted in the Introduction,
this volume goes well beyond these preliminary ideas, and Part III
details four key elaborations, dealing, in turn, with interpellation/counter-
interpellation, diversity regimes and legitimation crises, the centralization
and diffusion of authority, and multiscalar articulation and contention. Part
IV turns from theory to history, distilling key insights suggested by our
authors’ cases: early modern Europe, the Ottoman and Qing orders, and
the modern international order from the nineteenth century.
Definitions
How one understands the relationship between cultural diversity and
international order will depend, in the first instance, on how they are
defined. There is no natural relationship between concepts and things in
the world, and culture and order are no exceptions. If we define them
one way, we see some things and not others; if we define them another
way, different things come in or out of view.
Culture, of course, is notoriously hard to define,1 leading many to shy
away from its study, especially within IR and political science. Positivists
are reluctant to touch it, as things that can’t be defined can’t be meas-
ured. And others, like constructivists, have avoided studying culture in
general, focusing instead on its more manageable components, like social
norms. The term ‘culture’ is used, as Terry Eagleton explains, in at least
four different ways: to refer to the high cultural arts, the process of
becoming ‘cultured’, the norms and values of a society, and a people’s
whole way of life.2 These different usages betray profound ambiguities
and disagreements about the stuff of culture, and these in turn fuel
disputes over how it is best studied, if at all.
For some, the only response to this definitional ambiguity is to study
not culture but how the idea of culture is used, most often politically.3
Our approach has much in common with this, with our emphasis on the
organization of culture being very much about its political definition and
ordering. We do, however, have a working definition, one that draws
together elements that reappear across other conceptions. Very broadly,
we understand culture as ‘webs of intersubjective meanings, expressed
through, embedded within, and reproduced by language, bodies,
1 2
Williams 2014, 84. Eagleton 2016, 1.
3
For an excellent example of this approach applied to the question of religion, see
Shakman Hurd 2015.
Culture and Order in World Politics 25
artefacts, and practices. These meanings are constitutive, shaping iden-

tities and interests, and they are strategic resources that actors mobilize in
pursuit of diverse ends and purposes.’4
There will be critics who argue that this definition is too broad to
operationalize, that culture, so understood, cannot be isolated into dis-
crete independent or dependent variables amenable to causal explan-
ation. This is not our goal, though. In fact, one of the principal failings of
culturalist accounts of international order is their treatment of culture as
a coherent and sufficient cause (even if they do not use this language).
The key thing for us is that culture is anything but coherent: it is always
heterogeneous, often contradictory, and never clearly bounded. Yes, this
means it defies analysis as a discrete, measurable causal variable. What
interests us, though, is how cultural diversity works as a structural
condition, a highly variegated universe of meanings and practices that
poses distinct legitimation challenges for order builders. It is the political
implications of always-existent cultural diversity that interest us, not the
causal effects of particular meanings or practices, however important
these might be.
Defining international order is easier than culture, but it is not without
complexities. There are some who think that international orders are
simply unintended consequences of great power struggles.5 It is more
common, however, for orders to be conceived as institutions. Hedley
Bull provided the classic statement of this view, defining international
orders as purposive arrangements of sovereign states. They are ‘arranged’
by the institutions of sovereignty, international law, and diplomacy, and
their primary purpose is to protect and promote ‘the elementary goals
of the society of states.’6 Although widely used in the field, both of us
have highlighted the limitations of this definition, most notably how it
conceives international orders narrowly as orders of sovereign states.7
Such orders are rare in world history: even today’s global sovereign order
dates only from the 1970s – prior to that, the modern order was a
sovereign-imperial hybrid. The Bullian definition thus has very little
analytical range, bracketing from view other large-scale political orders
that have not been organized on the principle of sovereignty, and leaving
us without a language to describe shifts from non-sovereign to sovereign
orders (as occurred after World War II). We propose here, therefore, to
define international orders more broadly, emphasizing what we consider
4
Reus-Smit 2018a, 204.
5 6
For a classic statement of this view, see Mearsheimer 2001, 49. Bull 1977, 8.
7
See Phillips 2011, 5; Reus-Smit 2013b, 169; Reus-Smit 2017, 855; and Reus-Smit
2018a, 194.
to be their essential feature: that they are all large-scale arrangements of

political authority. International orders are, we suggest, best conceived as
‘systemic configurations of political authority, comprising multiple units
of authority, arranged according to some principle of differentiation:
sovereignty, heteronomy, suzerainty, empire, or some combination
thereof.’8
Before proceeding, two issues warrant brief discussion. First, through-
out this book the term ‘diversity’ is used frequently, most often with
reference to cultural diversity or diversity regimes. We recognize that this
is a distinctly modern term that gained currency in liberal debates about
the recognition of cultural difference, particularly with respect to policies
and practices of multiculturalism. The term should thus be used with
caution when discussing culture in social and historical contexts where
peoples would not have understood their practices and experiences
through the modern lens of ‘diversity’. We use the term advisedly,
therefore, following Ellen Berrey in distinguishing between diversity as
heterogeneity, and diversity as an organizational ideal.9 When we refer to
cultural diversity across the broad sweep of our historical cases, we use it
in the first sense, and when we speak of diversity regimes we are talking
about attempts to order and govern such diversity (qua heterogeneity).
We are careful here and in following chapters not to use diversity in the
second sense, as an organizational ideal.
Second, our definition of international orders encompasses orders
where the constituent units of political authority are differentiated
according to the principle of empire. Moreover, two of the historical
cases discussed in subsequent chapters took imperial form: the Ottoman
Empire and the Qing Empire. We acknowledge here, though, that not all
empires are usefully characterized as international orders. Some empires
exhibit a high degree of centralization, the Spanish Empire being a good
example. Others went through phases of centralization, like the Ottoman
Empire in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Ayşe Zarakol’s
discussion in Chapter 3). In such cases, and at such moments, the
existence of multiple units of political authority – which is integral to
our definition of international orders – is less apparent; indeed, central-
ization is often about extinguishing such units. For most empires, how-
ever, treating them as international orders highlights their very real
decentralization, and exposes the art of ‘heterogeneous contracting’
among hierarchically ordered units of authority that has glued them
together.10 This is why, among other things, decentralized empires are
8 9
Reus-Smit 2018a, 194. Berrey 2015, 25–27.
10
McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon 2018, 194.
often described not just as imperial but also as heteronomous (in the case
of the Holy Roman Empire) or suzerain (as various Chinese empires have
been described).
Starting Propositions
The argument advanced here starts with four key propositions. These are
elaborations of preliminary ideas advanced most recently by Reus-Smit
in On Cultural Diversity, and in Part III we augment them with a series of
additional insights drawn from our contributors’ analyses. Our four
starting propositions concern existential diversity, the legitimation chal-
lenges posed by such diversity, the ordering role of diversity regimes, and
how diversity regimes affect patterns of contention and struggles for
recognition.
Existential Diversity
Our first proposition undergirds everything that follows. Culturalists
assume that cultural contexts can be ‘unified’, to use Martin Wight’s
terminology, and that international orders emerge and survive only in
such contexts. We assume precisely the opposite – that all cultural
contexts are heterogeneous and contradictory, and this is certainly
the case when it comes to the expansive cultural landscapes in which
international orders evolve. In other words, we take seriously the near-
consensus view of culture among today’s anthropologists, cultural
studies scholars, political theorists, and sociologists. As Ann Swidler
writes in her oft-cited article, ‘all real cultures contain diverse, often
conflicting symbols, rituals, stories, and guides to action.’11 Or as James
Tully puts it, culture is always ‘a strange multiplicity.’12 If this is true,
then international orders cannot have emerged in unified cultural
contexts, as the culturalists claim. The cultural universes in which they
have emerged can only have been highly variegated. And, not surpris-
ingly, this is precisely what recent histories of the most notable historical
orders tell us. Whether it be the Roman, Ottoman, and Qing Empires,
or the international order of early modern Europe and the global order
that replaced it, they all emerged in complex, heterogeneous cultural
contexts.13
11 12
Swidler 1986, 277. Tully 1995, 11.
13
See, for example, Barkey 2008; Burbank and Cooper 2010; and Crossley 2002.
Diversity and Legitimacy

For culturalists, culture shapes international orders by informing their
institutional values, norms, and practices, and by sustaining the norma-
tive consensus required for these institutions to function effectively.
Assuming that international orders emerge in heterogeneous cultural
contexts requires a different approach. Diverse cultural contexts lack
the coherence needed to strongly constitute orders. They do, however,
work as structural conditions, posing distinctive governance challenges
and imperatives for order builders.
We are particularly interested in the legitimation challenges presented
by extant cultural heterogeneity. International orders, like all systems of
rule, rest not just on material might or narrowly defined institutional
bargains but on legitimacy: the perception, on the part of those subject to
them, that they are rightful. Much has been written about one important
dimension of this: the need to convert preponderant material power into
political authority (domination into hegemony, for example).14 Almost
nothing has been said, however, about a second, equally important,
legitimation challenge: extant cultural heterogeneity has to be trans-
formed into authorized forms and expressions of difference. Heteroge-
neous cultural contexts offer rich resources for political innovation: for
the construction of collective identities, the crafting of discourses and
narratives, the invention and performance of ritual practices, and the
enlisting of all of these in diverse political projects. The legitimation of
international orders requires the taming of this complex cultural uni-
verse: the scope for politico-cultural innovation has to be limited, author-
ized forms and expressions of cultural difference have to be defined, and
the relationship between structures of political authority and axes of
legitimate difference need to be established.
Two examples illustrate this, both from the conventional Western
narrative of international history. After a century of religious conflict,
the Peace of Westphalia not only helped to institute a system of nascent
sovereign states, it also established a distinctive cultural order in which
religion was the principal axis of cultural difference, and only certain
Christian sects were deemed legitimate (Catholicism, Calvinism,
and Lutheranism, but not Judaism, Islam, heretical Protestant sects, or
atheism). Two and a half centuries later, in the wake of World War I,
Europe was reorganized on the principle of ethno-national sovereignty,
and European rule over non-Western peoples was reaffirmed as a civili-
zational obligation: a ‘sacred trust’.
14
For an excellent discussion, see Clark 2011.
Diversity Regimes
At such moments of politico-cultural organization, order builders con-
struct diversity regimes: more or less formal ‘systems of norms and
practices that simultaneously configure political authority and construct
diversity.’15 At their most basic, diversity regimes do three things. First,
they define the principal units of political authority, be they sovereign
states, empires and their devolved authorities, the non-exclusive, over-
lapping authorities of heteronomous orders (like those of medieval
Europe), or some combination of these. Second, they license certain
forms and expressions of cultural difference, suppressing and silencing
others. And, finally, diversity regimes relate legitimate units of political
authority to authorized forms of difference, just as Westphalia tied sov-
ereignty to Catholicism and accepted forms of Protestantism, and after
World War I sovereignty and ethno-nationalism, and empire and civil-
ization, were conjoined.
Diversity regimes are different from the issue-specific regimes com-
monly discussed by IR scholars. They are structurally different, to begin
with. If we distinguish between the deep constitutional institutions
of an order (which define legitimate agency), the basic institutional
practices or fundamental institutions that facilitate coexistence and
cooperation (diplomacy and international law in today’s order), and the
issue-specific regimes that address functional challenges, then diversity
regimes straddle all of these levels.16 They define legitimate agency,
they are upheld by basic institutional practices (as the ‘standard of
civilization’ was codified in, and sustained by, international law), and
they are expressed in, and advanced by, issue-specific institutions, such
as today’s human rights regime. Because diversity regimes exist across
these levels, their structural effects are more profound than issue-specific
regimes. If international orders are, as we argue, systemic configurations
of political authority, then diversity regimes help to structure these very
configurations.
In advancing the concept of diversity regimes, we are mindful of an
important caution expressed by Swidler in Chapter 9. The concept,
we hold, captures in important ways the organization of cultural differ-
ence at the level of political orders, and Swidler deploys it to great effect
in illuminating cultural constructions within today’s emerging global
polity. She rightly argues, however, that the concept obscures as well as
illuminates (a feature of all concepts). Specifically, by highlighting
15
Reus-Smit 2017, 26.
16
Reus-Smit 1999; and, for a different formulation, Phillips 2011, 21–33.
macro-configurations of cultural difference, the concept of diversity

regimes blinds us to the very real forms and expressions of cultural
heterogeneity that exist in local contexts. Moreover, she rightly cautions
that what look like struggles for cultural recognition at the level of
international orders may in reality be struggles for other social goods,
especially meaningful local political autonomy. It may well be, though,
that this is a reflection of the very power of diversity regimes, providing a
macro-institutional framework that incentivizes the framing of political
claims in particular cultural forms.
Contestation and Change

Because diversity regimes help order builders to meet the legitimation
challenges of rule in heterogeneous cultural contexts, they help to stabil-
ize international orders. As Reus-Smit argues in On Cultural Diversity,
they facilitate political control by institutionalizing preferred meanings
and identities, cultivating consent for these and limiting the scope for
cultural innovation. They enable order builders to locate themselves
within a curated and conducive cultural landscape, thus legitimating
themselves and their rule. And, finally, diversity regimes aid social and
political coordination, generating and communicating the shared know-
ledge on which such coordination depends.17
At the same time, though, diversity regimes structure and condition
contestation within an order. To begin with, because diversity regimes
authorize particular forms and expressions of cultural difference, silen-
cing or extinguishing others, they create social hierarchies. And because
diversity regimes also link authorized forms of difference to legitimate
units of political authority, these hierarchies generate inequalities of
power. These inequalities invariably produce grievances, sowing the
seeds for contestation. Second, when contestation surfaces, diversity
regimes provide incentives for actors to mobilize around authorized
forms of cultural identification, to frame claims with reference to
accepted discourses and narratives, and to exploit established ritual
practices (see Barnett’s discussion in Chapter 11, and Birnbaum’s in
Chapter 12). This is not always the case, though. Sometimes diversity
regimes structure contestation by providing foils, where authorized forms
and expressions of cultural difference serve not as ‘tool kits’, as Swidler
famously suggests,18 but as abhorred hegemonic forms, against which
‘dissident’ cultural identities, values, and practices are constructed, or in
17 18
Reus-Smit 2018a, 209–211. Swidler 1986.
the conceptual vocabulary of this volume, ‘counter-interpellated’. Berry

(Chapter 8) and Towns (Chapter 13) both illustrate these dynamics.
Finally, because diversity regimes can be multiscalar, manifesting at
different levels of an order, disjunctures between these levels can struc-
ture contestation (an issue we take up in Chapter 15). We see this today
with the re-emergence of xenophobic ethno-nationalisms around the
world and the growing dissonance between domestic diversity regimes
championed by these movements and international norms of human
rights and multiculturalism.
Diversity regimes do not just structure contestation when they prevail;
they can also cast long historical shadows, informing grievances and
struggles for recognition well after their apparent demise. The most
notable example is the shadow cast by the diversity regime that long
structured European rule over non-European peoples, where sovereignty
at home and empire abroad, as a distinctive hybrid configuration of
political authority, was justified on the basis of a cultural hierarchy
codified in the legal ‘standard of civilization’.19 Although formally jetti-
soned by the 1970s, grievances generated by this regime are readily
apparent today. The Chinese government’s repeated references to the
‘century of humiliation’ are but one example. The key question for any
contemporary diversity regime is the degree to which it meets adequately
the recognition demands generated by its predecessor. And where it does
not, how does the mobilization of historic grievances affect a regime’s
stability and viability?
Elaborations
These propositions undergird much that is said in this volume, but the
rich analyses provided by our contributors demand their further elabor-
ation. Four elaborations are particularly important: the productive power
of diversity regimes in constituting international orders and the agents
that inhabit them; the dynamics of legitimation crises in international
orders and their relationship to the organization of cultural diversity; the
effects of political centralization and decentralization on the character of
diversity regimes; and the multiscalar nature of diversity regimes, and the
relevance of multiscalarity for understanding contemporary global diver-
sity management.
19
Gong 1984; Anghie 2005; and Bowden 2009.
The Productive Power of Diversity Regimes

Diversity regimes – understood as institutionalized ideas and practices
that organize cultural difference and legitimate systemic configurations
of political authority – form this book’s central focus. This prominence is
justified, given the immense productive power diversity regimes exercise
in constituting international orders and the actors inhabiting them.20
Diversity regimes function, first, to render certain axes of cultural
difference legible and politically salient, while sidelining others as invis-
ible and politically irrelevant. Recalling one of our foundational claims,
all order builders confront existential diversity. Cultural heterogeneity is
ubiquitous and must be actively organized if the international orders that
emerge from these heterogeneous contexts are to be legitimated and
stabilized. At the outset of an order’s existence, a multitude of meanings
and practices exist that can be mobilized around constructions of race,
nationality, religion, civilization, and a plethora of other alternatives, and
that can then be harnessed to diverse political projects. Diversity regimes
are constructed to order this complexity, to clarify and privilege some of
these meanings, categories, and practices, and then to relate them sys-
tematically to the distribution of political authority.21
Concurrent with privileging authorized forms of cultural difference,
diversity regimes dig deeply into the social order, interpellating these
forms of difference in the constitution of actors’ identities and associated
categories of cultural difference. To interpellate something, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, is to ‘bring into being or give identity to
(an individual or category),’22 and with diversity regimes, interpellation
manifests through varied practices that actively ‘surface’ authorized
forms of collective identity and attendant discourses and practices.23
By way of illustration, the classificatory schemes embedded in the census
play a crucial role in many national polities, giving concrete institutional
shape to particular types of collective identity (see Birnbaum’s discussion
in Chapter 12). Similarly, within the imperial orders this book considers,
institutions such as the Ottoman millet system and the Manchu Lifan
Yuan likewise concretized particular forms of collective identity
(see Zarakol in Chapter 3 and Millward in Chapter 4). This in turn
20
Following Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, we understand productive power as
‘the constitution of all social subjects with various social powers through systems of
knowledge and discursive practices of broad and general social scope’ (Barnett and
Duvall 2005, 20).
21
Within imperial contexts, see for example, generally, Burbank 2006 and Mamdani 2012.
22 23
Oxford University Press 2010, 914. Bially Mattern and Zarakol 2016, 641.
shaped the very identities of the actors inhabiting these orders, in ways
conducive to the perpetuation of existing structures of political authority.
The interpellative practices that define diversity regimes are relevant
not merely for their constitutive effects on actors’ identities. Diversity
regimes also shape the parameters of permissible cultural and political
contention within international orders. This is because the privileging
of authorized forms of cultural difference influences not only who may
make claims to recognition on power holders, but also what kinds of
recognition claims they can assert through routinized forms of political
contention. Indeed, as Birnbaum argues in Chapter 12, diversity regimes
define the very terms of what is recognizable. Again, this relationship
is best illustrated through historical example. In the twentieth century,
the number of independent political units within the international system
expanded significantly, from approximately sixty sovereign states in
1914 to almost two hundred by the century’s end. This expansion
stemmed primarily from subject peoples’ assertion of claims to recogni-
tion as self-determining nation-states.24 The pursuit of sovereign
independence through claims to national self-determination was, of
course, bitterly contested – what constituted a legitimate nation changed
markedly over the course of the twentieth century (from an ethno-
national to civic national conception), and the idea that non-Western
peoples constituted ‘nations’ had to be established. But the idea of
national self-determination made sense only within an international
system that privileged nationality as a salient category of cultural differ-
ence, and that related this category systematically to claims to exercise
legitimate political authority. By contrast, recognition claims anchored in
nationality were largely absent in seventeenth-century Europe. There,
prevailing diversity regimes instead privileged dynastic allegiances and
certain confessional identities, with these categories of difference then
dominating patterns of collective identification, mobilization, and
contention.25
The interpellative effects of diversity regimes are highlighted in
many of the following chapters, especially in Zarakol’s argument that
Ottoman diversity regimes did not simply codify extant cultural identities
(Chapter 3); in Barnett’s account of how Jewish communities adapted to
prevailing conceptions of nation (Chapter 11); in Birnbaum’s discussion
of how imperial cultural categorizations constituted religious commu-
nities (Chapter 12); in Becker Lorca’s analysis of how international law,
as an institutional locale for the organization of diversity, has generated
24 25
Philpott 2001; Reus-Smit 2013b. Nexon 2009.
distinct Western and non-Western legal cultures (Chapter 10); and in

Kalaycioglu’s account of contestations over the constitutive effects of the
World Heritage regime (Chapter 14).
Their pervasive productive power notwithstanding, diversity regimes
are by no means total in their grasp over actors’ identities, discourses, or
practices. For while interpellation selectively privileges some categories
of identity and empowers certain collective actors, it simultaneously
renders others marginal or invisible. These differential patterns of recog-
nition and empowerment generate grievances, which can eventually
inspire resistance in the form of practices of what we term ‘counter-
interpellation’.
Counter-interpellation refers to the practices that alienated actors use
to contest international orders, often taking the form of cultural innov-
ations that generate collective identities and articulate grievances outside
the parameters of prevailing diversity regimes. Even the most compre-
hensive diversity regimes are incapable of completely stifling potentially
subversive forms of cultural expression. As the following chapters illus-
trate, though, processes of counter-interpellation do not conjure cultural
identities, discourses, and practices from nowhere. To begin with, they
are always regime referential, in the sense that they are always cast
against, or in opposition to, authorized forms and expressions of differ-
ence. This is clearly apparent in Berrey’s analysis of how the white
nationalist identity mobilized by the anti-Agenda 21 movement in the
United States was constructed in contrast to the perceived cosmopolitan-
ism of a global elite (Chapter 8), and also in Towns’s analysis of anti–
gender equality campaigning in resurgent right-wing nationalist iden-
tities (Chapter 13). Second, processes of counter-interpellation build
new, counter-hegemonic identities through novel interpretations and
invocations of extant cultural resources, ‘inventing traditions,’ to use
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s famous phrase.26 Again, Berrey’s
analysis is illustrative, showing how current right-wing nationalism in the
United States builds on, and appeals to, a deeply entrenched, though
increasingly unacknowledged white racist diversity regime (Chapter 8).
Although beyond the scope of this book to explore, counter-
interpellation may be more likely in historical moments marked by rapidly
evolving communication technologies, which can facilitate new forms of
meaning making outside the terms of the existing order. The rise of the
printing press and confessionalization in Reformation Europe;27 the
growth of mass-circulation newspapers and the concomitant ascendancy
26 27
Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983. MacCulloch 2004.
of print nationalism;28 the contemporary, internet-fuelled growth of anti-

systemic jihadist and white supremacist global solidarities29 – each are
illustrative of this association between technological change, counter-
interpellation, and challenges to prevailing international orders.30
Cultural Diversity and Legitimation Crises

Diversity regimes are integral to the legitimation of power within inter-
national orders. They prioritize and organize certain axes of cultural
difference, help to constitute actors around these authorized forms
of difference, and shape the kinds of recognition claims these actors
can make on power holders. Above all, they play a foundational role in
tying authorized forms of cultural difference to the established distribu-
tion of political authority.
In the process of constituting and organizing political authority, diver-
sity regimes inevitably generate exclusions and grievances. The selectivity
with which diversity regimes privilege certain forms of cultural difference
while ignoring others invites resistance. The production of insurgent
identities through counter-interpellation marks an essential manifestation
of this process. Within any international order, insurgent forms of collect-
ive identity and anti-systemic grievances are always present. To define is
to exclude; thus resistance to diversity regimes and the orders they sustain
is by itself unremarkable. In this inquiry, however, we are especially
interested in the ways in which the politics of organizing cultural diversity
can become deeply entwined within larger crises of legitimation.
Assertions of cultural difference and the advancement of novel recog-
nition claims connected to those differences can constitute meaningful –
even transformative – challenges to power holders’ authority. The vari-
ation across our cases nevertheless shows the varied impacts this form of
contestation can have on international orders’ integrity. At one end of the
spectrum, order builders have successfully confronted challenges to their
political authority and cultural hegemony through intensified coercion,
often seeking to eliminate insurgent expressions of cultural difference.31
Victoria Tin-bor Hui’s exploration of coercive Sinicization under the
Qin and Han dynasties offers a powerful illustration of this dynamic
(Chapter 5). So too does Zarakol’s analysis of the Ottomans’ persecution
28 29
Anderson 1991. Morris 2016.
30
The relationship between nationalism, communicative technologies, and international
order is currently the subject of an ambitious doctoral study by Andrew Dougall at the
University of Queensland.
31
For a theoretical discussion of these issues, see Reus-Smit 2007.
of heretical forms of Islam and ethno-nationalist challengers in the six-

teenth and nineteenth centuries respectively (Chapter 3).
Selective accommodation is another means used historically to concili-
ate revisionist recognition claims and manage legitimation crises in ways
that modify but do not completely transform international orders. The
most salient historical example would be decolonization and the resulting
globalization of the sovereign nation-state. In the post-war period, non-
European nationalists directly challenged the racial and civilizational
hierarchies that had long formed an integral part of a Western-dominated
international order. They were ultimately successful in discrediting and
displacing race and hierarchy as formal categories of cultural identifica-
tion, so destroying colonial empires’ normative foundations. This led to
a wholesale reconfiguration of the organization of political authority
globally, with the old sovereign-imperial order replaced by a universal
order of sovereign states. But in articulating their recognition claims
through demands for national self-determination, anti-colonial actors
reinforced the centrality of nationality as a salient axis of cultural differ-
ence, even if at the same time aiding the rise of civic over ethnic concep-
tions of nation.32
Finally, challenges to international order can be total in character and
transformative in impact. In these instances, revisionist actors counter-
interpellate identities that fall far beyond the authorized forms of differ-
ence informing existing diversity regimes. These identities then form
the basis for articulating radically anti-systemic recognition claims that
challenge the prevailing order’s principles for legitimating and distribut-
ing political authority, and often call for the reorganization of political
authority itself. Crises of this kind signify a breakdown of power holders’
ability to limit cultural innovation within the terms of the existing diver-
sity regime, and a failure to defend their preferred distribution of mean-
ings and identities. If power holders are unable to suppress insurgent
identities and recognition claims, or accommodate them through a reno-
vation of existing diversity regimes, the legitimacy and integrity of the
international order itself can then be in jeopardy.33 Historically, crises
of this magnitude are rare, with Latin Christendom’s transition from
medieval heteronomy to Westphalian sovereign anarchy being perhaps
the most famous example. Their rarity notwithstanding, order trans-
formations on this scale can only be properly understood once we take
the diversity/order nexus into account.
32 33
Philpott 2001; Reus-Smit 2013b. See, for example, Hall 1999 and Phillips 2011.
Centralization and Decentralization

A prominent thesis in current debates about cultural diversity and inter-
national order is that the Westphalian order of independent sovereign
states is an exemplar of cultural pluralism and toleration, a quality
directly attributed to its formally decentralized nature. The following
chapters suggest that there is indeed a relationship between an order’s
degree of centralization and its relative openness, toleration, or plural-
ism. This relationship is by no means straightforward, though.
Our contributors do reveal a recurrent association between periods of
centralization – where order builders have sought to concentrate political
and administrative power – and the rise of more intolerant diversity
regimes that aim to suppress or eliminate potentially subversive forms
of cultural difference. The Qin and Han dynasties’ efforts to suppress
cultural difference following China’s Warring States period evidence this
trend (Chapter 5), as does the pathological homogenization that
attended Ottoman centralization efforts in the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Chapter 3). By contrast, periods in which authority has been
more decentralized have been more often associated with diversity
regimes that have pragmatically sought to encompass a wider bandwidth
of cultural difference. Again, Eurasian imperial orders offer particularly
compelling illustrations. Zarakol demonstrates that the Ottomans’ famed
diversity was not a historical constant, but was most pronounced during
moments when the Sultan’s authority claims over his subjects were at
their most modest (Chapter 3).
Two things should be noted about this apparent relationship between
centralization and intolerance and decentralization and toleration. First,
this is not a simple issue of state capacity. Latitudinarian approaches to
managing cultural diversity should not be misread as artefacts of weak-
ness. For example, Millward’s exploration of Qing ‘ethnic pluralism’
shows that the Manchus’ embrace of an incorporative ethos of imperial
rule was most evident in the eighteenth century, when the Qing
Empire was at its most vigorous (Chapter 4). Second, the nascent system
of sovereign states that emerged after Westphalia is, as we have seen,
the most celebrated example of a formally decentralized order. And
the diversity regime established through Treaties of Westphalia did
acknowledge a narrowly defined confessional diversity that was not
possible under the preceding papal-imperial diarchy. Yet in this decen-
tralized order, diversity at the systemic level was purchased at the cost of
potential homogenization at the level of the state. Similarly, the post-
1945 breakdown of empire saw a dispersal of authority downwards to
newly independent states, this time accommodating cultural differences
internationally by tying sovereign political authority to nationality and

displacing responsibility for managing diversity domestically to national
governments.
As Ikenberry explains in Chapter 7, this is precisely the liberal inter-
nationalist ideal for the management of cultural difference. Yet, again,
decentralization at the systemic level was purchased at the cost of cen-
tralization at the state level, opening the door to often violent processes of
cultural homogenization. Barnett’s analysis of the rise of the ‘Jewish
Problem’ in post-Napoleonic Europe shows the cultural violence that
attended the move to an ostensibly pluralist order of nation-states, as
Jewish communities struggled to survive under contending Western and
Eastern conceptions of the nation (Chapter 11). More recently still,
within contemporary China, Xi Jinping’s project to recentralize power
has been accompanied by an abandonment of an earlier post-1949 model
of ‘centralized pluralism’ in favour of coerced ‘Hanization’ of minority
populations (Chapter 4). It is no surprise, therefore, that the history of
sovereign orders, from Westphalia to the present, has been punctuated
by attempts to constrain the cultural practices of sovereigns: Westphalia’s
provisions on liberty of religious conscience, the post-Versailles minority
treaties, and the 1948 Genocide Convention are but a few examples.
Plural and Multiscalar Diversity Regimes

We have spoken so far as if diversity regimes were singular, as if each
international order evinced a diversity regime. In reality, diversity
regimes can be plural and multiscalar. In the history of any order, these
regimes rise and fall. As we have seen, they change with the shifting
ambitions of order builders, in particular their interests in centralization
versus decentralization, and as order builders respond to new configur-
ations of power and articulations of cultural difference. Zarakol illus-
trates the former in her discussion of Ottoman diversity regimes
(Chapter 3), and we see the latter in the differences between the modern
order’s post-Versailles diversity regime and the post-decolonization
regime of universal sovereignty, multiculturalism, and human rights.
It is almost always the case, therefore, that international orders evince,
over time, multiple diversity regimes, and that they should always be
referred to in the plural: the diversity ‘regimes’ of the modern order, the
Ottoman order, the Chinese order, and so forth. Saying this immediately
points to the dynamic nature of international orders – for as diversity
regimes change, so too does an order’s structure and organization.
If this complexity were not enough, diversity regimes are often multi-
scalar. In the chapters that follow, we see this at work in different ways
and with different effects. Because international orders are large-scale

configurations of political authority, attempts to organize diversity across
an order depend as much on local practices as the designs and insti-
tutional initiatives of order builders. In formally hierarchical orders – such
as those organized on the principles of empire or suzerainty – the degree
to which centrally instituted diversity regimes articulate and resonate with
local diversity practices depends, in part, on an order’s relative centraliza-
tion or decentralization, but also on the capacities of central authorities to
ensure compliance (which has often been attenuated at best). The story is
quite different in formally equalitarian orders, like systems of sovereign
states. Here the effectiveness of internationally instituted diversity regimes
depends on the existence of compatible diversity regimes within states,
and despite constant genuflecting to the principle of sovereign autonomy,
the former, as previously noted, have almost always come with prescrip-
tions for the latter. The protections of liberty of religious conscience in the
Treaties of Westphalia, the post-Versailles minorities treaties, and con-
temporary norms of multiculturalism are all examples.
In today’s global international order, where addressing diverse chal-
lenges of global governance has spawned complex forms of transnational
agency and attendant practices and institutions, multiscalarity takes on
added complexity. To begin with, as Swidler explains in Chapter 9, the
emerging global polity itself contains a nascent diversity regime, distinct
from both the regime of the statist liberal international order and the
regimes that prevail within sovereign states. Over the past few decades,
the emergence of genuinely global governance challenges has spurred
the growth of embryonic authority structures, and an accompanying
(if nascent) global institutional imaginary. The emergence of an embry-
onic system of authority above the level of the nation-state has both
reflected and reinforced the rise of more cosmopolitan solidarities, which
exist in tension with more established national affiliations.
The multiscalar nature of contemporary diversity regimes has spawned
a distinctive politics of culture, a politics that can no longer be seques-
tered to diversity regimes operating at the national, international, and
global levels in isolation. Instead, struggles over recognition are playing
out simultaneously across multiple layers of authority. The liberal inter-
nationalist ideal detailed by Ikenberry in Chapter 7 imagined that the
politics of culture in an ‘open and rules-based’ multilateral order could
be rendered a domestic affair, and irrespective of this, the global march of
modernity would, in time, erode cultural differences. What we see,
however, is that the worldwide surge in interaction capacity that has
defined globalization is simultaneously producing a global polity and
attendant imaginary, and it has provoked both a nativist backlash within
states and the rise of reactionary and radically anti-systemic transnational

solidarities. Ikenberry highlights the flagging social purposes animating
the liberal international order, but Swidler and Berrey further complicate
this story: the former pointing out the cosmopolitan social purposes at
work at the level of the global polity, the latter highlighting the illiberal
cultural forces at work within the long-time hegemon. The consequence
of all of this is a multiscalar patterning of contention. As global govern-
ance assemblages take form, they are beginning to generate new patterns
of identity, as well as new forms of grievance.
These grievances and their accompanying recognition claims challenge
the post-1945 liberal international order from multiple directions. As
notions of global ethical responsibility take root, actors invested with
more cosmopolitan identities have begun challenging an international
order that still legitimizes sovereign nation-states as the primary reposi-
tories of political authority. Global governance institutions have, mean-
while, themselves become targets of contestation. Kalaycioglu’s account
of the fiercely contested definition of what constitutes ‘world heritage’
within UNESCO captures a more general dynamic, where actors are
mobilizing nationalist and post-colonial grievances to challenge the epi-
stemic authority and political legitimacy of institutions ostensibly
invested in advancing the interests of a common humanity (Chapter 14).
The increasingly fractious and multiscalar pattern of contemporary
forms of cultural contention is equally evident in far-right anti-UN
activism within the developed world. Within this volume, the pushback
against sustainable development (Chapter 8) and assertions of ‘trad-
itional values’ against national and global campaigns to advance gender
equality (Chapter 13) both evidence this tendency.
Historical Insights
In addition to these theoretical elaborations, several notable historical
insights emerge from the following chapters: the poverty of the debate
between cultural unity as a necessary precondition for order on the
one hand, and the notion that international institutions can neutralize
the effects of cultural diversity on the other; the fact that diversity gov-
ernance is a generic feature of all international orders; and the particu-
larity of the Westphalian diversity regime.
Beyond Consensus and Neutralization

Our contributors call into question the two most widely held views on the
nexus between cultural diversity and international order. First, they
repudiate the idea that international order is dependent on cultural

homogeneity. Wight famously asserted that international societies
emerge only what there is ‘a degree of cultural unity,’34 but in none of
the cases explored by our contributors did international orders emerge
from culturally uniform environments. Nor for that matter do our con-
tributors find evidence of international orders disintegrating in the face of
encroaching cultural heterogeneity. Certainly, in some cases, order
builders perceived unauthorized expressions of cultural identity as threats
to order, and worked hard to suppress them. But this suppression – most
often a complement to efforts to centralize power within sprawling
imperial orders – was episodic rather than uniform. That order builders
responded to such challenges through more robust efforts to suppress
cultural difference moreover underscores the underlying diversity with
which they contended, and the institutionally mediated character of the
strategies they developed to manage this perceived challenge. It is crucial
to note, however, that our contributors reveal as many examples of order
builders seeking to order extant cultural heterogeneity as those seeking to
fully extinguish it, the Ottoman and Qing cases being particularly note-
worthy (Chapters 3 and 4).
Second, our contributors call into question the institutional neutral-
ization thesis. The idea that the sovereign state system developed as a
means of sidestepping the challenges of managing deep cultural differ-
ence does not withstand critical scrutiny. On the contrary, the inter-
national order that developed in post-Reformation Europe rested on a
historically specific diversity regime. This regime constructed and privil-
eged certain categories of cultural difference, and then related these to
the new sovereign-territorial configuration of political authority that
evolved in the decades following the Peace of Westphalia. Likewise, the
post-1945 liberal international order did not sideline questions of cul-
tural difference. Instead, the delegitimation of racial and civilizational
hierarchies, and the global redistribution of power in keeping with prin-
ciples of national self-determination, together represented a radical
reconfiguration of strategies for organizing cultural diversity and relating
them to political authority. Far from neutralizing questions of cultural
difference, the post-1945 order simply saw a transformation of the global
diversity regime. Contemporary patterns of multiscalar contention fur-
thermore demonstrate that the post-1945 effort to displace the question
of diversity management to the domestic sphere has been unsuccessful,
further discounting the institutional neutralization thesis.
34
Wight 1977, 33.
Diversity Management as a Generic Practice

Beyond discounting existing accounts of the relationship between cul-
tural diversity and international order, our contributors’ analyses show
that the organization of cultural diversity is a generic practice, common
to all international orders. Diversity regimes have mediated cultural
difference and related this difference to the legitimation of power, across
a wide range of orders, whether governed by heteronomous, suzerain,
imperial, or sovereign organizing principles. Equally, practices of diver-
sity management have been central to international orders’ composition,
regardless of their scale. The more compact Sinosphere of post-Warring
States China; the sprawling empires of the Ottomans and the Manchus;
the world-encompassing international orders that developed from the
late nineteenth century – each subsisted in conditions of cultural diver-
sity, and stabilized systemic configurations of power and authority by
relating them to authorized expressions of cultural difference.
In assembling this volume, we deliberately expanded its remit both
beyond the present and beyond Western-dominated international
orders. This helped to establish that the imperative of organizing diversity
is hardly peculiar to this moment in history. It also enabled us to explore
the bounded variation characterizing different diversity regimes through-
out history. The requirement of organizing diversity and linking it to the
legitimation of power has been a perennial challenge for international
orders’ custodians. But order builders have demonstrated remarkable
variability in how they have perceived this challenge, and in the solutions
they have adopted to manage it.
Thus, for ancient Chinese state builders, acknowledgement of the
Sinic world’s cultural diversity constituted an invitation to entropy.
Accordingly, they contrived a range of mechanisms – from the commis-
sioning of dynastic histories to sponsorship of an elite examination
system – to ‘flatten’ this diversity in the service of a pan-Sinic unity that
nevertheless remained the exception rather than the rule in China’s later
history. Efforts at pathological homogenization conversely remained
more episodic and targeted within other orders, as evidenced in the
Ottomans’ successive persecution of heterodox Muslims and non-
Muslim ethnic minorities in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
At their most expansive, key non-European imperial orders succeeded
because they embraced incorporative diversity regimes, aiming to encom-
pass rather than obliterate cultural diversity. Their conceptualizations of
this diversity, and the solutions they contrived to manage it, nevertheless
varied dramatically, and evolved markedly over time. Thus, the Otto-
mans’ early latitudinarianism contrasted with the Manchus’ more rigid
strategy of ‘centralized pluralism’. The institutions they adopted likewise

varied, from the Ottomans’ millet system of communal self-government
(albeit a relatively late development, as Zarakol explains in Chapter 3), to
the Manchus’ emphasis of ethnic segregation, through practices such as
the banner system and the colonial-style Lifan Yuan (see Chapter 4).
These imperial approaches to diversity management differed again
from the diversity regime that arose in Western Europe following the
Peace of Westphalia. Virtually alone among Eurasia’s power centres,
Latin Christendom did not coalesce into an imperial international order
in the early modern period. Instead, the Reformation and an early
modern military revolution crystallized a systemic crisis, which resolved
after Westphalia into what would later become a sovereign state system.35
The recognition of strictly delimited forms of confessional difference, the
systematic non-recognition of other types of religious identification and
expression, and the institutionalization of these modes of recognition
and non-recognition were critical to this development. Subsequent to
the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, nationality displaced confessional
and dynastic allegiance as the basis for sovereign recognition, with the
meaning of legitimate nationhood becoming the new locus of contention.
This demonstrates the variability and dynamism of diversity regimes over
time, even within what was ostensibly the ‘same’ (Western) cultural area.
More than simply capturing variability for its own sake, our contribu-
tors’ analyses also illustrate two more fundamental points. First, what
counts as meaningful cultural difference varies dramatically across space
and time. Supposedly essential cultural markers – such as race, caste,
nationality, religion, civilization, and gender – turn out to be politico-
cultural constructions, rising and falling in prominence as axes of cul-
tural difference, oscillating in their significance as categories meaningful
to the distribution of political authority. Second, our contributor’s
analyses do not disclose a clear trend either towards or away from greater
‘tolerance’ for diversity over time. Instead, what they show are successive
configurations of the order–diversity nexus, with different strategies of
diversity management inevitably generating their own distinctive forms
of exclusion and resistance.
The Particularity of Westphalia

Finally, our findings have special relevance for understanding the West-
phalian order of sovereign states. An august tradition within IR scholar-
ship long venerated the Peace of Westphalia as the ‘majestic portal’
35
Phillips 2011.
marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world.36

Through this lens, Westphalia signified an end to pretensions towards
universal monarchy, and the emergence of a new order that guaranteed
the liberty of princes and the religious freedom of subjects. Revisionists
have rightly excoriated this mythology.37 Nevertheless, many commen-
tators continue to celebrate Westphalia as having laid the foundations for
a genuinely pluralist international system.38 Regardless of whether it
sprung from a distinctly Western tradition of tolerance, or represented
a generic solution to the ‘problem’ of cultural diversity, the sovereign
state’s later global spread through this lens supposedly attests to its value
as a uniquely adaptable means of reconciling diversity with order.
Views such as these both misunderstand what the Westphalian settle-
ment was and did, and greatly exaggerate its relative historical merits.
Westphalia has to be located in a highly complex cultural universe, and
its ‘solution’ to international order in early modern Europe was predi-
cated on an historically and culturally particular understanding, con-
struction, and organization of authorized forms of cultural difference.
Consistent with our larger argument, the organization of diversity and
the stabilization of international order were inextricably entwined
endeavours. Critically, however, Westphalia was simply one of many
‘solutions’ to the challenge of cultural diversity that international order
builders have historically contrived.
Traumatic as they were, Europe’s Wars of Religion and Latin Chris-
tendom’s breakdown were hardly unique. Crises of pluralism of equiva-
lent scale have buffeted international orders many times throughout
history. Moreover, Westphalia’s selective ecumenicism appears far less
progressive when contrasted against its early modern contemporaries.
For all of their exclusions, Ottoman latitudinarianism and Qing ‘central-
ized pluralism’ both encompassed far greater diversity than Westphalian
Europe, complicating claims for Westphalian exceptionalism. More
ominously, Westphalia’s construction as the progressive capstone ter-
minating Europe’s international Wars of Religion obscures the entwine-
ment of religious and racial classifications that underpinned its diversity
regime. Westphalia’s authorized topography of cultural difference con-
tinued to rely on ethnicized religious ‘others’, both within Europe (most
notoriously, the Jews) and beyond it (‘heathens’ in Afro-Asia and the
New World). The resulting hierarchies generated grievances and recog-
nition claims for centuries after 1648, even as the sovereign state spread
36
Gross 1948, 28.
37
See, for example, Osiander 1994; Teschke 2003; and Reus-Smit 2013b.
38
See, for example, Jackson 2000, 181 and Kissinger 2014, 9.
globally. Acknowledging Westphalia’s dark underbelly is essential, not

only to better understand it on its own terms, but also to better locate it
comparatively within the larger sweep of historical struggles to organize
diversity in support of international order, of which it forms but one
(albeit integral) part.
Conclusion
The propositions set out in this chapter, the theoretical elaborations this
volume proposes, and the empirical and historical insights provided by
our contributors all point to a single, overarching conclusion about the
relationship between cultural diversity and international order: their
mutually constitutive relationship. On the one hand, cultural diversity
has a profound effect on the institutional structure and practices of an
international order. The norm is for international orders to emerge in
heterogeneous, not unified, cultural contexts, and these contexts are best
conceived as structural conditions that pose distinctive legitimation chal-
lenges for order builders. In response to these challenges, diversity
regimes are instituted, defining the legitimate units of political authority
and tying these to authorized forms and expressions of difference. At the
most fundamental level, therefore, cultural diversity conditions the very
nature of international order. The reverse is also the case, however:
international orders organize cultural diversity. One of the principal
insights of recent work in anthropology and sociology is that social insti-
tutions affect the ‘flow’ of culture.39 Or as Swidler puts it, ‘cultural
structuring by institutions might be thought of as operating from the
outside in, organizing dispersed cultural materials the way the field
surrounding a magnet links iron filings or the way the gravity of the sun
orients the planets.’40 Diversity regimes work in precisely this way: they
are constructed in response to extant cultural heterogeneity, but in
ordering that complexity, they curate and choreograph the cultural
landscape. This is not a simple process of codifying and licensing extant
identities, meanings, and practices; it also conjures new cultural units
and divides into existence, a process reinforced by the incentives diversity
regimes provide for actors to organize and mobilize around authorized
axes of difference. And as previously explained, diversity regimes can
provoke processes of counter-interpellation, in which challenges to the
prevailing order craft and invoke purportedly marginalized and silenced
identities, values, and practices.
39 40
Hannerz 1992, 14. Swidler 2001, 158.
Part II
Historical Orders
3 The Ottomans and Diversity1
Ayşe Zarakol
Since its demise in 1922, the Ottoman Empire has had a curious
posthumous identity, remembered in widely divergent ways. This is
especially true when it comes to the ‘memories’ of the empire’s treatment
of cultural diversity: Ottomans are vilified as oppressive Islamists by
some2 and touted as a model of toleration by others.3 If the former
characterisation is correct, there is nothing the Ottoman Empire can
teach us about managing ‘diversity’4 in ‘international orders’; if the latter
is correct, perhaps we need to look no further than Ottoman history to
deal with the challenges of the present. Neither characterisation captures
the full picture of the Ottoman Empire’s evolving diversity regimes,
however. This chapter starts from the observation that widely different
interpretations of Ottoman attitudes to diversity are possible because
the empire was not static in this regard over the course of its more than
six-hundred-year-old history. Ottoman history thus provides plenty of
ammunition for both the modern-day vilifiers and the idealisers.
A measured study of Ottoman history demonstrates, by contrast,
that while the Ottoman state was generally rather latitudinarian in its
1
I would like to thank Chris Reus-Smit and Andrew Phillips, as well as the other
participants in the Cultural Diversity workshops (Barcelona 2017 and San Francisco
2018), many of whom are also contributors to this volume, for their comments. Earlier
versions were also presented at the Dynamic of Religious Interaction Conference
(Cambridge 2017), the Millennium Conference (LSE 2017) and the POLIS
Departmental Seminar (Cambridge 2018). I am grateful to comments from those
occasions, especially from Daniel Barbu, George Lawson and Lerna Yanık.
2
For example, Balkan nationalists and certain versions of Kemalism.
3
For example, present-day Islamists, especially those who are more liberal-leaning. The
academic case for Ottoman multiculturalism also exists and has even seeped into IR. See,
for example, Kupchan 2012.
4
Because use of the term ‘diversity’ to reference identity-based differences originates from
a twentieth-century US (or Anglo-liberal) context of multicultural policies and builds into
the question of difference a positive connotation, it must be used with caution when
applied to historical cases such as the Ottomans. Following the editors’ discussion in
Chapter 2, I thus use ‘diversity’ to refer simply to cultural heterogeneity, and ‘diversity
regimes’ when referring to institutional attempts to order and rule that heterogeneity.
49
50 Ayşe Zarakol
dealings with cultural diversity (at least in comparison to other polities of

the time), it too was capable of repressive cultural interference if a
combination of conditions that push such an outcome was present:
(1) institutional trends towards state centralisation, (2) interpolity com-
petition involving external actors with ties to internal groups and (3) a
governing (or legitimating) ideology viewing heterogeneity as a threat
(and vice versa), likely, but not necessarily, for reasons having to do
with (1) and (2).5
The aforementioned criteria are derived from the two most volatile
periods in the history of the Ottoman Empire in terms of the state’s
(deliberate) treatment of cultural diversity: the (long) sixteenth century,
during which period the empire was thoroughly ‘Sunnitised’, and the
(long) nineteenth century, a period that opened with the empire facing
new nationalisms in Europe and closed with the Armenian massacres of
1895–1896, subsequently followed by the Armenian genocide of 1915.
In the sixteenth century, the primary targets of the Ottoman state were
heterodox Muslim communities: non-Sunni denominations were espe-
cially targeted, but Sunni groups were also disciplined. In the nineteenth
century, it was the non-Muslim communities’ turn to be seen as a
problem or a threat by the Ottoman state. This is not to say that other
communities were not affected by state policies within these periods, but
they were not the primary targets. Nor were the problems of targeted
communities restricted solely to these centuries: the seventeenth and
twentieth centuries especially are also marked by episodes that suggest
that the Ottoman state (and its successors) continued to see some forms
of diversity as a problem.6 There are also episodic outbursts of violence
towards various local communities throughout the history of the empire –
episodes that may be explainable on a case-by-case basis but do not seem
to fit any grand pattern, at least from this level of analysis. These reser-
vations notwithstanding, the (long) sixteenth and nineteenth centuries
nevertheless stand out for the systematic and sustained attempts overseen
5
As with any order, bottom-up pressures for change were also present in the Ottoman
Empire, such as those created by the hierarchies supported by the diversity regime of any
given period. For the purposes of this essay, however, my focus is more on state actions
and less on societal response.
6
For example, in the seventeenth century, certain members of the ‘puritan’ Kadızadeli
movement reached the upper echelons of power and targeted both heterodoxy in Islam
and the lifestyles of non-Muslim groups (e.g. banning coffee houses or the sale of alcohol
within city limits). In the twentieth century (in 1942), the Turkish state levied a tax on
non-Muslim citizens and sent those unable to pay to labour camps. There are many other
such episodes that could be recounted here. Other post-Ottoman states in the Balkans
and the Middle East (hence successors in plural) have had their own problematic
episodes.
The Ottomans and Diversity 51
by the Ottoman state to deal with the problem of heterogeneity, and thus
give us an opening into understanding how the Ottoman ‘order’ dealt
with cultural diversity.
From a diversity management angle, the pressing question for the
Ottoman Empire (or for any political order) is why some types of hetero-
geneity were problematized over similar types of heterogeneity that were
not, and why in some periods and yet not others.7 Politicisation of
difference is a historically contingent phenomenon, and cultural differ-
ence needs to be understood relationally and contextually, without the
temptation to impose today’s salient categories anachronistically on
the past. This is why it is productive to compare the treatment of Muslim
minorities in the sixteenth century and the treatment of non-
Muslim groups in the nineteenth century. Focusing only on how
non-Muslim groups were treated in the Ottoman Empire as a proof
of Ottoman multiculturalism reads back into history a particular relation-
ship dynamic that may not always have existed. In other words, the
Muslim–non-Muslim divide, while always present in a legal sense in
the empire, may not always have been the most politically salient cultural
demarcation as far as the state was concerned. To treat such divisions as
static would thus impose a particular conclusion on the study before it has
even started.
This brings us to the question of how the Ottoman Empire should be
conceptualised within this project. As explained in Chapter 2, our editors
follow Reus-Smit in defining international orders as ‘systemic configur-
ations of political authority, comprising multiple units of authority,
arranged according to some principle of differentiation.’8 The extent of
state centralisation and the reach of political authority varied greatly over
the duration of the Ottoman polity; in other words, there were periods
where the Ottoman Empire approximated a centralised polity or proto-
state more than an international order. The Ottoman ‘diversity regime’
evolved over time, though there were some recurring referents that made
it recognisable as ‘Ottoman’ throughout. The famous millet system
became properly institutionalised only in the eighteenth century, at
which point it was legitimised by the construction of a narrative of a
traditional pedigree supposedly extending back to the fifteenth century.
Furthermore, the millet system, even in its most evolved form, never
captured (nor was intended to capture) the complex cultural-religious
make-up of the empire. Superficial references to the millet system mislead
7
And the same could be asked of other diversity regimes as well. See, for instance,
Millward’s discussion of the People’s Republic of China in this volume.
8
Reus-Smit 2017, 859.
52 Ayşe Zarakol
us into thinking of Ottoman communities as easily divisible into Muslims

or non-Muslims, or Muslims, Christians and Jews. As late as the eight-
eenth century, the area that is now called the Middle East was home to
(excluding Muslim communities) the Maronites, the Jacobites, Nestor-
ians, the Melkite, Orthodox Christian Arabic speakers, Catholic Arabic
speakers, the Copts, Armenians, Greeks, the Druze, Arabic-speaking
Rabbinical and Qaraite Jews, Jews of Kurdistan, Sephardic Jews, and
so forth.9 North Africa, the Balkans and Anatolia were similarly diverse.
There were further divisions (and homogenisations)10 among these
groups based on location, especially in terms of urban versus rural
communities. The same person may have been seen as member of a
group (as defined by religion, sect, ethnicity, language or location) or not
depending on the activity they were engaged in and who they were
engaging with. We should thus not imagine that groups in the Ottoman
Empire, even the formally institutionalised ones, had much internal
coherence or firm boundaries. In fact, it was frequently the Ottoman
state’s attempts to manage cultural diversity that created or reinforced
such boundaries, and not the other way around.11
This chapter proceeds in three sections. First, I consider whether the
diversity regime of the Ottoman Empire can be characterised as any one
thing over the six hundred years of the empire’s existence. Reus-Smit
defines ‘diversity regime’ as ‘systems of norms and practices that simul-
taneously configure authority and construct diversity’ in order to meet
legitimation challenges.12 As already noted, the Ottoman diversity
regime was a continuously evolving system, so in that sense there was
not one Ottoman diversity regime but multiple versions over time. The
overarching ethos connecting various Ottoman diversity regimes was a
mixture of cultural laissez-faire and pragmatism. However, there were
also ‘exceptional’ periods where the Ottoman polity took a very heavy-
handed approach to managing cultural diversity and in fact conceived of
certain types of diversity as a problem to be sorted out.13 The chapter
contextualises the thus exceptional sixteenth and nineteenth centuries
against the general context of Ottoman pragmatism. The second section
focuses on the long sixteenth century, in the middle of which the
9
Masters 2001, chapter 2.
10
‘European visitors to the region, whether Christians or Jews, frequently noted with
disgust and alarm that their erstwhile coreligionists were “Turks” in all but name’
(Ibid., 43).
11
This observation is very much in line with the arguments in the Introduction to this
volume. See also Reus-Smit 2017.
12
Ibid., 876.
13
For a critique of the narrative of ‘Ottoman pragmatism’, see also Dagli 2013.
Ottoman state pursued an aggressive campaign of Sunnitisation towards

its Muslim population, with smaller follow-up bursts afterwards. The
sixteenth century is often overlooked by modern accounts of the empire’s
model of tolerance, probably because it was heterodox Muslim commu-
nities that bore the brunt of the state’s force, rather than non-Muslims.
The third section then focuses on the demise of the lax Ottoman diversity
regime at the end of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Armenian
genocide in 1915. In both the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries we
find a polity previously relatively relaxed about cultural diversity mani-
festing starkly opposite attitudes. Comparing these exceptional periods of
state impatience towards cultural differences with the more laissez-faire
periods in the empire’s history can give us important clues as to what type
of stressors cause diversity regimes to become restrictive as opposed to
relaxed. The chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of the lessons
that can be drawn from the Ottoman case for cultural diversity in future
international orders.
A Syncretic, Islamic Empire

It is not easy to characterise a polity that lasted for more than six hundred
years as just one thing, but on balance, it may be fair to say that for most
of its history the Ottoman order was one where the state took a relatively
relaxed stance towards the management of cultural diversity, while main-
taining an Islamic identity itself. The cultural syncretism was built into
the empire’s DNA from its beginnings, and notwithstanding the gradual
homogenisation of the population over centuries, it lasted until its
bitter end.
Both the overarching Islamic identity of the polity and the cultural
diversity of its demographics were present from the moment of origin.
The Ottoman polity grew in the fourteenth century from a small beylik,14
one of many created by the ruin of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, which
had collapsed in the early thirteenth century after many years of
onslaughts by the Crusades coming from the West and the Mongols
from the East. Early Ottoman armies were very heterogeneous, ‘mixing
Christians with Muslims and often directed against coreligionists, [with a]
focus on booty and territorial expansion rather than conversion.’15 Early
Ottoman warrior bands even included pagan Tatars. Osman I, the
founder, incorporated Byzantine warriors into his army and gave them
land titles (tımar), as well as administrative positions. In fact, Osman’s
14
Often translated as ‘principality’, ‘petty kingdom’ or ‘statelet’.
15
Darling 2000, 135; see also Wittek 1938.
54 Ayşe Zarakol
closest companion, Köse Mihal (Mikhalis the Beardless), was Greek and
took part in Ottoman raids as a Christian.16 There was also intermarriage –
for example, Osman’s son Orhan married a Byzantine princess.
Despite the religious heterogeneity of their bands, the early Ottomans
justified their conquests by a legitimating ideology of ghaza (Islamic holy
conquest). However, the Ottoman rulers seem to have had a practical
relationship with their Islamic identity from the beginning. The adoption
of the ghazi title by the Ottomans was driven by their competition with
other Turkish beyliks, especially the Aydin beylik, who used this title to
recruit warriors against the Venetians.17 The ghazi identity of the Otto-
mans became more pronounced in the second half of the fourteenth
century, when the Ottomans stopped acting as mercenaries and started
making conquests for themselves. It was in this period that they
expanded into the Balkans, facing ‘new opponents who were generally
not prepared to accept Turkish conquest gracefully … [having] not lived
side by side with Turks for decades or centuries like the Byzantines of
Anatolia.’18 This was also the period when the Ottoman rulers stopped
being able to lead all of the raids and started having to delegate at
least some authority to other frontier beys, ‘some of whom were not
of Ottoman origin and did not identify strongly as Ottomans.’19 The
Ottomans cast Turkish offensives against themselves as ‘treason against
the ghaza,’20 hurting the fight against the infidel.21
This interplay between an ostensibly Islamic identity for the state and
the syncretic nature of its institutions and demographics was thus estab-
lished well within the first century – if not the first decades – of the
Ottoman reign and would go on to set the tone of the empire’s diversity
regimes for centuries to come. Depending on the preferences of a par-
ticular sultan on the throne, the empire might have leaned to one side or
the other at times, but the majority of the time the balance was kept. The
overarching theme was thus pragmatism and flexibility, and though it
sounds peculiar to our modern ears, the empire can be described as both
Islamic in its identity and religiously syncretic (or pluralist). As Barkey
observes: ‘The resulting Ottoman form of political legitimacy was much
16
Deringil 2000, 554. Mihal converted later in life.
17
Darling 2000. The fact that the Turkish beyliks were fighting against Christian enemies
using the ghazi title did not stop them from also hiring themselves out as mercenaries to
various Christian kingdoms.
18 19
Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36.
20
Ibid., 37. Another factor was the Black Death, which wreaked havoc in the more
urbanized Byzantine communities but left the Ottomans relatively unscathed, giving
credence to the divine mission narrative.
21
Ibid., 38. Kafadar 1995 suggests that much of the ghaza narrative was in fact constructed
in later centuries.
more expansive; it appealed as much to the Muslim as the non-Muslim

peoples of the empire, refraining from the imposition of an absolute
creed or understanding of religion, one completely unified and cohesive
system.’22 Diversity regimes cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. Any insti-
tutional choice for managing culture, however well-intentioned, will
create its own normative hierarchy, with particular winners and losers,
and those in between.23 As Reus-Smit notes, ‘like all hierarchies, those
produced by diversity regimes are stabilized by a combination of material
inducements and intersubjective understandings about the order’s legit-
imacy … Such hierarchies also generate grievances, however.’24 If all
diversity regimes thus inevitably create grievances, we can make sense of
them only by comparing and contrasting them to their alternatives at a
given point in time. Comparing the Ottoman diversity regime to those of
its contemporaries over the six hundred years of its existence suggests
that the Ottoman rulers in general were less likely to pursue systematic
policies of cultural or religious assimilation. Unlike the Spanish Empire,
for instance, the Ottoman state did not see itself as responsible for
salvation,25 and with the exception of the janissaries,26 state institutions
did not pursue forced conversions on a mass scale. Furthermore,
‘Ottomans were never inquisitional’ and ‘there were no dark sentinels
constantly on the alert to catch someone out in heresy.’27 Conversion,
when it took place, was pushed by non-state actors, such as the derviş
lodges, but even their preferred method was ‘convert[ing] more by
example rather than prostelyzing.’28 There were indeed incentives to
convert – such as cizye, the non-Muslim tax – but they were not too
heavy-handed.29 Even the more devout Ottoman rulers focused on utility
and results over sincerity of belief.
However, this pragmatism should not be necessarily taken as evidence
of a well-articulated policy of tolerance (as it is sometimes made out to
be). There were, in fact, some rulers who attempted to institutionalise
toleration as part of the legitimating narrative, but they were not the
norm. For example, Bayezid I (1389–1402), who used his Christian
vassals not only to conquer Turkish beyliks in Anatolia but also in the
siege of Constantinople,30 considered ‘himself to be descended from
22 23
Barkey 2014, 472. Zarakol 2011; Bially Mattern and Zarakol 2016.
24 25
Reus-Smit 2018a, 217. Deringil 2012, 15.
26
The janissary corps were initially constituted via a child levy, whereby one son from
Christian families in the Balkans would be taken and raised by the state. This is an
example of forced conversion, but it was not motivated by a desire to save the child’s
soul. On the janissaries, see Inalcik 1973 and Kafadar 1991.
27 28 29
Deringil 2012, 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid. See also Masters 2001.
30
Darling 2011, 41.
56 Ayşe Zarakol
Alexander the Great, the hero of Christians and Muslims alike’ and
encouraged ‘attempts to reconcile Islam and Christianity.’31 When Baye-
zid I was defeated in the Battle of Ankara (1402) and taken captive,
resulting in the Ottoman Interregnum (1402–1413), his ultra-
cosmopolitan vision was defeated with him: following the reconstitution
of the state in 1413, many chroniclers cast Bayezid’s Byzantine-inspired
attempts as moral corruption, contrasting it with the (assumed) purity of
the nomadic ghazi ethos.
Bayezid I’s vision of official ‘multiculturalism’ may have been
defeated, but the many multicultural practices of the polity survived
under the cover of Islamic identity. Christians were recruited into the
army (without conversion) until the end of the fifteenth century and
continued to be timar (land title) holders.32 In the broad culture there
was a general attitude of ‘live and let live’, accommodated not uncom-
fortably under the banner of holy war. Saltukname, a heroic epic dated to
1480, presents Sari Saltuk as both fighting the Byzantines but also ‘bring
[ing] tears to their eyes by reciting the Bible at the altar.’33 After the
conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II (1451–1481) followed inclusive
policies with regard to urban development, and invoked both Byzantine
and Islamic (as well as Timurid) symbols to legitimise his rule: ‘He built
himself one palace in the Byzantine style and one in the Timurid style,
issued a law code in imitation of Justinian’s, and employed Byzantine
and Anatolian writers as well as artists working in the Italian, Greek,
Persian and Turkish traditions.’34 Furthermore, ‘he gave Christians and
Jews corporate recognition in the empire, and his land and tax policies
disadvantaged the old-time gazis and frontier Sufi orders in favor of
ex-Christian military recruits.’35 Mehmed II’s corporate recognition
of Christians and Jews would, over centuries, evolve into the now well-
remembered millet system,36 and in fact, some scholars still date the
creation of the millet system to this period.37 It is also sometimes argued
that ‘Ottoman sultans did not innovatively introduce the millet system
into their empire at the capture of Constantinople, but even prior to this
point they had already been applying its principles to the non-Muslim
communities under their rule,’38 based on the assumption that Muslim
rulers replicate ‘the attitude of the Prophet to the other religions.’39
31 32 33 34
Ibid. Darling 2000. Deringil 2000, 555. Darling 2011, 48.
35 36 37
Ibid. See, for example, Barkey and Gavrilis 2016. Ibid.
38
Khan 2016, 4, discussing Gibb and Bowen 1950, 214.
39
Gibb and Bowen 1950, 209, as cited in Khan 2016, 4.
This view has come under quite a bit of criticism in recent decades,40
given that there is no documentary evidence for it, despite the fact that
the Ottomans were meticulous record keepers. A study of Ottoman
records by Braude41 has demonstrated that, prior to the nineteenth
century, millet did not have the meaning we now attribute to it:42 ‘Otto-
mans variably used the term millet for themselves — i.e. the community
of Muslims in contradistinction to dhimmis—, foreign Christian heads-
of-state in diplomatic correspondences, and for rare Jewish favourites.’43
Sects were referred to instead as ta’ifa (group), a term ‘liberally assigned
to almost any collective social or economic group: craft organization,
merchants, tribals, residents of a particular quarter, or even foreigners.’44
A ta’ifa had a degree of autonomy: it ‘established its own rules for
inclusion, chose its leadership, and promulgated its internal regula-
tions.’45 Then it would be registered and receive official sanction,
following which the ta’ifa members could seek recourse in the Ottoman
(Muslim) courts, if needed. This was both a more complex and a more
flexible (or ad hoc) system than the millet system of the nineteenth
century. Scholars who see the origins of the millet system in the fifteenth
century have read nineteenth-century understandings back in time, also
misled by first communal and later nationalist historiographies who
wanted to have their millet institutionally recognised as early as possible,
because earlier dating made arguing for new rights and privileges more
justifiable.46
Examination of the available historical documents demonstrates that
in the fifteenth century, Mehmed II did not follow a particular or uni-
form legal paradigm for dealing with non-Muslim communities. In some
cases, existing religious leaders and institutions of a community were
recognised: the Greek ecumenical patriarchy seems to fit this model.
In other cases, such as the Armenians, Mehmed II did push for the
establishment of a patriarchate: ‘the motivation behind this policy
could be the fact that the spiritual capital of Armenians, Ejmiacin, lied
outside Ottoman borders where the original chief patriarch resided and
the Ottomans intended to build a de facto patriarchate in Constantinople
as a focus of loyalty for Armenians within the empire.’47 These two
patriarchate communities more closely resembled the millet model of
the later period, in that the patriarchs, once elected by their communities
40
Khan 2016 notes that Ursunius 1993 is one exception to this revisionist trend.
41 42 43 44
Braude 1982. Masters 2001, 61. Khan 2016, 5. Ibid.
45
Ibid., 62.
46
Though the practice of exaggerating the longevity of the practice dates back to the
Ottoman times. See Masters 2001, 61.
47
Khan 2016, 7; see also Braude 1982.
58 Ayşe Zarakol
and recognised by an official Ottoman berat (imperial decree), did fulfil

communal responsibilities, not dissimilar to guild wardens or revenue
farmers. The Jewish community, on the other hand, did not have (nor
did it later develop) any leadership commensurate with the powers and
privileges of the patriarchate; the chief rabbi was not that significant.
Taxes from the Jewish community were collected by another, lay,
appointee and ‘individual congregations within Jewish communities
had a great degree of autonomy.’48 Rather than the Ottoman state
pushing a leadership structure on them, it was the Jewish congregations
who appointed their local chief rabbis themselves, ‘in order to pool their
resources more effectively.’49 Jewish communities of the empire were
also organised not as one large group, but rather with ‘each kehilla living
in its own quarter grouped around its own synagogue and subject to its
own haham or rabbi.’50 Finally, Catholics did not have any communal
recognition or leadership until centuries later, when the Ottoman state
became concerned that they might be recruited by foreign powers.51
In sum, the early Ottoman state did not have a standard way of dealing
with non-Muslim communities, and came to arrangements with each
group on a rather ad hoc basis, depending on what was deemed to be
needed at any given moment. The general ethos of the state, especially
in this early period, was one of ‘latitudinarianism and syncretism.’52
Kafadar has in fact characterised the diversity regime of the empire in
the period up to the fifteenth century as ‘a “metadoxy”, a state of being
beyond doxies, a combination of being doxy-naïve and not being doxy-
minded, as well as the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously
defining and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy.’53 This is not to say that the
state treated each religious community equally; even in its most latitudin-
arian moments, the Ottoman state had a pronounced Islamic identity,
and encouraged conversion to Islam via various incentives. As noted
previously, non-Muslims in general paid more taxes.54 Though there
were Christian tımar holders well into the sixteenth century, the first
two centuries of the empire also witnessed considerable ‘voluntary’
conversion, especially among the remaining Balkan ruling families, who
were thus able to maintain some of their stature under Ottoman rule.
Nevertheless, we can observe that in terms of cultural or religious coer-
cion, the Ottomans fared better (at least from a modern vantage point)
48 49 50
Khan 2016, 8; see also Levy 2010. Khan 2016, 8. Ibid., 9.
51
Goffman 1994 suggests that the entirety of the millet system evolved in response to
pressure from Catholic and Protestant communities.
52 53
Deringil 2000, 555. Kafadar 1995, 76.
54
Deringil 2012 suggests that these taxes were not always collected.
than comparable empires of the time. Spain, for instance, ‘had come to
conquer, colonize, and evangelize the recently discovered continent,
[and] felt that it was elected by Providence for this mission.’55 Later, in
the eighteenth century, Russia created the Agency of Convert Affairs,
targeting both pagans and Muslims.56 There was never any such com-
parable agency in the Ottoman Empire, which makes the Sunnitisation
campaign of the sixteenth century especially interesting.
State of Exception: Sunnitisation in

the Long Sixteenth Century
Though there were many small violations of the broader laissez-faire
attitude to cultural diversity throughout the history of the Ottoman
Empire, one period stands out starkly as being particularly exceptional
in its brutal treatment of culturally heterodox elements. In the sixteenth
century, the Ottoman administration targeted and ruthlessly eliminated
heterodox Islamic elements in a broad campaign of Sunnitisation that
lasted well into the early seventeenth century.57 This campaign ranged
from the active and bloody persecution of various communities, such as
the Kızılbaş,58 to various measures intended to enforce proper belief,
understood as being Sunni Islam, as it was interpreted at the time. This
latter goal was achieved through different processes of social disciplining,
such as the promulgation of a new criminal law code that policed the
boundaries of orthodoxy and public morality, the promotion of mosque
worship through the imposition of new fines for irregular attendance, and
the construction of an unprecedented number of mosques in order to
stabilise mosque congregations and monitor them easily.59 There were
also attempts to educate the general Muslim population via public lec-
tures and manuals of religious instruction.60 This section reviews the
context that led the sixteenth-century Ottoman state away from its
laissez-faire attitudes towards such a systematic policy of cultural-
religious discipline (where Muslims were concerned).
Centralisation efforts were underway in the Ottoman Empire well
before the sixteenth century,61 and they continued at full speed well into
55 56 57
Ibid., 551. Ibid., 552. Terzioğlu 2012–2013.
58
A derogatory term that ‘the Ottomans applied to the Turkoman tribesmen who followed
Shah Ismail I (r. 1501–24) in a revolt against Ottoman control in eastern Anatolia at the
end of the 15th century’ (Agoston and Masters 2009, 313).
59
Krstic 2011, 107; see also Terzioğlu 2012–2013, 314.
60
Terzioğlu 2012–2013, 316–317.
61
I argue in Zarakol 2018 that these trends towards centralisation may have been driven by
systemic dynamics, spreading westward from Asia towards Asia Minor. There is a
60 Ayşe Zarakol
the sixteenth century. A significant development was the creation of the

standing army of janissaries instead of the ghazi warriors, and a central-
ised bureaucracy out of the same janissary framework. Mehmed II recre-
ated the traditional Islamic practice of the mamluk (slave soldiers)62 in a
rather ‘innovative’ manner: he ‘developed a new army and bureaucracy,
based on recruitment of non-Muslim youths as loyal servants of the
Sultan without social connections … These provided the Sultan’s per-
sonal troops … Janissaries; and they staffed the central bureaucracy’
(italics added).63 The slave-servants of the sultan thus became the new
‘nobility’ of the land, but without the ability to produce heirs, thereby
making it impossible (for the time being) for them to build strong
bases of opposition to dynastic authority. Ghazi vassals came to be
replaced with governors, moving from a feudal arrangement to a patri-
monial one.64
Mehmed II’s grandson, Selim I, conquered Mecca and Medina and
with it earned additional support for the Ottoman claim to the caliph-
ate.65 Selim I then used the title of the caliphate to establish his political
authority over the ulama (religious jurists) hierarchy – a radical move for
the Islamic context. When, for instance, the Şeyhülislam (the head of
ulama) ‘protested against the decision by Selim to have 150 treasury
officials executed, the Sultan replied that this was “a violation of the
Sultan’s authority … No-one [has] the right or competence to question
what the Sultan commands or forbids.” The men were executed.’66
Selim’s son Süleyman I (the Magnificent), further extended the sultan’s
law-making authority; hence his Turkish title Kanuni (lawgiver.)67 The
Ottoman sultans of the sixteenth century thus circumvented the Islamic
growing body of literature in history that studies the legacy of Mongolian invasion of
Eurasian states – see Zarakol 2018 for an overview. By contrast, nineteenth-century
trends were helped along by developments in Europe spreading eastward.
62 63 64
Tezcan 2010, 90. Black 2011, 200. Tezcan 2010.
65
The Abbasid dynasty had ended in 1295. After that point, the claim to the caliphate was
contested by several parties, including the Mamluks in Egypt. When they lost control of
the holy lands to the Ottomans, they also lost whatever legitimacy they had to this claim.
Ottomans had first laid claim to this title in the early part of the fourteenth century.
66
Black 2011, 204, citing İnalcık 1973, 94.
67
The Ottomans also continued their tradition of using many titles to prove their claim to
sovereignty: ‘The Ottomans were quick to take up the Persian titles “emperor
(hüdavendigar)” and “the universal ruler who protects the world (padisah-i
alempanah)”; foreign rulers frequently addressed the Ottoman Sultan as “emperor” …
The rhetoric of world-conquering empire reached a climax under Mehmed II and
Süleyman I. Mehmed called himself “the sovereign of the two lands and the two seas”
(sc. Rumelia and Anatolia, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea) … Süleyman
I boasted: “In Baghdad I am Shah, in Rum Caesar, in Egypt Sultan, who sends his
fleets to the seas of Europe, the Maghrib and India”’ (Black 2011, 538; see also İnalcık
1973, 41).
tradition of political authority, merely enforcing but neither making nor

interpreting law by, first, actively adapting a particular school of jurispru-
dence (Hanafi) and, second, developing an ‘imperial learned hierarchy
with fairly standardized career and training tracks.’68 In 1556 Süleyman
I took the unprecedented step of specifying which texts the students of
the imperial education system were to study.69 In sum, in the sixteenth
century the Ottoman state brought Islamic religious institutions under its
own authority, a centralising move on a par with developments that
would soon unfold in Europe.70 However, this move put it in direct
tension with Muslim groups within the empire that did not recognise
the Hanafi approach or the ulama hierarchy. Such heterodox groups now
posed a threat to the centralising project of the state.
The Ottomans themselves did not have a particularly distinguished
pedigree within the Islamic tradition.71 Therefore, the legitimacy of their
centralising project was always in question within a traditional Islamic
framework, even after they conquered the holy lands. From the fifteenth
century onwards, history writing came to be a primary site for the
expressions of criticisms against centralisation. Numerous history texts
bemoaned the corrupting effects of civilisation (as represented by sophis-
ticated state institutions and their administrators) and held up the pur-
itan ethos of the early ghazi warriors of the fourteenth century (and a
period where there were few state institutions to speak of ) as the proper
model for Ottomans to emulate. Earlier Ottomans were remembered
as simple but brave ghazis who knew nothing of taxation or other bur-
eaucratic practices, and were contrasted to evil administrators who intro-
duced such measures and whose moral failings were evidenced by their
sexual and other lifestyle failings. By the sixteenth century, however,
there were no ghazi warriors left to speak of, long since replaced by a
standing army of janissary corps, cavalry and other provincial troops.
What did remain from the early period of the empire, however, were
Sufi dervish lodges. These lodges had legitimised Ottoman ghaza and
fulfilled various religious functions for the warriors until the Ottoman
state was properly constituted and developed its own ulama hierarchy
in the fifteenth century. Thus, the lodges became a vector for resistance
to centralisation, which rendered them increasingly problematic from the
perspective of the Ottoman polity.
There was also an ‘international’ angle to these dynamics. In the
sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire became engaged in simultaneous
68 69 70
Black 2011, 584. Ibid., 586. Zarakol 2018.
71
We know little about the Ottomans before their arrival on the historical stage in the
thirteenth century, but we know that they could not claim prophetic lineage.
62 Ayşe Zarakol
rivalries with the Habsburg to the west and the Safavids to the southeast,
with transformational effects for all involved. One consequence of the
interimperial rivalry was the magnification of various millenarian expect-
ations about the ‘end of days’. Whereas in Europe millenarianism drew
its original impetus from the fall of Constantinople, ‘in the context of the
Ottoman and Safavid empires, as well as Mughal India, millenarianism
drew force from the fact that the last century of the Muslim millennium
started in 1495 C.E. (901 H) and was to end in 1591/92 C.E.’72 The
millenarian trend made questions of faith more existential, even for a
non-inquisitional empire such as the Ottoman Empire – if the end of days
was near, it was important to be on the right side of faith.
During this rivalry, various heterodox Muslim groups in the Ottoman
Empire came to be seen as Safavid sympathisers and this is what marked
them for persecution. Heterodox Muslim beliefs were persecuted and
many of the dervish lodges systematically destroyed in this period,
seen as Safavid or Shi’ite traitors. There was even a boom in heresy trials
in this period – a very unusual development for the Ottomans. Ironically,
it could be argued that the experience of persecution itself is what made
‘Shi’ites’ out of such groups as the Kızılbaş:73 until they were targeted for
persecution, ‘unlike Jews and Christians, non-Sunni Muslims living in
the Ottoman realms did not enjoy official recognition as distinct com-
munities; rather, the Ottoman officials accommodated them (when they
so choose) simply by treating them as if they were Sunnis.’74 Deliberately
targeting them as Safavid sympathisers spoiled this fiction and forced
various heterodox communities (at least those that survived), who may
not have previously considered themselves as kin (or as Shi’ites for that
matter), into the same camp.
Despite the rivalry with the Habsburg to the west, however, Christian
communities escaped this period relatively unscathed. In 1616, partly in
response to Habsburg measures, the Ottoman sultan briefly toyed with
(but ultimately rejected) the idea of imposing a levy on foreign residents
of Constantinople, who were also in increasing competition in their
neighbourhoods with the newly settled Morisco refugees from the Habs-
burg Empire.75 We may speculate that this was because the Ottomans
did not take the Habsburgs as seriously as rivals as they did the Safavids,
so they were not concerned about the Habsburg sponsorship of
Christian ta’ifa in the empire (or at least not to the same extent). Yet
another reason may be that as relative ‘outsiders’ to the Ottoman order,
the non-Muslim ta’ifa did not have the standing to mount a legitimacy
72 73 74 75
Krstic 2009, 39. Terzioğlu 2012–2013, 313. Ibid. Krstic 2009.
critique of the centralising project of the Ottoman state. Hence, they

could be safely ignored.
In sum, we can point to three overlapping dynamics from the long
sixteenth century that made the Ottoman state’s Sunnitisation campaign
possible: state centralisation, ideological conflict about the state’s legit-
imating ideology and interimperial competition. None of these factors
was enough by itself, and each contributed to others. There are good
reasons to believe that state centralisation is part of a cyclical trend in the
longue durée of human history, but it was also aided in this case by the
arrival of Mongolian-Turkic conceptions of sovereignty76 and pushed
along further by interimperial competition. The presence of interimperial
competition also made ideological conflicts about sovereignty and legit-
imacy more acute and urgent, putting in the line of fire especially those
groups that could legitimately present alternative interpretations of the
ideology the state was using to justify its centralisation efforts, as well as
groups that could more easily find external sponsors. This particular
triad of confluence was also present at the end of the nineteenth century.
State of Exception Redux: Nationalisation

in the Long Nineteenth Century
Ottoman absolutism was dismantled in the seventeenth century, and as a
consequence both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were periods
of considerable decentralisation.77 Furthermore, interimperial competi-
tion decreased in the seventeenth century, and the Ottomans became
more inward looking as territorial expansion slowed down and then
reversed. In this period, the Ottoman bureaucracy pursued a hands-off
approach in many matters, including the management of cultural diver-
sity. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the intoler-
ant face of the Ottoman state had made a comeback, this time targeting
especially non-Muslim groups. This section focuses on the context pre-
ceding the massacres of the late nineteenth century.
The period leading up to the nineteenth century had witnessed
the rise of local notables (a’yan) who benefited from the growth of
commercial agriculture. Local communities developed mechanisms of
self-government, such as communal corporations and neighbourhood
cash wakfs.78 The social world of the Ottoman Empire was also
76
Zarakol 2018.
77
For a more comprehensive account of this period, see Tezcan 2010. See also Findley
2010, Heper 1976 and Barkey 2008.
78
Tezcan 2010, 198.
64 Ayşe Zarakol
transformed: there were major innovations in Ottoman music; first-

person narratives emerged in the Ottoman literature; the coffee house
emerged as an urban secular public space. Arts and culture were sup-
ported not by the court but by new patrons: ‘the expansion of markets
and investment opportunities in the sixteenth century led to the forma-
tion of social groups whose members not only bought their way into the
politically privileged classes of society but also spent their money on arts
and culture.’79 External military defeats notwithstanding, the eighteenth
century could be characterised as ‘one of the most peaceful periods of
Ottoman history in terms of political protests.’80 As a result of these
social and economic changes, for the first time there emerged a collective
political identity in the Ottoman Empire that encompassed both the rulers
and the Muslim subjects:81 in the eighteenth century, ‘the connotation of
the term re’aya, which literally means herd or flock, shifted from subjects
in general to non-Muslim subjects in particular.’82 This meant that any
free Muslim male could become a part of the governing bureaucracy; they
had become ‘citizens’ in a manner. Yet this also had the consequence of
separating non-Muslim subjects in a manner they had not been before. It
was after this development that the fault line between the Muslim and the
non-Muslim population of the empire properly activated.
The shift is difficult to describe from a modern vantage point. It is not
as if before this juncture the non-Muslim communities were treated
equally by the Ottoman state. Religious identity determined legal and
political status, with different ‘laws’ governing Muslims and the various
non-Muslim communities.83 Yet, though non-Muslims faced certain
taxes or other burdens that Muslims did not face, they also had certain
freedoms Muslims did not have. Furthermore, non-Muslims, especially
Greeks, were involved in the creation of the Ottoman polity from the very
beginning. Throughout much of the history of the empire, ‘the majority
of the imperial elite were Muslims, but it also included Christians. Greek
Phanariots, members of the old Greek families of Istanbul, some with
roots dating back to the Byzantine Empire, belonged to the adminis-
trative elite and enjoyed special ranks and statuses.’84 Jewish families also
took part in the administration of the empire.85 Finally, there was the
janissary system, which at least in its inception forced the conversion of
non-Muslim boys from the empire’s European territories. The smartest
79 80
Ibid., 230. Ibid., 225. Yaycıoğlu 2016 disagrees to some extent.
81
The Sunnitisation processes discussed in the previous section had also contributed to
this outcome by homogenising the Muslim population.
82 83 84
Tezcan 2010, 235. Deringil 2012. See, for example, Yaycıoğlu 2016.
85
Deringil 2012.
of the boys selected for janissary service were trained as imperial adminis-
trators.86 Through such military or administrative service, one could gain
the favour of the sultan and be awarded in retirement with land titles.
This is how many influential Ottoman families got their start, finding
ways to transmit their wealth across generations despite the fact that
hereditary nobility was not recognised. Until the seventeenth century,
Muslim-born men were not allowed to join the janissary corps, which
shut off one possible avenue of social and political advancement to low-
status Muslims. The opening of the administrative ranks to Muslim-born
men in the seventeenth century changed this dynamic and contributed to
the rise of the Muslim proto-nation.
To reiterate, the emergence of a Muslim proto-nation in the eight-
eenth century irreversibly changed the relationship of the Ottoman state
to its non-Muslim subjects. Previously the Ottoman sultan had stood
more or less equidistant from all of the ruled, regardless of their religion:
‘A Muslim peasant belonged just as much to the re’aya, or the flock of the
sultan, as the non-Muslim one; they were both outsiders … as far as the
ruling class was concerned.’87 Once the Muslims came to be included in
the nascent ‘political nation’, non-Muslim subjects developed justifiable
resentments that intersected both with nineteenth-century notions of
self-determination and European realpolitik vis-à-vis the Ottoman
Empire, contributing to the territorial losses in the Balkans and adding
urgency to the centralisation project. At the same time, non-Muslim
subjects themselves were nationalising, and ‘with the advent of national-
ism, “Religion became a marker of national identity in ways not known
in the past, and therefore more sharply marked off from neighboring
religions”.’88 As a result of these developments, conversion (whether
from Islam to Christianity or vice versa) became a much more significant
act, taking on political meanings it did not have before. Religious identity
became linked to emergent national identities.
The long nineteenth century thus initially witnessed various attempts
by the Ottoman state to address the growing grievances of non-Muslim
communities and found itself outrun by the multiplication of schisms
around nationalising demarcations. The first section argued that that the
institutionalisation of the millet system was a relatively late development
in the history of the empire. Yet the millet system started coming apart at
the seams almost as soon as it was introduced, as more and more
86
Forced conversion is a barbaric practice to our eyes. The historic justification for the
practice is that it creates a group of servants to the sovereign who have no loyalties to
anyone but the sultan; having converted, they are cut off from their families of origin.
87 88
Tezcan 2010. Deringil 2012, 4, citing Mazower 2001, 76.
66 Ayşe Zarakol
communities demanded recognition.89 The citizenship reforms the

Ottomans implemented throughout the nineteenth century – to prevent
the potential deployment of non-Muslim communities by foreign powers
against the Ottomans – were yet another attempt. The Gülhane edict of
1839, which commenced the Tanzimat period, declared the equality
before the law of both Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans. The
1856 Reform edict, which followed on the heels of the Crimean War
(1853–1856) – during which the empire had been rescued from humili-
ating defeat by France and Britain, and was therefore designed under
outside pressure – declared ‘equality in military service (which nobody
liked), justice, schools … abolished the head tax, and provided for
equality of employment in government … called for establishment of
banks, the codification of penal and commercial laws, strict observance
of annual budgets, and for the reform of prisons.’90 This was followed by
the constitutional and parliamentary experiment of 1876 that guaranteed
religious freedom. This was once again justified primarily in reference to
upsetting ‘Russian efforts to intervene with Western approval in order
to “liberalize” the Ottoman regime,’91 though some effort was also made
to find Islamic referents in the concepts of shura (the council electing the
caliph in the early period) and mesveret (consultation).92
It needs to be underlined that all of these developments were
happening against a backdrop of the Ottoman state’s recentralisation in
the face of international pressures. Territorial losses in the eighteenth
century helped to revive Ottoman absolutism with new justifications.
The promulgator of the ‘New Order’, Selim III, acknowledged the
military superiority of the West for the first time in 1797.93 From then
on this ‘fact’ would become one of the primary mechanisms for the
justification of centralised rule and growth of state power, and this time
(unlike in the sixteenth century) the Ottomans would follow more closely
along the European trajectory vis-à-vis the management of diversity.
Mahmud II, who came to the throne in 1808, moved in the name of
modernisation to eliminate the power of local notables (a’yan), the ulama
and the janissaries alike, destroying all traditional obstacles to centralised
sovereignty. A much more centralist administration modelled on the
West was instituted in the Tanzimat period (1839–1876), with the ranks
of bureaucracy expanding considerably and new obligations being
imposed on now-citizens in terms of taxes and military service.94 New
secular schools were established for the bureaucracy and the military,
89
The Armenian Protestants split from the Orthodox, etc. See Deringil 2012.
90 91 92 93
Karpat 1972, 259. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 270. Heper 1976, 510.
94
Mardin 1973, 178.
who came to perceive themselves as being tasked with the modernisation

of the empire.95 These measures did face some resistance, both from
intellectual circles, such as the Young Ottomans (who were formulating
arguments in favour of limiting the powers of the monarchy, though not
necessarily of the bureaucracy), as well as from an emerging middle class.
It was the demands from these groups that made the aforementioned
constitutional experiment possible, but the experiment did not last long.
Sultan Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution in 1878, blaming
war with Russia. He also justified his increasingly absolutist rule by
reanimating the caliphate title (held but rarely invoked by the Ottoman
sultans since the sixteenth century), which he attempted to use as a
rallying symbol of Pan-Islamism in an attempt to hold the empire
together. Abdülhamid II’s reign (1876–1908) witnessed the further
extension of the Ottoman state apparatus.96 Society was also transformed
as levels of urbanisation and education increased sharply, giving rise to a
new group of intellectuals (often with Balkan roots), who took up the
cause of Turkish nationalism (Young Turks)97 and who viewed earlier
experiments with Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism as failures, as the
empire continued to lose territory to nationalist-secessionist movements,
especially in the Balkans. Nationalism was equated with modernisation,
which was equated with state centralisation. Such efforts resulted in the
Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and the Second Constitutional Era,
which lasted until World War I, following which the Turkish Republic
came into existence, officially ending Ottoman monarchy in 1923 and
the caliphate in 1924.98
On the cultural diversity front, the story of the Ottoman Empire ends
rather tragically with the Armenian genocide (which claimed more than a
million lives, according to most estimates) and wide-scale ethnic
cleansing of Greeks from Anatolia (involving hundreds of thousands of
deportations, as well as casualties).99 From that point on, the syncretic
heritage of the empire was hopelessly lost, with the battle lines drawn
between modernising Turkish nationalists on the one hand and Islamist
reactionaries on the other, both with their own assimilation projects, a
pattern that has lasted into the present-day reality of the Republic of
Turkey. The tragedies that capped the Ottoman long nineteenth century
thus present a puzzle: how is it that a state that was for centuries a
95 96 97
Heper 1976, 510–511. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 280.
98
I cover this period extensively in After Defeat 2011, chapter 3. Also see works by Cemil
Aydın for a discussion of the ideological trends of this period.
99
See Rae 2002, Chapter 4, for a detailed account of this period and a complementary
explanation of these developments as ‘pathological homogenisation.’
68 Ayşe Zarakol
remarkably laissez-faire polity in terms of its management of cultural

diversity (at least for its time) was also capable of committing some of
the worst examples of crimes against humanity in modern memory?
The next section attempts to answer this question by casting the nine-
teenth century in a comparative light with the sixteenth and then draws
lessons from the Ottoman case for future international orders.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde:

Ottoman Lessons for International Order
As noted in the introduction, the Ottoman Empire is lauded by many for
its toleration of cultural diversity, and yet condemned by others for its
crimes against various cultural-religious groups. Both reputations are
earned. When it was tolerant, the Ottoman polity was generally better
at the management of cultural diversity than its contemporaries; when
it was intolerant, the opposite was true. What factors activated the
Ottoman ‘Mr Hyde’ in the long sixteenth and nineteenth centuries?
In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman state did not tolerate heterodoxy
among Muslims, but it was not similarly bothered by the heterodoxy of
the non-Muslim communities. Three factors seem to have played a role
in their systemic targeting of heterodox Muslim sects. First, political
centralisation on the scale attempted by the Ottomans in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries was almost unheard of in the Islamic tradition,100
so the legitimation of Ottoman moves towards absolutism rested on
precarious ground to begin with. The heterodox Muslim sects, and
especially the dervish lodges, stood in the way of state centralisation
efforts and were one of the sources of resistance narratives based on an
idealised ghazi history that harkened back to an early Ottoman period,
where the Ottoman sultan was essentially primus inter pares among war-
riors and had no law-making authority independent of religious figures.
Second, the Ottoman polity at the time was engaged in high-stakes
imperial competition, and these heterodox groups were, for many
reasons, seen to be sympathising with the enemy (i.e. the Safavids).
Furthermore, the millenarian frenzy about the end of days increased
the urgency of being on the right side of religious belief and thus made
intrafaith toleration less likely. Finally, these heterodox groups were
legitimately articulating criticisms (from within Islam) that undermined
the centralising ideology of the state. None of these factors was a suffi-
cient motivator by itself. The competition with the Habsburgs, for
100
But the Safavids and Mughals were undergoing similar trends around the same time.
instance, was not enough for the Ottoman state to cast its non-Muslim
communities as potentially treacherous, perhaps because the Ottomans
were not as bothered by their rivalry with Habsburg as they were about
the Safavids, but also likely because the non-Muslim communities did
not stand in the way of state centralisation (yet). Non-Muslim commu-
nities could not (yet) generate delegitimising myths for the state (or at
least ones that could be appealing to the broader population).
In the nineteenth century, there was a similar confluence of factors
undermining Ottomans’ usual attitudes towards pluralism. State central-
isation efforts were once again under way, this time justified with refer-
ence to modernisation and catching up with Europe (and thus preventing
territorial losses). Following developments in Western Europe, the legit-
imating ideology for centralisation this time was nationalism, and the
previously Sunnitised Muslim population of the empire was becoming
increasingly nationalised. Non-Muslim groups, though now declared to
be equal citizens in theory, posed a challenge to nationalisation because
of the way nationalism had become tangled up in religious markers in the
nineteenth century, and especially so in Ottoman lands due to the legacy
of the short-lived millet system. Non-Muslim groups within the empire
were increasingly nationalised along millet lines, and they used national-
ism to resist state centralisation even when they were not trying to secede
from the empire. The competing nationalisation narratives of these
groups undercut state efforts to organise the population around the
notion of equal Ottoman citizenship (just as heterodox interpretations
of Islam had undercut sixteenth-century claims to power by the Ottoman
throne). Finally, non-Muslim groups increasingly came to be seen as
tools of foreign powers, just as the Shia communities had been cast as
Safavid sympathisers in the sixteenth century. As it was in the sixteenth
century, it was a confluence of all of these factors that led to the tragic
outcome of the nineteenth century.
What lessons are to be drawn from the Ottoman case for the manage-
ment of cultural diversity in future international orders? Our ability to
draw lessons from this case is limited by two factors. First, the Ottoman
case spans back to a time period that pre-dates the concepts of culture
and diversity, as well as the notion that these things can or should be
deliberately managed or cultivated by the state. Just as individuals have
become more reflexive throughout the modern period about ‘self-fash-
ioning,’101 so have states (and, by implication, international orders).
Second, as varied as the Ottoman Empire was over time, it is still one
101
Greenblatt 1980.
70 Ayşe Zarakol
case and thus is sui generis in some ways. We need more points of
comparison to draw proper lessons about diversity regimes.102 Having
said that, the Ottoman case gestures towards three lessons about diversity
regimes, which I will gently raise here for future debate.
First, on balance, political centralisation (especially when coupled with
external competition) seems not to be good news for cultural diversity.
The state as Leviathan is a jealous god. This lesson is also borne out by
mid-twentieth century experiments with the extreme versions of modern
sovereignty, so this is a rather banal observation to make. I nevertheless
make this observation specifically in regards to the Ottoman case because
there is a misunderstanding that permeates much of the historical sover-
eignty literature that assumes political centralisation to be a uniquely
European development. Nothing could be further from the truth.103
Second, when political centralisation is under way, from the perspec-
tive of cultural ‘minorities’ it is more dangerous to be on the margins of
the inside group than it is to be a proper outsider. Groups that have
enough moral standing (e.g. religious authority, citizenship rights) to
mount a critique of the efforts under way are more threatening to deci-
sion makers than those who are deemed inferior or marginal at the
outset.
Finally, the Ottoman case should at least make us ponder whether
there is something especially dangerous about laissez-faire (or multicul-
tural, or liberal) orders when they become threatening. When such
systems work they may be preferable to other regimes if the primary goal
is toleration, but such systems may be especially ill-equipped to deal with
crises and to handle challenges of diversity during crisis. A cursory survey
backs up this hunch – the American diversity regime, for instance, whose
overarching arc is easily classified as one of the more inclusive and
tolerant of minority rights of any modern state, has also shown itself to
be capable of some of the most racially intolerant policies when under
pressure. This is something it has in common with the Ottoman order.104
To the extent that the contemporary international liberal order is also a
projection of such laissez-faire values, we have good reason to be wary of
the consequences of the current stress test on the global management of
cultural diversity.
102
See Hui, Millward and Barnett in this volume, as well Reus-Smit 2018a.
103
Zarakol 2018.
104
For parallels between the United States and China, see Millward’s chapter in this
volume.
4 Qing and Twentieth-Century
Chinese Diversity Regimes
James A. Millward
Of the world’s early modern empires, there are two whose contemporary
avatars have patently retained their former territorial scope. Both, per-
haps significantly, were primarily continental as opposed to maritime
empires – and thus were built through expansion into contiguous lands.
One is the United States, and the other the People’s Republic of China.
Both the US and the PRC continue to wrestle with problems of ethno-
cultural diversity rooted in their past. In the US, these derive primarily
from the establishment and expansion of settler colonies by western
European states from the sixteenth century; from the absorption, by
diplomacy and conquest, of territories once under Spanish and Mexican
as well as Native American control by the state descended from the
Anglo-American colonies; from the use of African slaves in plantation
agriculture; and from other immigration. In the PRC, neither immigra-
tion nor imported slaves have been a notable factor. However, territorial
expansion by Chinese and non-Chinese dynastic monarchies on the
East Asian mainland from the Qin to the Qing, and by the reconquest
by the PRC in the mid-twentieth century of most of the Qing imperial
territories, has bequeathed to the contemporary Chinese state ethno-
cultural and political complexities, in particular the indigenous peoples
of territories now within China’s northern and western frontiers. In
addition, the Qing management of British and Japanese pressure along
the Chinese maritime frontier and the vicissitudes of civil wars have left
thorny status issues, as well as differing varieties of contested ‘Chinese’
identity in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
As is common for modern nation-states, one of the ways both the US
and PRC have attempted to downplay imperial legacies and manage
contemporary ethno-national diversity is through historiographical rhet-
oric. ‘Manifest destiny,’ for example, was the classic euphemism for
imperial expansion in the American case. US public history now more
honestly recognizes that much US territory was expropriated by guile,
coercion or force from prior occupants; still, for reasons more self-
congratulatory than historical, the continental US is generally considered
71
72 James A. Millward
to be not an empire, but rather a democratic republic promising free-

doms in its eighteenth-century foundational documents that have
only incrementally been extended to those unlike the wealthy, white,
male, ostensibly heterosexual and often slave-holding authors who
penned them.
China, through another kind of historiographical sleight of hand, is
considered to have always been something now called ‘China’: a unique,
unitary cultural-political entity that, though ruled by an ‘emperor’
(huangdi 皇帝), was never ‘imperialist.’ In the official historiography
promoted by Chinese states since the twentieth century, China in this
idealized sense has always existed implicitly with its current form even
before there was a state with that name or shape (the first to occupy the
current maximal footprint was the Qing in the eighteenth century).
Today’s Chinese ‘minority nationalities’ or ‘ethnicities’ are thus deemed
to have always been ‘Chinese,’ even before they and their lands fell under
rule by a ‘Chinese’ state.1 This is because ‘China,’ as the word is used
today, encompasses a long list of ‘dynasties,’ a heterogeneous assemblage
of monarchies occupying different parts of the East Asian mainland at
different times, or even simultaneously in multistate systems, over the
past three millennia. In the case of the twentieth-century Republic of
China and the People’s Republic of China, this historiographical conceit
goes beyond the typical tendentious nationalistic history writing by
modern nation-states. In China, the practice of writing prior (often
inimical) states into the history of the current one goes back two thou-
sand years; the compilation of successive dynastic ‘official histories’
created a legitimating lineage known as the daotong 道統, ‘the continuity
of the Way.’ By the logic of the daotong, all prior states can be considered
direct, ‘Chinese’ ancestors of the PRC today. (The idea of the Holy
Roman Empire provides a rough analogy, if a unified Hapsburgian,
Napoleonic, Hitlerian or EU Europe had triumphed and claimed
unbroken historical continuity with Rome and Western Christendom.)
Even when multiple such Chinese states competed simultaneously
(Liao, Jin, Song), like the kingdoms of Europe, or when the ‘dynasties’
were ruled by conquerors from the north who did not speak Chinese or
follow Chinese customs of their day (Manchus, Mongols and other Inner
Asian peoples), they are still all embraced by the daotong and modern
Chinese nationalists as stepping stones along the Way of pan-historical
‘China.’ Rather than ‘manifest destiny,’ this trick might be called
‘manifest heritage.’
1
For an extreme example of such CCP historiographical claims, see Shan 2018.
Qing and Twentieth-Century Chinese Diversity Regimes 73
Having established this rough parallel of diversity and historiography,

shared by today’s two quasi-imperial powers, henceforth in this chapter
I will leave aside the US and all the historiographical Chinas before the
Qing Empire (1636–1912). It is the Qing that provides the immediate
backdrop to the formation of the twentieth-century Chinese republics;
it was the Qing that acquired an empire double the size of the preceding
Ming state by incorporating de novo Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, as well
as the Qing dynasts’ Manchurian homeland. Moreover, the Qing diversity
regime left a legacy, albeit often unacknowledged, which shaped the PRC
diversity regime as it functioned through the early twenty-first century.
Scholars in the twentieth century subscribed to a model of the Trad-
itional Chinese World Order (TCWO, a term coined by John King
Fairbank) that bought into the ‘manifest heritage’ ideology of the daotong
and modern Chinese nationalism. This model inaccurately, but influen-
tially, assumed an unchanging, continuous China-centred international
order and uniform Chinese diversity regime that functioned from
antiquity through the nineteenth century – a ‘Confucian peace.’ In
section two of this chapter I outline and critique this ahistorical TCWO
model. In section three I describe a contrary characterization of the Qing
international and domestic diversity regimes, which might be called
imperial pluralism. This new understanding, which arose from historio-
graphical revisions from the late 1980s, best describes the empirical
reality of the Qing Empire’s domestic diversity regime.
Section four examines ways in which the diversity regimes of post-
Qing Chinese republics, in particular the PRC minzu 民族 system imple-
mented from the 1950s, echoed aspects of Qing discourse and practice
regarding ethno-national diversity, territorial status issues and foreign
trade. I am characterizing the PRC minzu system as centralized pluralism.
Section five discusses the recent Chinese theoretical critiques of the
minzu system, based in part upon a Fairbank-style misunderstanding of
the past, which have resulted in a shift in the direction of Han assimila-
tionism as the newest PRC diversity regime, one characterized by major-
itarian (Han) nationalism and policies forcefully targeting cultural
difference among non-Han indigenous peoples, especially as Uyghurs
and Tibetans. Section six considers what lessons the Qing and Chinese
cases offer to the study of diversity regimes in the international order.
I express alarm at the situation as of time of writing (2018) and offer
cautious support for a return to the centralized pluralist diversity regime
that might better interpellate ethno-national diversity in the PRC and
perhaps even enhance PRC soft power abroad.
Briefly put, in this chapter I argue that current evocations of
the Chinese past popular among Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
ideologues and some Western international relations (IR) scholars, used

to justify or explain both domestic Han assimilationism and the inter-
national ‘Confucian peace’/tributary system diversity regimes, are based
on the TCWO construct and thus get their historical facts wrong. Never-
theless, there are other historical and cultural resources from China’s
own past (imperial and centralized pluralism) that, if properly under-
stood, could inform a diversity regime both more humane and more
practical than the narrow, chauvinistic and ultimately European-style
nationalism towards which the PRC pivoted in the 2010s.
The Problematic Traditional Chinese World Order Model

In introducing and editing The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s
Foreign Relations,2 John King Fairbank worked with a set of concepts that
had been identified and circulated by European Sinologists since at least
the eighteenth century and articulated in Fairbank’s prior writings and
those of others of the first generation of modern historians of China.
Fairbank integrated and codified these concepts into a grand narrative of
an unchanging traditional Chinese worldview and, some argued, of a real
historical East Asian world order that had endured from ancient times
until the nineteenth century. Here I roughly summarize the TCWO.
The world, also known as tianxia 天下 (all under Heaven), was Sino-
centric. Chinese civilization was superior to non-Chinese (barbarian)
culture, its centrality validated by Confucian belief that the workings of
the cosmos were correlated to the proper maintenance of ritualized
relations in society from the individual family level up to the emperor
himself. As ‘Son of Heaven’ (tianzi 天子), the emperor sat at the fulcrum
of earthly human and cosmological affairs. Both civilization and sover-
eignty radiated outward from the Sinic centre in an unbounded gradient,
dissipating gradually across the territorial and cultural periphery.
(A schematic of concentric rings inspired by the Tribute of Yu [Yugong
禹貢]3 provided the cover illustration of Fairbank’s book and the con-
ceptual map of how ‘traditional China’ purportedly viewed the world.)
The gravitational force in this Sinocentric system was ‘Sinicization,’ or
‘Sinification’ (known in Chinese as ‘coming to China’ or ‘coming to
civilization’; lai hua 來華). Through this process, peoples from the outer
peripheral rings spontaneously adopted Chinese culture and thus
became Chinese. ‘China’ expanded, therefore, across the East Asian
2
Fairbank 1968, 1–19.
3
Yugong is a famous chapter of the ‘Book of Xia’ 夏書 section of the Book of Documents 書經,
dating from the first millennium BCE.
mainland not through military conquest or expropriating migration, but

through Sinicization. Likewise, because foreign conquerors of China
(such as the Mongols or Manchus) Sinicized soon after arrival, the
empires they built were thus Chinese as well, and despite its many
diverse dynastic polities, China was always China.
While thus incorporating peripheral peoples, according to the TCWO
model, China interpellated neighbouring polities by what Fairbank called
the tributary system. Chinese emperors imagined themselves sovereigns
over the whole world (tianxia) and required foreign emissaries to
acknowledge this fact. Outlying states had to express fealty to the
Chinese emperor through a court visit, a kowtow and presentation of
symbolic local goods (gong 貢 or tribute). In return, they were allowed to
trade with China. When they came to China starting in the sixteenth
century, European countries, especially Britain, objected to these con-
ceits. British demands for free trade outside the tributary system culmin-
ated in the Opium War. After losing this war, China belatedly recognized
the reality of the modern post-Westphalian states system and began to
slough off its traditional Sinocentric illusions.
Fairbank knew that what he described was more a conception of the
world in elite Chinese eyes, rather than empirical reality: a worldview, not
a world order (despite his book’s title). He pointed out that the value of
‘gifts in return’ granted by the emperor to ‘tributaries’ often exceeded the
value of the ‘tribute,’ and thus amounted to a price paid by the Chinese
court to maintain a lofty self-image. In fact, the term ‘tribute,’ with its
resonances of Achaemenid or Roman extraction of wealth from con-
quered territories, is an erroneous translation of gong, which is closer to
‘diplomatic gifts to a superior.’ Fairbank perpetuated this mistranslation,
but made clear that presenters of gong to Chinese courts endured the
ritualized brown-nosing because they went away the richer for it. Gong
presentation did not entail the material imposition of hierarchical status;
it did not make the presenter a real vassal or a colony. For that, Chinese
states, like polities elsewhere, used military power.
Several chapters by other scholars in The Chinese World Order volume
discussed countries and frontiers where things worked quite differently
than in the Fairbankian scheme.4 Other books challenged the accuracy of
the TCWO for certain periods.5 Nevertheless, the TCWO model
achieved paradigmatic status, permeating textbooks and popular histor-
ies as well as specialized works. In its reiterations, the TCWO model lost
4
See chapters in Fairbank 1968 by David Farquhar, Chusei Suzuki, Mark Mancall and
Joseph Fletcher.
5
Rossabi 1983.
the distinction between world view as Chinese elite conceit, and world
order as a description of historical reality. Sinocentric China, tianxia, the
tributary system, Sinicization and the eternal nature of China as a con-
tinuous civilization-state became received wisdom; the claim that a
benevolent China presided for centuries over a uniquely peaceful East
Asian world order was ritually repeated without much thought and little
evidence. The TCWO handily fits the needs of Chinese nationalist
apologetics, and many of these same elements can found in modern
Chinese-language histories and political tracts.6
The TCWO model does identify some important ideas: tianxia or ‘all
under Heaven’ is a notion with deep philosophical roots in Chinese texts.
Modern scholars have worked with it, emphasizing those benevolent
strains of Confucianism that employ a cultural rather than a racial test
for inclusion within the ‘civilized’ sphere. From this perspective these
scholars have discussed the transition from empire to nation in China7 or
argued for the global relevance of Confucianism today.8 The term tian-
xia’s ambiguous scope (connoting both ‘China’ and the wider ‘all under
Heaven’) suggests a seamless subcelestial space, a notion with potential
for addressing the disjunctures between subnational, national and supra-
national groups and polities. It is thus implicit in theories of China’s
‘peaceful rise’ to regional and/or global prominence: a Sinocentric tian-
xia, it is argued, is not only a description of premodern East Asian
international relations, benevolently interpellated by the tributary
system, but also a potential map for a Sinocentric regional or global
future. Such a theory suffuses the rhetoric underlying Xi Jinping’s neo-
Silk Roadist ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI; Yidai yilu 一帶一路).
Even in the late 2010s, some see tianxia ‘revival’ as a Chinese goal and
even as a real possibility.9
Decades after Fairbank, and even after the Qing historical field has
repudiated TCWO (see next section) some IR scholars and popular
writers on international relations have revived the Fairbankian package,
or elements of it, assuming the tributary system, tianxia configuration
and Confucian peace to have been real features of Chinese history before
the early nineteenth century.10 Ironically, they have often done so with
6
Suisheng Zhao 2015 and Peter Perdue 2015 have recapped and critiqued the TCWO/
tribute system model in detail. Zhao shows how both Chinese president Hu Jintao’s
‘harmonious society’ and President Xi Jinping’s selective quotes from the Chinese
classics draw on and emphasize the narrative of a benevolent Chinese world order.
7 8
Wang Hui 2014. Du Weiming 2010; Bell 2003.
9
French 2017 does not quite claim the TCWO was factual, but argues that China’s
leaders’ belief in a historical ‘tributary system’-type tianxia drives CCP ambitions today.
10
For example, Zhou 2011.
the admirable intention of making the IR discipline less Eurocentric by

offering a traditional East Asian alternative to models derived from
Western experience. The tributary or tianxia system apparently offers a
state system where the rise of one hegemonic player did not stimulate
counter-alliances by smaller players, as in the Peloponnesian Wars arche-
type. Instead, the TCWO supposedly managed hierarchical relations and
commerce in traditional East Asia in a non-conflictual way over the long
term. Today in the late 2010s, moreover, some commentators and
prognosticators about China’s future role in the world are fond of the
TCWO as a possible alternative to the liberal world order.11
Of course, a model does not have to be historically grounded to have
force or even shape policy in the present. The Confucianistic ‘Asian
values’ discourse, as in ‘the Singapore model,’ has gained some traction
since the late twentieth century. ‘Asian values’ overlap in important
respects with the TCWO, notably in its supposedly culturally determined
preference for authoritarian government and hierarchically arranged
social relations. Space here does not allow a detailed consideration of
whether an updated TCWO – ahistorical as it is – might really work as a
diversity regime replacing the neoliberal world order. However, I will
hazard one thought about this before moving on: the key factor under-
pinning peace within the TCWO tributary system, the theory purports,
was a unique Confucianist cultural grounding shared by China and
countries in the Chinese periphery – otherwise there can be no explan-
ation for why East Asia did not follow IR patterns observed elsewhere.
Insofar as it is culturally Sinocentric and unique, however, Western and
Islamic states and peoples at the very least would be excluded from this
cultural foundation, with Indic-influenced societies in Southeast and
South Asia only marginally amenable. As a diversity regime, however,
the neotributary TCWO model could in theory only function given high-
level cultural homogeneity among its subscribers. As such, then, TCWO
is simply an inverted version of Martin Wight’s understanding of the
Western-dominated international order: an international order founded
on parochial principles that cannot survive global cultural heterogeneity.
Even on its own theoretical terms, then, accepting its own (demon-
strably false) historical assumptions, the TCWO model, because it is
based on supposed cultural uniqueness, by definition offers little hope
11
Zhang and Buzan 2012. Other recent popular or scholarly IR work focusing on or
presenting TCWO as fact include Hsiung 2010; Jacques 2009; Kang 2007; Kang
2010; Zhao Tingyang 2005 and 2009. Zhao Suisheng 2015 provides further examples
of tribute or tianxia concepts in recent Chinese-language publications on IR or political
theory.
for managing regional or global cultural diversity in the contemporary or

future world – unless that world were to Sinicize first. If you take
spontaneous Sinicization out of the TCWO, it looks a lot like power
politics as usual.12
The New Qing History and Qing Imperial Pluralism

From the 1980s, two waves of revision, driven in large part by access to
the Qing archives, shifted understanding of the Qing Empire off its
Fairbankian foundations.13 The second wave, known as New Qing His-
tory (NQH),14 directly challenged Sinicization, the tributary system and
other aspects of the TCWO by examining issues of empire and ethnic
identity largely ignored by prior scholarship. As it is now understood, the
world view, world order and international relations practices of the Qing
Empire differed markedly from the TCWO image.
First of all, the Qing did not prioritize ‘Confucian’ countries and
peoples over others. Whereas in the TCWO model Korea, Liuqiu (Ryukiu,
Okinawa), Annam (Vietnam) and in theory Japan were thought to occupy
inner zones, while Inner Asians (Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs) were more
distant ‘barbarians,’ in practice the Qing court and Manchu elites were
closest to Mongols (who manned Qing armies and among whom
the Manchu royal family densely intermarried) and Tibetan lamas (whose
Buddhist teachings the Qing court sought); even Uyghur elites were
enrolled in the system of aristocratic rankings shared by Manchu and
Mongol princes – Han Chinese were not. Laos, Burma and Nepal irregu-
larly sent missions that, for protocol purposes, were handled by what
Fairbank considered the ‘tributary system,’ but these peoples were cultur-
ally far from the Qing court.
While formal aspects of what Fairbank identified as ‘the tributary
system’ applied to some Qing interactions with some foreigners, these
were neither systematic, universal, timeless nor prerequisites for trade.
The Qing clearly understood the value of untrammelled foreign trade on
some frontiers under the right circumstances, even if they preferred to
confine it to trade enclaves (predecessors to Deng Xiaoping’s Special
Economic Zones, SEZs). The court and statecraft thinkers understood
12
Scholars interested in understanding the historical interpolity relations of Asia really
should not turn to Fairbank’s 1968 The Chinese World Order but rather to Brook et al.
2018.
13
Cohen 1984; Rawski 1996; Millward and Dunnell 2004; Waley-Cohen 2004.
14
A basic list of titles often considered NQH would include Crossley 1990, 1992, 1999;
Hevia 1995; Rawski 1998; Millward 1998; Forêt 2000; Rhoads 2000; Elliott 2001;
Millward et al. 2004; Perdue 2005.
full well that the political world was comprised of discrete sovereign
states, not a fuzzy tianxia gradient. They negotiated political borders in
treaties, drew them on maps, marked them with cairns and defended
them with forts. The Qing court might express the tianxia conceit and
assert its own cultural superiority for ideological or strategic purposes,
but the archives – as opposed to public promulgations – show that the
Qing court was, at bottom, pragmatic and realist in frontier management
and foreign affairs. Qing took tianxia seriously, but not literally.
Nor was there any such thing as Sinicization, if that term is meant to
describe a spontaneous process whereby non-Chinese magically become
Chinese. Among other problems, the Sinicization theory treats culture(s)
as primordial, essentialized and static, an approach now eschewed by
anthropologists (though still present, to a degree, in the ‘multicultural-
ism’ discourse). Acculturation and assimilation certainly happened in
Chinese history, as everywhere else, but in ways that were often partial,
two-way, syncretic, conscious, reversible and generally more complex
than the Sinicization myth allows. One telling example must suffice to
suggest the pervasive problems with the whole idea: even as Manchus in
Chinese cities were beginning to lose native Manchu language ability, the
Qing government faced a huge fiscal problem because Han Chinese
intermarried and adopted Manchu customs, names and dress in order
to benefit from state subsidies to Manchu banner families.15 Manchur-
ization was as serious a problem to the Qing as was ‘Sinicization.’
The Qing ruling elite functioned in multiple languages and cultural
registers simultaneously, legitimizing their rule in different ways for the
Manchus as well as the Chinese, Mongol, Turkic-Muslim and Tibetan
domains the Manchus had conquered. This fact emerges clearly from
Qing sources in Manchu and other languages besides Chinese, which
before NQH few scholars had read. The culturally plural Qing identity is
evident in many other ways as well, including the royal embrace of
Tibetan Buddhism and the ostentatious public multilingualism displayed
in Qing Beijing’s polyglot signage and publication projects parading
parallel Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Zunghar Mongolian, Turkic
and Tibetan text.
A central tenet of the NQH, then, is that Qing should not be equated
with ‘China’ without qualification. China (i.e. the former Ming territor-
ies) and the Chinese (mainly the Sinophone Han people) were part of the
Qing Empire, as were the other domains. The Qing realm did portray a
certain brand of centrism, but it was not Sinocentric. Rather, in its many
15
Elliott 2001.
ideological manifestos, especially under the eighteenth-century Qianlong

emperor, the Qing trumpeted its creation of a ‘Great Unity’ or ‘One
Family’ focused on the Qing royal house: the guojia 国家 (which meant
not ‘nation,’ as the term now means, but ‘state family,’ i.e. the Aisin
Gioro clan whose sons occupied the throne). The term guoyu 国语 or
‘national language’ did not indicate ‘Chinese’ in Qing times, but the
Manchu language.
Thus, through studies of imperial expansion, imperial ideology and the
ethnicity of Manchus and other Qing peoples, and, generally, through
paying greater attention to the ways in which the Manchu identity as
Manchus and their pluralist ideology mattered in the Qing, a new picture
of the precedents to ‘modern China’ has emerged. The last China-based
dynastic monarchy, which ruled mainland East Asia for nearly three
centuries, was not Sinocentric in its make-up; although more educated
Qing elites were indeed Confucians (among other things), they were not
Confucian chauvinists. With ideological skill matched only by their
military prowess, the Manchus bridged the Great Wall divide and
brought the peoples and lands of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet
and the former Ming into a unified polity. All was not sweetness and light
in what was, after all, an imperial system under militarist tribal con-
querors, but Tibet and Mongolia declared independence only following
the fall of the Qing in 1912 – not before then. Though there were troubles
along Xinjiang’s southwestern border under the Qing, there was no
Uyghur jihad against Qing rule, which indeed successfully relied upon
Uyghur nobles and officials managing Xinjiang on the local level. Over-
all, for non-Han peoples, it is fair to say the Qing imperial government
worked well, as early modern empires go – and arguably also by the
standards of today’s PRC, which values ‘stability’ above all else (more on
that later in this chapter).
One broad conclusion of the NQH revision, then, was that the Qing
was a largely successful empire, overseeing a doubling of territory and
population and vast expansion of the economy over nearly two centuries.
This success, moreover, can be largely attributed to the Qing diversity
regime of imperial pluralism: its inclusive, culturally pluralist ideology,
with localized administration by native elites who were enrolled symbol-
ically in the ruling house. These included Mongol princes and military
families; Uyghur nobles and beg officials; Tibetan lamas of the Gelugpa
church; as well as the Han Confucian scholar-official elite. Administra-
tive and legal systems differed accordingly in different domains of the
empire, which was held together at the top level by a network of high
Manchu, Mongol, a few Uyghur and some Manchurized Han officials
in a military bureaucracy. Imperial systems may be conventionally
understood to ‘organise political authority hierarchically,’16 but in the

Qing case (as with the Mongol Empire and other Eurasian states with a
steppe nomadic background), the Qing imperium below the level of
the military conquest elite displayed aspects of a pluralist system, with
multiple parallel centres of authority and overlapping jurisdictions and
constituencies. The Qing centre dominated politically and militarily,
but the form of its power and its ideological and administrative face
varied among different peoples of the realm. (At a generic level, these
characteristics of the Qing have prompted comparisons with the Otto-
man Empire and other states with Central Eurasian and/or Mongol
imperial roots.17 Ayşe Zarakol’s chapter shows that the idea of a static,
unitary Eurasian model cannot sustain close, chronologically specific
examination. Nonetheless, the broad similarities between Qing and
Ottoman cultural laissez-faire are noteworthy.)
In the late nineteenth century, following massive rebellions in Han
areas and European military interventions, more power devolved to
Chinese officials and generals. Chinese-style administration began to
displace the patchwork of diverse administrative systems on the frontiers
and in the lands of non-Han peoples. Only then were Manchuria,
parts of Mongolia, Xinjiang, eastern Tibet and Taiwan incorporated as
‘provinces’ (sheng 省) and put under Chinese-style administration
governed by mandarins, in the hope that this would protect them from
foreign conquest or secession as Qing central power declined. The
administrative reform did not work especially well materially: from the
late nineteenth century Beijing lost control of each of these territories
for some length of time in one way or another. Ideologically, however,
it could be argued that the marker the late Qing had laid down through
provincializing and encouraging Han settlement in its frontier acquisi-
tions allowed later Chinese rulers – despite the dramatic transition from
culturally pluralist Qing Empire to Han-centred Chinese republic – to
claim sovereignty in a manner sufficient to convince world powers.
No other states dispute the CCP reconquest of Xinjiang and Tibet or
its claims on Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The Qing purposefully celebrated what we would today call the ‘diver-
sity’ of its empire. It did so not in pursuit of anything like today’s
‘multiculturalist’ agenda, but as a treasured validation of the imperial
project: the Qing centre could attract and hold a variety of peoples in a
‘Great Unity’ based on principles that, while Confucian-tinged, were
very different from the schematic Tribute of Yu gradient around a Sinic
16 17
Reus-Smit 2013a, 169. Crossley 1999; Perdue 2005.
core. The Qing arranged the socio-cultural realms of Manchu, Mongol,

Chinese, Tibetan and Muslim (Uyghur) not in hierarchy, but as parallel,
distinctly administrated sectors each linked to a universalist central
ruling house. Diversity, then, was a fundamental, ideologically central
and administratively patent feature of the Qing. It is ironic and perhaps
surprising that under the PRC, a state with the same peoples occupying
mostly the same territory, diversity is no longer treated as a feature, but
as a bug.
Centralized Pluralism in the PRC: The Minzu System

Nearly two decades after its first publication, when the NQH research
began to reach Chinese scholars in translation, it caused a stir. While
some Chinese historians accepted NQH conclusions (mainly younger
scholars and those who read more of it in English), others decried
the work of this academic faction (xuepai 学派) as an American imperial-
ist plot.18 Related debates also appeared in the popular (though still
state-controlled) press, centring on whether Sinicization was a real
phenomenon, whether highlighting non-Han ethnicity in history was
undermining the unity of the motherland, and, of course, on the NQH’s
direct discussion of Qing military conquests in Inner Asia, which PRC
official historiography sanitizes as ‘unification.’
The ethno-national tensions among Uyghurs and Tibetans and the
status issues of Hong Kong and Taiwan render such discussion highly
sensitive in the PRC. More than that, however, awareness of the NQH
corresponded with a general reconsideration of the ‘minority nationality’
(shaoshu minzu 少数民族) policies in place in China since the 1950s. In
party journals, highly placed academics and ideologues had begun in the
early 2000s to discuss a ‘second-generation nationality policy’ (see the
next section); these discussions became urgent after riots in Tibet (2008)
and Xinjiang (2009). Some of these policy revisions have, as of time of
writing in 2018, come into practice even without formal revision of the
legal code or constitution. But the original minzu system of the PRC,
which I label centralized pluralism, comprised a carefully considered,
systematic diversity regime that, while designed for an authoritarian
political environment, addressed issues similar to those faced by liberal
democracies and did so relatively successfully.
Though the PRC’s minzu system is often treated as a simple imitation
of the nationality system of the Soviet Union (USSR), it has unique
18
Li Zhiting 2015.
historical roots. The republics founded by the Guomindang (GMD;

Nationalist Party), the Communist Party and even the Japanese (in the
parts of China they occupied) were all forced to deal with the imperial
legacy of ethno-cultural diversity, even while working to establish
Chinese (or Manchurian) nation-states. The first republics that followed
the collapse of the Qing employed the slogan ‘unity of five races’ (wuzu-
gonghe 五族共和) and represented Han, Manchu, Mongol, Muslim and
Tibetan as five colours and/or bars on the Chinese Republic’s various
flags. This five-people classification directly followed Qing precedent,
simply shifting Han to the top of the prior Qing list (while ignoring other
ethnically diverse groups within China proper, particularly many non-
Chinese peoples in the south). The Manchurian puppet state likewise
spoke of five peoples, simply substituting ‘Japanese’ for ‘Muslims’ – few
of whom lived in China’s northeast.
These formulations recognize the diversity of post-Qing mainland East
Asia: Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek took up ethnic questions in the
canonical ideological treatises by which they attempted to shape Chinese
nationhood. Like the first anti-Manchu revolutionaries, they were anx-
ious about diversity, and contortedly attempted to explain away, incorp-
orate, redefine or assimilate those non-Chinese peoples within the nation
now called the ‘Republic of China.’19 Chiang Kai-shek used the term
minzu not to recognize diversity, but to erase it; for him there was only
one minzu that mattered in China: the Zhonghua minzu, a culturalist term
meaning ‘Chinese people’ that he meant to incorporate not only the Han
but all other groups as well. Chiang argued that the five ‘races’ found in
China of his day were descendants of a primordial Chinese race, the sons
of the Yellow Emperor.20
Soon after coming to power, the CCP embraced a more pluralist
approach. Some have credited this to the years spent by the communist
armies in frontier areas where they were in frequent contact with and
sometimes indebted to non-Han peoples. Ideologically, their Marxist-
Leninist roots enjoined the CCP to treat ‘nationality’ as a socio-political
category that was significant (even if fated to disappear in the future).
They could not simply ignore it or define it away as the leaders of the
GMD had attempted to do. Thus, the PRC borrowed the form and some
of the rhetoric of its minority nationality policy from the Soviet Union’s
nationality system.21 It is little noted, but when the CCP People’s Liber-
ation Army occupied Xinjiang in 1949, that region’s diverse population
had already been categorized and administered according to Soviet-style
19 20 21
Millward 1992. Mullaney 2010, 2. Martin 2001; Hirsch 2005.
ethno-national categories since the late 1930s. Xinjiang thus may have
served the PRC as an early example of what the ultimate categorization of
China’s peoples would look like.22
In the 1950s, the PRC mobilized scholars to conduct a nationwide
ethnic classification project. They were nominally guided by ethnography
and comparative linguistics, and took this work seriously; besides
the Soviet model and the example from Xinjiang, the ethnographers
consulted earlier studies by French and English scholars of groups in
southwest China. Ultimately, however, the state’s desire for legibility
overrode ethnographical nuance. Through this minzu distinction pro-
cess, which would be criticized today as essentializing cultural difference,
the PRC reduced the vast ethnic complexity of the former Qing Empire
to a taxonomy of fifty-six groups (the Han and fifty-five minority nation-
alities). Around these, it built a vast and penetrating administrative
network.
Thomas Mullaney has written that ‘the idea of China as a “unified,
multinational country” (tongyi di duo minzu guojia) is a central, load-
bearing concept’ in the PRC.23 That load-bearing centrality of the PRC
diversity regime to political, social and cultural life surely deserves more
attention than most students of PRC governance have paid it.24
This neglect is perhaps because foreign scholars consider minzu policies
to be about minorities, and most tend to want to study the vast Han
majority. (More than 90 per cent of the PRC population is categorized
as Han, whereas Russians amounted to only half of the population of
the Soviet Union.) But no one spending time in China could miss the
prominence of minzu matters in the Chinese political environment:
minzu were on the currency, featured in the Olympic ceremonies and
the Chinese New Year television pageant; the set of fifty-six was endlessly
reiterated in dolls, postcards, and picture books, each minzu afforded
its distinct costume, music, food, courtship rituals and so on. The
concept of the state-identified and delimited set of minzu is so normal-
ized in China that foreigners are asked ‘how many minzu are there in your
country?’
22
See Millward 2007, 207–209 on the Xinjiang ethnicity program under the warlord and
sometime Soviet puppet Sheng Shicai.
23
Mullaney 2010, 1.
24
There is, to my knowledge, no overall survey of the Chinese minzu system or policy-
making process equivalent to Martin 2001 and Hirsch 2005 for the Soviet Union. Works
addressing the issue include Huang Guangxie 1995 and Mullaney 2010, as well as
Dreyer 1976, Heberer 1989, Gladney 1996, Ma Rong 2017 and Elliott 2015. See
Mullaney 2010, 150, n. 8 for other relevant bibliography.
More substantially, the state channelled resources according to minzu

categories and bolstered minzu identities through cultural programmes,
minzu language education, publication projects, city signage, representa-
tive quotas in the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Conference, preferential policies for university
admission and childbirth and many other measures. Minzu status is
inscribed on personal identification cards, and can officially influence
employment, housing, marriage, ability to travel and other aspects of life.
The very map of the PRC itself proclaims the role of minzu consider-
ations: the northern and western frontier, and a large chunk of the
southwest, are comprised of province-sized ‘autonomous regions’ named
for a titular minzu (Mongol, Uyghur, Hui, Tibetan and Zhuang). Many
prefectures and counties, too, are labelled ‘autonomous’ under the
names of various non-Han groups.
The PRC minzu system deserves to be studied side by side with the
Soviet version as a communist model of a top-down diversity regime,
a model that attempted to escape the ideological bind faced by Marxist
regimes inheriting colonial empires. This model, broadly understood,
influenced the lives of a substantial portion of the world’s population in
the twentieth century.
Despite its structural similarity to the Soviet system, however, the
PRC’s centralized pluralist diversity regime differs in significant ways.
These are apparent in the ambiguous and labile character of its keyword:
minzu 民族 is a nineteenth-century Japanese neologism, built from char-
acters meaning ‘people’ and ‘clan,’ first used to translate German Volk.
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese writing it was
among a cluster of terms introduced, somewhat interchangeably, to
develop Chinese understandings of such concepts as nation, people,
national people, race and so on. In the Turkic languages of Xinjiang,
minzu is translated by millät, a notion famous from the nineteenth-
century Ottoman millet system (see Ayşe Zarakol’s chapter). From the
1950s, in PRC English publications, minzu began to be rendered as
‘nationality,’ glossing the Russian term national’nost’. Since 1991, how-
ever, minzu has increasingly been translated into English on PRC official
websites and in state media as ‘ethnicity.’ This semantic shift demon-
strates that while these centralized pluralist systems bear superficial
resemblance to each other, the PRC minzu system is no cookie-cutter
copy of Soviet practice.
Moreover, in important but often unrecognized ways, the PRC minzu
system actually continued Qing practices within the form of the Soviet
nationalities model. Republics of the USSR in theory enjoyed the right
to secede from the union. Not so for Autonomous Regions in China.
Even in Tibetan and Xinjiang Uyghur ‘Autonomous Regions,’ the PRC

minzu system never afforded as much autonomy to native peoples and
elites as did Soviet Republics. One main reason for the differences in the
Chinese version is how the CCP functions in autonomous regions:
while the leading government official in an autonomous unit will belong
to the titular minzu of that unit, the first Party Secretary, who wields
the real power, is almost universally Han. The Communist Party in
China, then, has served as an ethnic Han commissariat and extra-
governmental arm of the central state – much as the predominantly
Manchu military bureaucracy did across the Qing Empire. No viable
native apparatus of titular minzu has developed in China’s so-called
autonomous units. The rhetoric around minzu deployed by the PRC
has, since the 1990s, drawn heavily upon Qing-era symbolic resources
(rather than, say, Marxist-Leninist theory). For example, the slogan
‘unity of the nationalities’ (minzu tuanjie 民族团结), ubiquitous in the
1980s and 1990s, was often associated with the image – and even family
life – of the eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor.25
The PRC updated and enacted Qing policies; centralized pluralism
continues imperial pluralism in significant ways. The Seventeen-Point
Agreement by which the young fourteenth Dalai Lama first agreed to
Tibet’s inclusion in the PRC (though signed under duress and rendered
moot by the 1959 invasion) broadly resembles the deal by which Tibet
had joined the Qing: Tibet’s theocratic political system, under the
Dalai Lama, was to stay in place, while Beijing took responsibility for
military matters and foreign affairs. Beijing in 1995 re-enacted a
Qianlong-era requirement that incarnations of high Tibetan lamas be
chosen by drawing lots from a ‘Golden Urn.’26 With regard to outward-
facing diversity management, the ‘one country, two systems’ framework
adopted for Hong Kong and Macau, and proposed for Taiwan, follows
Qing and earlier Chinese imperial precedents of carving out special
legal, administrative and commercial areas with differentially allocated
sovereignty. Likewise, SEZs in Shenzhen, then many coastal areas, and
since 2010 in Kashgar in western Xinjiang, are not only reminiscent of
the Qing trade enclaves in Xinjiang and the Chinese treaty ports, but
have been established in many of the same places.27
25 26
Millward 1992. Oidtmann 2018.
27
Recent research suggests a surprising degree of Qing input in crafting the treaty port
arrangements that we previously thought of as ‘unequal treaties’ imposed upon the
dynasty by imperialist powers. Fletcher 1978, 375–385; Millward 2007, 113–114;
Cassel 2012.
With regard to ethnicity, territoriality and sovereignty, then, the PRC in

its first decades institutionalized a diversity regime characterized by
the same pragmatic flexibility that the Qing displayed with its imperial
pluralism. Pluralist approaches to language, culture, local administration,
tax policy or law have been common in the PRC, a surprising fact given its
authoritarian nature. Admittedly, the PRC track record in honouring
these arrangements over the long term has been poor. The ‘leftward’
lurch of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was accom-
panied by Han-centric attacks on minorities: bombing of monasteries,
penning pigs in mosques and general denigration of non-Han culture as
‘backward’ and ‘feudal’ by both the party centre and marauding Red
Guards. Beijing’s tightening of controls over Hong Kong’s political and
legal systems in the 2010s, including the abduction of publishers and
other acts violating both the spirit and the letter of the 1990 Basic Law,
are recent examples of CCP deviation from earlier pluralist promises.
Not surprisingly, this overreach contributed to rising anti-CCP sentiment
in Hong Kong and the unprecedented protests of the 2014 Umbrella
Movement and massive protests in 2019. Moreover, dissent and resist-
ance among Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs over the past thirty years
represent not opposition to the structure of the PRC constitution’s
accommodations of diversity, which tend to be popular among ‘minority’
ethnic groups, but reaction to PRC violations of centralized pluralist
ideals and the minzu system framework. Failures to live up to the letter
and spirit of minzu system laws and constitutional provisions have been
common. However, in the 2010s, it is the fundamental principles of the
PRC’s centralized pluralism that have been called into question.28
Efforts to Revise or Replace the PRC Minzu System

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, theorists of ethnicity and
ethnic policy in China began to question the tenets of the PRC minzu
system, suggesting that the Soviet Union fragmented along ethno-
national lines due to the USSR’s nationality system itself (regardless
of whether this is an accurate assessment of what happened to the Soviet
Union).29 Interethnic violence, especially communal clashes between
Han and Hui Muslims (2004) and bloody riots in Lhasa (2008) and
28
Elliott 2015.
29
Ma Rong 2004, 2017; Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe 2011; summarized in Elliott 2015.
See also Leibold 2012. For simplicity’s sake I collapse Ma Rong’s and the two Hu’s
arguments in my summary here, but Mark Elliott points out important differences
between their positions.
Urumchi (2009), leant apparent urgency to a reconsideration of the PRC

diversity regime. Some Chinese scholars and political theorists, notably
Hu Lianhe and Hu Angang, offered bold proposals for a ‘second-gener-
ation minzu policy’ that would ‘depoliticize’ and ‘deterritorialize’ the
minzu system.30 The scholar Ma Rong justified reforming the minzu
system with comparisons to the American approach to ethnicity, which
he depicted as a ‘melting pot’ where American identity trumps particu-
larist ethnicity.31 Again, this is dubious as a description of US reality, but
the point is clear: assimilation to a unitary national identity, rather than
maintenance of fifty-six distinct ‘nationalities’ or ‘ethnicities,’ should be
the goal of ethnic policies. In pursuit of this goal, some proposed remov-
ing minzu status from ID cards and eliminating territorial set-asides for
specific minzu. Like Chiang Kai-shek a century ago, the theorists now
argue that everyone – the Han and the other fifty-five minzu alike – is
ultimately derived from the root of Zhonghua minzu 中华民族, an omni-
bus ‘Chinese’ category.32 This inverts the famous formulation of anthro-
pologist Fei Xiaotong, operative since the 1980s, that the Chinese
people were one body composed from multiple elements (duoyuan yiti
多元一体), and that Zhonghua was a higher-level identity that crystallized
from the fifty-six minzu, and with which PRC peoples identified concur-
rently to their identity as one of the fifty-six.33
Why is the PRC minzu system facing revision now, in the first and
second decades of the twenty-first century? Of course, the reconsider-
ation began in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991,
when many Chinese observers concluded that the diverse nationalisms
ostensibly encouraged by the Soviet system caused its ultimate collapse.
But the radical Han assimilationist shift in the PRC diversity regime has
intensified in the 2010s, two decades after the Soviet collapse.
Broadly, it is worth noting a parallel to a phenomenon noted in the late
Ottoman Empire. As Ayşe Zarakol puts it in her chapter, ‘political
centralisation (especially when coupled with external competition) seems
not to be good news for cultural diversity.’34 The acceleration of Han
assimilationist policies in Xinjiang as well as pressure on Hong Kong and
Taiwan do correspond directly with President Xi Jinping’s dramatic
centralization of power since 2015, as well intensified CCP perception
of US competition.
30 31
Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe 2011. Ma Rong 2004, 2017; Elliott 2015.
32
State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China 2018. Note in the
preamble, ‘Various ethnic cultures of Xinjiang have their roots in the fertile soil of
Chinese civilization … .’
33 34
Fei Xiaotong 1989. Zarakol, this volume.
It is likewise tempting to associate the gradual PRC shift from central-

ized pluralism to Han assimilationism with the 2010s global wave of
majoritarian nationalisms, with which it certainly shares some features.
Yet skin-colour racism and xenophobia (while certainly present in
China) do not play the same role as they do in fuelling North American,
European and Australian white supremacy movements. China does not
attract the flows of immigrants or refugees that have triggered public
backlash elsewhere. The one common, nearly global factor that links
China’s majoritarian nativism to that in Europe, North America and
India is Islamophobia. Besides the Uyghurs, the PRC state has in the
2010s increasingly targeted the religious practice of its other Muslim
peoples, criticized mosques that are too big or too ‘Arabic,’ and let online
Islamophobia fester (while closely censoring other political speech and
banning Winnie the Pooh).35
While China’s Han assimilationist turn to some degree parallels his-
torical and global phenomena, domestic factors provide stronger reasons
for PRC policy makers’ retreat from centralized pluralism: having aban-
doned communism as an ideology, the CCP increasingly stakes its
legitimacy on a highly territorial brand of nationalism (hence constant
reiteration of the ‘century of humiliation’ mantra and hysteria over
rocks in the sea). The party’s first concern is the persistent non-
quiescence of Tibet and Xinjiang. In Xinjiang and Tibet, both Qing
conquests that the PRC reoccupied militarily, the PRC faces an unad-
dressed and long-denied post-colonial – or still colonial – situation that
revisionist history has not erased and rising standards of living have not
soothed. Official rhetoric blames ‘outside’ influence from religious
groups and Western governments, but party documents and academic
discourse shows that the party now increasingly views religion itself as
responsible for separatism.
Second, neither has culturally Cantonese (and British) Hong Kong
welcomed Mandarinization, CCP propaganda in the guise of ‘patriotic
education’ and encroaching political control from Beijing. Hong Kong is
not usually equated with the Xinjiang and Tibet issues, but could well be,
for a similar retreat from centralized pluralism is under way with regard
to the former British colony. Ignoring significant cultural and historical
differences from the north Chinese ethno-national norm, official PRC
sources and even private conversations portray Hong Kong resistance as
ingratitude to the motherland, without recognizing the heavy-handed
35
Because of meme images that suggest Chinese President Xi Jinping resembles the
Disney cartoon Winnie the Pooh (Obama is Tigger), the PRC has banned the bear of
very little brain; Hernández 2017.
cultural chauvinism, as well as political authoritarianism, inherent in the

CCP party-state. As in Xinjiang or Tibet, PRC crackdowns on cultural
‘others’ in the south have, unsurprisingly, failed to increase the gratitude
of non-Han or even non-Mandarin-speaking peoples of Guangdong and
Hong Kong.
Third, the fact that northern Han-centric nationalism has now, with
state encouragement, replaced communism as a central PRC ideology
is another reason for the incipient unwinding of the minzu system.
Particularly on social media, in lieu of immigrants to demonize, many
nationalistic Han ‘netizens’ have singled out internal ‘others,’ in particu-
lar the Uyghurs and Tibetans, as objects of fear and indignation. Affirma-
tive action for minorities in college admission is widely resented, as were
rules that permitted minorities to have more children than Han under
some circumstances. Violent incidents of one sort or another involving
Tibetans and Uyghurs are reported one-sidedly in PRC state media and
rampant Han chauvinism is tolerated on social media, fuelling demon-
ization by the Han majority of other minzu.
Is China’s global ‘rise’ responsible for the erosion of cultural pluralism
at home? The PRC’s enhanced economic and political clout may allow it
to shrug off with relative impunity international complaints over domes-
tic Chinese human rights abuses. PRC propagandists use the Belt and
Road Initiative as an excuse for the intensive securitization of Xinjiang
and the internment of the Uyghurs, and have even succeeded in rallying
BRI partners to the CCP policy of interning Turkic indigenes in concen-
tration camps in Xinjiang. Ironically, as it seeks to clothe its diplomatic,
economic and strategic initiatives in soft power garb, the CCP proclaims
its benign intent in explicitly multiculturalist terms. Xi Jinping’s key
speeches and a flurry of propaganda around the Belt and Road –
including bedtime stories about ‘sharing,’ dancing children of all races
and a rip-off of the 1970s ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing (in perfect
harmony)’ Coca-Cola advert36 – are awash in saccharine inclusiveness.
The CCP has not forgotten the rhetoric of diversity, even while aban-
doning its substance at home.
Prospects for the PRC Minzu System and

Lessons for the International Order
I lack space here to detail the new policies and regulations that have
increasingly restricted the cultural expression of Uyghurs, Tibetans and
36
‘Music Video: The Belt and Road Is How’ 2017; ‘What’s the Belt and Road Initiative?’
2017; ‘I’d like to build the world a road’ 2018.
other minzu and religious groups in China through the 2010s. However,
as I write in the summer of 2018, a prominent watershed has been
reached, and crossed, by the PRC. Starting in 2017, international media
reports began to reveal the mass extra-legal detention of Uyghurs and
ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang camps, where they are subjected to a pro-
gramme of ‘educational transformation’ (jiaoyu zhuanhua 教育转化)
aimed ostensibly at ‘de-extremification,’ but in fact attempting to
re-educate them away from Islamic belief, replacing it with love for the
party and Xi Jinping.37 Foreign commentators have noted this mass
internment of people on the basis of religion and ethnicity in concen-
tration camps, and drawn parallels to incidents of ethnic cleansing
elsewhere.
This ‘de-extremification’ (qu jiduan hua 去极端化) and ‘educational
transformation’ programme clearly arises out of the 2010 ‘second-gener-
ation minzu policy’ discussions and the party’s embrace of the myth of
Sinicization. And while they mark a dramatic uptake in severity, the
Xinjiang internment and brainwashing nonetheless lie along the same
policy trajectory as a series of state campaigns in recent years against
mundane aspects of Uyghur culture and common Islamic practice,
taking in dress, food, worship, funereal and other customs. At least with
regard to the Uyghurs, the CCP party-state has abandoned centralized
pluralism in favour of a brutal Han assimilationism.
At the same time, the minzu system remains deeply embedded in the
PRC bureaucracy; its terms remain in Chinese laws and the constitution;
ethnic identity remains on the new PRC national ID cards, even as they
are updated with biodata and linked to the state surveillance infrastruc-
ture. Ethnic students study in a network of ‘minority nationalities uni-
versities,’ whose faculty and administrators pushed back against
the ‘second-generation’ advocates with robust defences of the original
minzu system for as long as it was politically feasible to do so.38 A large
constituency of ‘minority’ minzu and some Han continues to support the
minzu system, a diversity regime whose concepts are now normalized
within Chinese society. It has not been fully extirpated, even as the
cultural autonomy of non-Han people is violated in a manner unseen
since the 1959 invasion of Tibet and the Cultural Revolution of the
1960s and 1970s.
There is great irony in the PRC’s Han assimilationist turn of the
2010s. Although those believing in the Sinocentric Fairbankian scheme
37
Niewenhuis 2018 pulls together the principal reporting on the Xinjiang re-education
camps up until August 2018.
38
Leibold 2012.
have failed to recognize this, the Qing and early PRC models of imperial
or centralized pluralism in fact offer instructive lessons about diversity
regimes in authoritarian contexts. Consciously or unconsciously drawing
on imperial precedents, the PRC has at times demonstrated great cre-
ativity in pragmatically reallocating and enclaving political and economic
sovereignty (autonomous regions, ‘one country, two systems,’ SEZs).
These offer the globalizing world interesting options both for managing
domestic diversity and facilitating supranational cooperation (could the
Belt and Road actually become a new, multipolar, culturally laissez-faire
subcelestial order as PRC propaganda promises?). It remains to be seen
whether violent rebellion, international reputational costs, a domestic
challenge to Xi Jinping’s increasingly authoritarian rule, or some com-
bination of these, will lead the PRC back to something like its earlier
minzu system, which was more rooted in Chinese political tradition
than is the acerbically Han-centric and assimilationist path the CCP
has lately chosen.
5 Cultural Diversity and Coercive Cultural
Homogenization in Chinese History
Victoria Tin-bor Hui
For most international relations (IR) scholars, China appears as a glaring

exception to this volume’s argument on cultural diversity. The conven-
tional wisdom is that while ‘Europe is many,’ ‘China is one.’1 Henry
Kissinger emphasizes ‘the singularity of China’2 and its ‘cultural cohe-
sion’ grounded in Confucianism.3 As such, there should be little cultural
diversity to speak of and little need for diversity management in Chinese
history. In relations between this supposedly singular and Confucian
China and its neighbours, international order is said to exist only among
states with shared Confucianism, while disorder is assumed to prevail
between states with divergent cultures.4
China’s supposedly timeless cultural and political unity has long been
contrasted with Europe’s (again, allegedly innate) irrepressible pluralism.
The presumption of Chinese homogeneity and political unity runs deep,
and would initially speak against China’s inclusion in a volume dedicated
to cultural diversity and international order. On closer examination,
however, neither the presumption of Chinese cultural homogeneity nor
the assertion of China’s ‘timeless’ political unity withstands critical
scrutiny.
Consistent with this volume’s argument, Chinese historian Ge Zhao-
guang maintains that ‘Chinese cultural tradition is plural, not singular.’5
Another historian, Hugh Clark, highlights cross-fertilization and hybrid-
ization: although the Han Chinese developed a conceptual distinction
between the inner and the outer or the civilized and the barbarous, the
dividing line was ‘far less absolute than the Sinocentric … Chinese
historiography would suggest.’6 There was much intermixing in northern
China in the Sixteen Kingdoms (304–439) and the Northern and
Southern dynasties (420–589), the Sui (581–618) and the early Tang
(618–907) dynasties, followed by Mongolization in the Yuan dynasty
(1279–1368), de-Mongolization in the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
1 2 3
Clark 2018, 296. Kissinger 2012, 5. Ibid., 19, 60.
4 5 6
Kang 2010; Kelly 2012; Lee 2017. Ge 2018, 95. Clark 2018, 302.
93
94 Victoria Tin-bor Hui
and further Manchurization and Sinicization in the Qing dynasty

(1644–1911).7
Likewise, Chinese culture was plural because ‘China’ itself was not
politically always ‘one.’8 The received wisdom takes for granted China’s
‘great unity under Heaven’ (tianxia dayitong). But what does ‘unity’
mean? The late Tan Qixiang, the chief editor of the authoritative Histor-
ical Atlas of China, believed that ‘historical China’ should not be
delimited by either the People’s Republic or earlier dynasties; rather, it
should be defined by the maximum territorial reach achieved under the
last dynasty, the Qing.9 However, the Qing more than doubled China’s
size. Ge Jianxiong, Tan’s student, points out that an expansive concep-
tion of ‘historical China’ based on the Qing’s territorial reach would yield
only eighty-one years of unity from 1759 to 1840.10 This effectively
renders China disunited by definitional fiat for most of history. Ge’s
solution is to turn to a more limited definition: the maximum territorial
reach of the first unified Qin dynasty as achieved circa 214 BCE. This
territorial space – roughly bounded by the Yellow River in the northwest,
the Yin Mountain and the lower Liao River in the northeast, the Sichuan
Basin in the west, the eastern part of the Yungui Plateau in the southwest,
the Guangdong and Guangxi regions in the south, and the coastline in
the east – is also regarded as ‘within the pass[es]’ (guannei 關內) or ‘the
interior’ (neidi 內地) in court records.11 The areas conquered or
absorbed by the Qing in Manchuria, Mongolia, Central Asia and Tibet
lie in ‘the periphery’ or ‘beyond the pass[es]’ (guanwai 關外).
I follow this minimal definition of ‘historical China’ as the baseline –
notwithstanding that regimes from ‘beyond the pass’ periodically
marched into territories ‘within the pass,’ and regimes from ‘the interior’
regularly marched out to ‘the periphery.’ If we count the number of years
when the central court could ‘(successfully) claim the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force within [a] given territory,’12 we generate
991 years of unity up to 2000. This means that ‘China’ more often took
the plural form than the singular form, even when we adopt the minimal
definition (the interior), and much more so if we use the maximum
definition (the interior plus the periphery). This duality of China is in
fact reflected in the Chinese term for China, zhongguo (中國). The
Chinese language does not distinguish between the singular and the
plural forms. Zhongguo is typically translated as the ‘middle kingdom’
in the singular form, but it originally denoted ‘central states’ in the plural
7 8
Ibid., 300–304; Ge 2018, 120; Millward, this volume. Ge 2018, 120.
9 10
Tan 2000, 2–4. Ge 1994, 79. Ge Jianxiong is unrelated to Ge Zhaoguang.
11 12
Ibid., 106, 179. Weber 1991, 78.
Cultural Diversity and Coercive Cultural Homogenization 95
form in the classical era (before 221 BCE) and continued to alternate
between multistate systems and unified empires in the so-called imperial
era (221 BCE–1911 CE).
Despite the fluidity of zhongguo, Ge Zhaoguang maintains that a
‘relatively stable’ Han ‘cultural identity’ with ‘a shared history, a unified
set of ideas about ethics, and highly organized state institutions and
political systems’ was already crystallized in “the central territories”
during the first two unified dynasties.13 There is thus some truth to
China’s ‘cultural cohesion,’ at least for the Han Chinese and in ‘the
interior.’ But this relative cohesion should be seen as an artefact of
political unity – a political unity that was in turn cemented by a diversity
regime that actively promoted coercive cultural homogenization. China’s
apparent cultural homogeneity was neither spontaneous nor organic.
Rather, it was the institutionally mediated outcome of a diversity regime
that equated cultural diversity with political division, and that sought to
forcibly forge Sinic cultural unity in order to stabilize and legitimize a
supposedly universal empire.
In China, political unity produced and reproduced cultural homogen-
eity, while political division allowed room for cultural diversity. Unifiers
who succeeded by crushing power rivals readily moved on to level their
subjects. A flattened cultural landscape, in turn, facilitated political
unification. Political unity per se does not necessarily erode cultural
diversity. The European Union and the United States of America, for
example, officially promote multiculturalism. What matters is how polit-
ical unity is achieved, and how cultural diversity is organized to legitimate
and perpetuate that unity. Kissinger faithfully regurgitates the standard
narrative that ‘[e]ach period of disunity was viewed as an aberration,’14
so that ‘[a]fter each collapse, the Chinese state reconstituted itself as if by
some immutable law of nature.’15 Yet, as historian Peter Lorge observes,
‘[h]owever compelling the idea of a unified empire was in the abstract,’
competing Chinese kingdoms ‘did not reflexively or “naturally” con-
dense into a large, territorially contiguous … state following a period of
disunity.’16 Ge Jianxiong most clearly points out that ‘unity – this sacred
term – has been repeatedly associated with war.’17 In the classical era
before the first ever successful political unification, Mencius and other
philosophers believed that unity should be achieved by ‘the True
13
Ge 2018, 20, 27. The ‘central territories’ were more fluid than ‘the interior.’ The former
originally referred to northern China, the northern half of the latter. It gradually
expanded to overlap with ‘the interior.’ See more on territorial expansion later in this
chapter.
14 15 16 17
Kissinger 2012, 6–7. Ibid., 6–7. Lorge 2005, 27, 9. Ge 1994, 184.
Monarch’ or ‘the one who has no proclivity to kill.’18 In reality, the state
of Qin achieved unification by comprehensive self-strengthening reforms
that facilitated total mobilization for war, relentless divide-and-conquer
strategies that broke up balancing alliances, ruthless stratagems of bribery
and deception that enhanced the chances of victory, and brutal measures
of seizing territory and killing enemy soldiers en masse that demoralized
and decapitated losing states.19 In subsequent periods of plural China,
political unification continued to be accomplished by military conquest.
Mao Zedong was more cognizant of Chinese history when he said that
‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’20
Political unification and cultural unification generally went together in
the area we now know as China because the same guns served double
duty. Reus-Smit points out that the organization of cultural diversity
represents ‘a particular kind of governance challenge.’21 Peter Katzen-
stein similarly suggests that cultural homogeneity reflects ‘political and
intellectual innovations created for particular purposes, rather than
inherent cultural traits of unchanging collective identities and
practices.’22 I contend that the major innovation to meet the ‘governance
challenge’ of forging cultural and political unity out of Chinese diversity
was state capacity. In the China case, successive dynasties’ precocious
capacities for direct rule and military-fiscal extraction were crucial in
translating rulers’ ambitions for political and cultural unification into
reality.
Reus-Smit holds that the management of cultural diversity is shaped
and conditioned by two forces: ‘shifts in the underlying distribution of
material capabilities and new cultural claims … animated by grievances
against the hierarchies and exclusions of prevailing and past regimes.’23
While he puts stronger emphasis on the latter, Ge Zhaoguang calls for
attention to ‘the role of the state, the dynasty, and the emperor in the
periodization of history and the molding of culture.’24 According to
Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, ordinary people with grievances are
‘normally compliant, rising in resistance only when dramatic windows of
opportunity open up.’25 The ‘political opportunity structure,’ in turn, is
critically shaped by state capacity, defined as ‘the extent to which gov-
ernmental action affects the character and distribution of population,
activity, and resources within the government’s territory,’ and most of
all, by the ability to extract resources and monopolize coercive means.26
High-capacity regimes with competent bureaucrats and disciplined
18 19 20
Pines 2012, 18, 51. Hui 2005, ch. 2. Mao 1938.
21 22 23
Reus-Smit 2018a, 221. Katzenstein 2012, 213. Reus-Smit 2018a, 215.
24 25 26
Ge 2018, 112. Tilly and Tarrow 2015, 233. Ibid., 57, 172.
security forces can swiftly stifle collective action from below. In studies of
state capacity, China is the pioneer, while Europe is the laggard.27 China
developed the capacity for direct rule as early as the fourth century BCE,
two millennia ahead of Europe’s comparable development that began
only in the Napoleonic era.28 Thus, although classical thinkers such as
Mencius and Xunzi provided theoretical justification for the ‘right to
rebel’ and even tyrannicide,29 most rebellions were readily crushed. The
rare rebellions that succeeded simply changed the dynastic title and
reinstalled the centralized bureaucracy with marginal adjustments.
China’s state capacity was high enough even to harmonize different
religions and prevent religious wars common in other world regions.30
Tilly and Tarrow point out that ‘deadly ethnic and religious conflict
concentrates in low-capacity … regimes’ while ‘high-capacity states
simply manage … by repression and the threat of repression.’31 The
Song, the Ming and the Qing dynasties championed the ‘unification of
the three teachings’ (sanjiao heyi 三教合一), in which ‘Confucianism is
used for worldly affairs, Buddhism is used for the heart and mind, and
Taoism is used to cultivate the body.’32 This ‘unification’ – or harmon-
ization – meant that ‘no single religion could claim an absolute or
complete interpretation of the truth or establish a monopoly on thought,
knowledge, or the world of faith.’33 Ge Zhaoguang emphasizes that the
appearance of complementarity was not the result of mutual tolerance
among religions, but of tight official control. The imperial court not only
appointed top religious leaders (the Buddhist Controller and Taoist
Controller), but also issued permits for individuals to join monasteries.34
This high degree of state control does not mean that there were no
religiously motivated conflicts in Chinese history. When political move-
ments in the name of religion arose (for example, the White Lotus
Rebellion and the Taiping Rebellion in the Qing), they were against the
imperial court rather than against each other.
The rest of this chapter focuses on diversity management in eras of
Han Chinese–led political unity. Under ethnically Han dynasties,
China’s diversity regime was Janus-faced: while the ruled were homogen-
ized, those beyond the reach of power projection had to be explained
away by a civilizational hierarchy. If the ‘Son of Heaven’ was supposed to
rule ‘all under Heaven,’ those not subject to his rule must be beyond the
27
As Tuong Vu remarks, ‘If China is still sometimes treated as an “anomalous case,” more
sophisticated studies have turned the tables and made European states look like
historical laggards.’ Vu 2010, 151.
28 29 30
Hui 2005, 176–177. Ibid., 177. Ge 2018, 140.
31 32 33
Tilly and Tarrow 2015, 57, 176. Ge 2018, 142. Ibid., 141.
34
Ibid., 141.
pale of civilization unless they came to pay tribute to and acknowledge

his superiority.
If China’s culture seems homogeneous today, it is because successive
Sinitic dynasties consistently favoured a diversity regime that emphasized
coercive cultural homogenization as a necessary prerequisite for estab-
lishing and maintaining political unity. Reus-Smit argues that the first
imperative that drives order builders to organize diversity is control.35
Control was a paramount concern for unifiers who wanted to keep the
empire to the ruling family for perpetuity. As Millward points out, the
term guojia (國家) meant ‘state family.’36 Political unity effectively turned
‘all under Heaven’ into the Son of Heaven’s private property. For
Chinese rulers who wanted to hold on to the vast empire, diversity was
reminiscent of rebellions and wars, while coercive cultural homogeniza-
tion could produce compliant subjects. Exemplifying the Wightian pre-
sumption that diversity would mean disorder and chaos,37 Chinese
unifiers championed the view that ‘stability is in unity.’38 This is not
unlike Ayşe Zarakol’s analysis, in which diversity was seen by the rare
centralizing rulers as a threat to be eliminated in the Ottoman order. The
difference was the level of state capacity, which was far stronger far earlier
in China’s history than elsewhere, and enabled successive dynasties to
more consistently legitimize their power through a diversity regime
centred around coercive cultural homogenization.39
Certainly, China’s history of organizing cultural diversity cannot be
exclusively reduced to the homogenizing practices of ethnically Han
dynasties. Reus-Smit suggests that a major imperative for organizing
cultural diversity is ‘self-location,’ defined as ‘the placing of one’s
identity, as an order-builder, within the cultural terrain one seeks to
organize.’40 When emperors of non-Han origins ruled the Sinitic ‘central
territories’ lying ‘within the pass,’ they had to justify themselves vis-à-vis
the Han-majority subjects and other ethnicities, as Millward’s chapter on
the Qing dynasty’s organization of diversity clearly demonstrates.
In contrast, this chapter focuses exclusively on the diversity regime of
coercive cultural homogenization that the ancient Qin and Han dynasties
pioneered. Orfeo Fioretos suggests that it is imperative to examine ‘the
legacies of founding moments in shaping long-term power relations’
because ‘later events are conditioned by earlier ones, not simply the
constellation of interests and constraints at the moment.’41 In China,
the classical era and the Qin-Han dynasties laid down the foundation for
35 36
Reus-Smit 2018a, 13, 209. Millward, this volume.
37 38 39
Reus-Smit 2018a, 13, 37. Pines 2012, 1. Zarakol, this volume.
40 41
Reus-Smit 2018a, 13. Fioretos 2011, 269, 371.
diversity management both in subsequent Sinic dynasties, but also more

recently in Xi Jinping’s China – hence their integral importance to this
inquiry.
This chapter proceeds in five sections. Section one provides a snapshot
of the immense cultural diversity that prevailed in the area we now know
as China, from prehistoric times through to the Warring States period.
Section two outlines the diversity regime of coercive homogenization that
emerged under the Qin and Han dynasties as an integral part of their
project of political centralization and unification. Section three explores
this diversity regime’s persistence and success in legitimating the power
of subsequent Sinic dynasties – a success that has proved pivotal in
perpetuating a myth of China’s supposedly ‘timeless’ cultural unity to
this day. Section four then explores the limits of the Chinese diversity
regime of coercive homogenization. Section five concludes by briefly
adverting to the contemporary implications for international order
flowing from the preceding analysis.
Cultural Diversity Before Homogenization

Let us start with China at its birth. The beginning of China, as Ge
Zhaoguang puts it, ‘demonstrates the plurality of Chinese culture.’42
The narrative of Chinese cultural unity often begins with ‘the time that
Pangu created the earth and sky’ and ‘the times of the Three Kings and
Five Emperors of antiquity.’43 However, the existence of Xia
(2070–1600 BCE), a mythical era, is still the subject of heated debate.
The Shang (1600–1046 BCE), an era known for oracle bones, was
established by ‘foreigners’ with ‘relatively strong connections to what
later became known as Tungusic culture.’44 Among the ruins of the
Shang’s capital, Anyang, there were ‘scapulimancy, plastromancy, seri-
culture, tattooing, black pottery, and jade cong’ from the east, ‘bronze
making, hollow-head adzes, and spears’ from Central Asia and West
Asia, and ‘rice, elephants, buffalo, and tin’ from South Asia.45
The Zhou era (1045–256 BCE), which included the Western Zhou
(1045–771 BCE) and the Spring and Autumn and Warring States
periods (770–221 BCE), is particularly crucial for understanding China’s
original diversity. Like the Shang, the Zhou started as a takeover of the
‘central territories’ by non-Sinitic peoples from ‘beyond the pass.’46 The
Zhou king established a feudal hierarchy to defend distant strategic
points from the conquered Shang people and their former allies.
42 43 44 45
Ge 2018, 120. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 100.
46
Clark 2018, 300–302.
The king directly ruled vast areas that he could effectively control and
then enfeoffed his sons, relatives and loyal supporters to establish gar-
risoned city-states beyond his realm. Over the course of multiple centur-
ies, the Zhou king lost military dominance over various fiefs. By the
Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, zhongguo became a fully
fledged international system of sovereign-territorial states.47 The ‘central
states’ demonstrated both political and cultural diversity. Even Zhou
states that originally shared a common lineage gradually developed
regional variations in dialects, bronze forms, orthography and architec-
ture as a result of geographical variations. Non-Zhou states were of
different races with different languages and customs. For instance,
people in the state of Yue ‘were said to cut their hair and tattoo their
bodies,’ and those in the state of Chu ‘were said to believe in witches and
ghosts and partake in strange rites.’48 The state of Qin, which would
eventually unify the Warring States system, was regarded as ‘semi-bar-
barian’ and felt it necessary to introduce a policy of full Sinicization on its
drive towards universal domination. Extensive intermarriages added
further layers and shades of ethnicities and customs. On the whole, Zhou
culture involved ‘two overlapping traditions: the tradition of rites and
music and the shamanic tradition,’ as reflected by the lament of the
time that ‘the rites had fallen into disorder and music had been ruined.’49
Yet, it was this diversity and division that made the classical age the
‘central era’50 of Chinese philosophy, military strategy and administrative
technology, nurturing the Hundred Schools of Thought, including Con-
fucianism, Legalism, Daoism, military strategies and more.
Born in this classical era, Chinese civilization was loaded with ‘para-
doxes and tensions.’51 It is erroneous to take Confucianism as the
47 48
Hui 2005, 3–4. Ge 2018, 100.
49
Ibid., 100. It may be argued that Europe is characterized by cultural heterogeneity, while
China is characterized by cultural homogeneity. As I pointed out elsewhere, there is no
doubt that various states in the Warring States era shared many common cultural
characteristics: members of major ruling classes shared some blood ties as a result of
common lineage to the Zhou and/or diplomatic marriages; they spoke the language of
Zhou states in international meetings; and they aspired to a common standard
of civilization that distinguished them from ‘barbarians.’ But the same cultural affinity
was also evident among early modern European states: core areas of the European
Christendom shared not only the common heritage of the Roman Empire and
Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire, but also a common religious belief; many European
sovereigns were members of the same extended families through diplomatic marriages;
and members of the nobility spoke French and Latin and aspired to the cultural
standards set by Paris. Like different states in early modern Europe, different states in
ancient China exhibited cultural differences as well as cultural similarities. See Hui 2005,
163–164.
50 51
Ge 2018, 101. Pines 2012, 4–5.
intellectual heritage or culture of all of China. Confucianism had to

contest with a multitude of conflicting traditions, especially the Legalist
and military schools that explicitly advocated domination over other
states without, and domestic society within.52 Confucianism is also far
less internally consistent than the suffix ‘-ism’ suggests. Similar to other
world philosophical bodies, Confucian classics were written over gener-
ations and counsel opposite pieces of wisdom. While some Confucian
principles do champion pacifism, others provide justifications for war
against those lacking in virtues. Shi Yinhong even underscores a ‘non-
Confucian tradition that is “more Napoleonic than Napoleon and more
Clausewitzian than Clausewitz” – that is, the tradition of total conquest
by massive expeditions and extermination as practised by not just the
Qin’s First Emperor (r. 246–210 BCE), but also the Han’s Martial (Wu)
Emperor (r. 141–87 BCE), the Tang’s Emperor Taizong (r. 626–649),
and the Ming’s Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–1424).’53
A Diversity Regime of Coercive Cultural

Homogenization Emerges Under the Qin
and Han Dynasties
The classical era bequeathed to the first unified Qin dynasty ‘a mixed
space that intermingled a wide variety of races, ideas, cultures, and
regions.’54 As the Qin quickly collapsed after only fifteen years in 206
BCE, the second unified dynasty, the Han (202 BCE–220 CE), inherited
similar diversity. Yet, by the time the Han disintegrated into the Three
Kingdoms period (220–265), China had become ‘a relatively stable
cultural community, one that forms the basis of the “nation” of “China,”
especially in the central territories of Han-ethnicity China.’55 How did
the cultural plurality of the classical era become consolidated into a
singular Han culture? The answer is an extreme homogenization regime
that included mass killings and migrations, standardization of weights
and measures, erasure of intellectual diversity and monopolization of
history writing. One may be tempted to think that the Qin dynasty was
overthrown because it was too brutal in its efforts to erase diversity. Yet,
the Han dynasty adopted similar measures and lasted for four centuries.
The two first unified dynasties together mastered a set of homogenization
policies on a scale that would rival twentieth-century totalitarianism.
Political unity provided the driver for cultural homogenization because
a dynastic founder who came to power by brutality naturally tried to keep
52 53 54 55
Hui 2018. Shi 2011, 6. Ge 2018, 101. Ibid., 27.
his throne by brutality.56 The Qin could vanquish competing states no

less because it would slaughter defeated armies en masse to prevent
losing states from recovering. In 268 BCE, a strategist, Fan Sui, articu-
lated the policy of ‘attacking not only territory but also people.’57 He
argued that the Qin should aim at the destruction of armies on such a
scale that rival states would lose the capacity to fight. The most talented
commander, Bo Qi, alone killed 240,000 Han–Wei allied troops in
293 BCE, several hundreds of thousands of Chu soldiers and civilians
in 279 BCE, 150,000 Zhao–Wei allied troops in 273 BCE and 400,000
Zhao forces in 260 BCE. On the whole, the state of Qin is recorded as
having slaughtered more than 1.5 million soldiers of other states between
356 and 236 BCE. While these numbers are likely to be exaggerated and
should be treated as reflecting the magnitude of battle deaths rather
than absolute figures, they nevertheless reflect the Qin’s ruthlessness in
its pursuit of political unity.58 As the Qin swept through the Warring
States system in the final wars of unification between 236 and 221 BCE,
it continued to kill the royal families and troops of conquered states.
After unification, the victors demolished the losers’ defence structures.
The empire also extended direct rule with collective responsibility and
mutual surveillance from its original home base to the entire empire.59
Most of all, for the purpose of diversity management, the Qin court
moved 120,000 merchant households of vanquished states to its capital
and sent the Qin’s convicts to establish settlements in frontier regions.
Such massive population transfers that aimed at maximizing control and
surveillance also had the side effect of assimilating minorities.60
When the Han dynasty was established, the founder, Liu Bang, prom-
ised to abolish the Qin’s harsh policies. Early Han emperors followed the
Daoist doctrine of minimal governance, thus allowing societal actors and
their plurality to thrive. When Martial (Wu) Emperor came to the throne,
however, he uprooted such pockets of diversity and autonomy by com-
pulsorily moving rich households, local elites and ranking officials – the
non-court actors most likely to develop grievances against the coercive
diversity regime – from the provinces to the capital area in 127 BCE.
To ensure that those with more resources would be bound to the imper-
ial court rather than pursuing profits independent of it, the Han followed
the Qin’s policy of ‘suppressing commerce.’61 The Han undercut
56
As Kevin Rudd characterizes the current Chinese regime: ‘We should never forget that
the Chinese Communist Party is a revolutionary party which makes no bones about the
fact that it obtained power through the barrel of a gun, and will sustain power through
the barrel of a gun if necessary.’ Rudd 2018.
57 58 59 60
Hui 2005, 86. Ibid., 86–87. Ibid., 217–218. Ibid., 166.
61
Ibid., 212.
merchants by heavy taxation, state management of trade and salt and

iron monopolies.62
The second homogenization measure was standardization. Under the
Qin dynasty, ‘all weights and measures were standardized, the gauge of
wheeled vehicles was made uniform, and the writing system was stand-
ardized.’63 This policy was extended to the calendar, the penal code,
coinage and through roads. The standardization of writing, in particular,
not only provided a common means of communication, but also shaped
‘the ways of thinking derived from Chinese characters.’64 This policy
meant that populations in the ‘central territories’ would be bound
together by shared daily experiences with the same rules written in the
same characters.
The third measure was to stifle the freedom of expression that the
classical era of diversity had nurtured. The Qin court burned all books
except the Qin’s court records and those on medicine and agriculture,
and persecuted 460 scholars who expressed doubts about the First
Emperor’s policies. The Han dynasty likewise suppressed the Hundred
Schools.65 The Han dynasty is often praised for promoting Confucian-
ism as the state doctrine. Yet, this policy also erased the intellectual
diversity of classical times and imposed intellectual uniformity. To
ensure that elites would not venture into forbidden intellectual pursuits,
the Han also introduced an examination system that required decades
of intensive training in Confucian canon. To tightly bind educated elites
to the ruling house, the best of them were rewarded a lucrative career in
officialdom. Over time, Confucian teachings would provide a common
set of values shaping ‘the structure of family, clan, and state.’66 The
examination system thus strengthened China’s capacity for direct rule
in the immediate sense, by producing a unified cadre of literate scholar
administrators. But it also strengthened Chinese capacities for political
centralization indirectly, working as a powerful acculturative mechanism
that forged a culturally homogenous service elite dedicated to governing
a unified China.
To top off the policy of homogenization, the Qin and the Han dynas-
ties also started the tradition of narrating ‘one history.’ While Ge Zhao-
guang is a rare Chinese historian who underscores China’s historical
plurality, even he takes for granted the official linear history. He main-
tains that although China since ancient times ‘has been through periods
of dissolution or separation,’ it has always been ‘narrated by one
“history”’ that ’proceeds from the time that the formation of a strong,
62 63 64 65
Hsu 1965, 363. Ge 2018, 101. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 101.
66
Ibid., 97.
central political power was made possible by the unification achieved by

the Qin and Han dynasties,’ down to modern times.67 Crucially, this top-
down singular history emerged by design rather than by default. On the
eve of the wars of unification, the Qin state commissioned the Lushi
chunqiu to champion the idea that unity would ‘benefit All-under-
Heaven.’68 After achieving political unity, the burning of defeated states’
records was an effort to bury alternative histories. The Han dynasty
appointed Grand Historian Sima Qian to write the Historical Records
(Shiji), the first effort to trace China’s origins to mythical times. China
would experience centuries of division and hybridization between the
Han and the Tang dynasties. Nevertheless, the Tang’s Emperor Taizong,
who was of mixed descent and who usurped his elder brother’s throne,
claimed Han lineage and ordered the writing of singular official histories
for previous eras. His efforts established the tradition of ‘the continuity of
the Way’ (daotong), which further strengthened the sense of cultural
continuity.69 Subsequent dynasties, whether established by Hans or
‘barbarians’ or ‘semi-barbarians,’ would all claim that ‘they were
“China”.’70 Millward aptly characterizes this logic, by which ‘all prior
states can be considered direct, “Chinese” ancestors of the PRC
[People’s Republic of China] today, as ‘manifest heritage.’’71
The Persistence of Coercive Cultural

Homogenization and the Legitimation of
Power under Subsequent Dynasties
The fact that founding and early unified emperors were not content with
ruling only pre-existing ‘central territories’ but continued to conquer ‘all
under Heaven’ is important for our understanding of the subsequent
persistence of the diversity regime of coercive homogenization in Chinese
history. The purpose of homogenization was not just to exert tight
control and prevent rebellions internally, but also to enhance Chinese
society’s legibility and thus its susceptibility to heightened military-fiscal
extraction. Simply put, the ability to culturally homogenize populations
strengthened the early dynasties’ capacities to mobilize and extract
wealth, thereby further extending the range of territories and peoples
subject to coercive cultural homogenization. Coercive cultural homogen-
ization, military-fiscal extraction and territorial conquest thus fed off
each other in a recursive loop, consolidating and entrenching a Sinitic
67 68 69 70
Ibid., 25–26. Pines 2012, 44. Ge 2018, 19. Ibid., 19.
71
Millward, this volume.
assimilationist diversity regime as a common touchstone of subsequent

dynasties.
The Qin dynasty drafted more than 800,000 men to campaign both
northward and southward. The Han heavily taxed trade and imposed salt
and iron monopolies to help pay for its multifront wars. Although
emperors always adopted the Confucian rhetoric of caring for the people –
no less so because the failure to do so justified the ‘right to rebel’72 –
ambitious unified emperors in fact continued, if not increased, extractions
to support expansionist campaigns. This is because regular land taxes
could barely cover ordinary expenses in peacetime, so the extraordinary
demands of military campaigns required extraordinary extractions.73 The
Han’s Martial (Wu) Emperor and subsequent ambitious emperors under-
stood that excessive extractions would incite peasant rebellions. They
typically planned for war only after they had accumulated sizable budget
surpluses. But if victory did not come quickly as expected – and it rarely
did – surpluses would be turned into deficits. Even victory involved
additional administrative and military expenses to consolidate conquests,
so that every piece of territorial gain was a drain on the central treasury.
When a budget crisis hit, the court would be tempted to impose unsus-
tainable taxes, conscription and corvée.
The rapacity of the Qin and Han dynasties was moreover not driven
purely by the perceived imperative of universal conquest, but also by the
exorbitant consumption demands of the imperial court itself. The Han
faulted the Qin for enslaving the people, but they followed similar prac-
tices. Political unity meant that the Son of Heaven personally owned
‘all under Heaven’; there was no effective mechanism to prevent the
emperor from enslaving his subjects and exploiting their labour. Ge
Jianxiong observes that annual revenues were mostly spent on court
consumption rather than public projects.74 Qin’s First Emperor was
not alone in drafting 1.4 million convicts to provide forced labour to
build palaces and tombs. The Han’s Martial (Wu) Emperor also used
one-third of annual revenues to construct his tomb, and most of the rest
on building palaces, gardens and ancestral temples.75
Given the oppressive exactions of the early dynasties and their appetite
for universal conquest, how was it possible for them to legitimize and
stabilize their rule? Reus-Smit argues that ‘material might has to be
converted into political authority’ because the ‘efficacy and stability’
of any political order depends on ‘the cultivation and maintenance of
legitimacy.’76 He adds that, ‘[w]hen rule is legitimate – when political
72 73 74
Pines 2012, 134. Wong 1997, 90, 94. Ge 1994, 201.
75 76
Ibid., 196–197. Reus-Smit 2018a, 189, 208.
authority replaces sheer domination – not only do the costs of rule

decline, as the need for coercion and bribery diminishes, but political
orders reap the benefits of voluntary compliance and support.’77
China’s emperors did not fail to understand the importance of legit-
imacy. Not unlike today’s Chinese leaders, who have successfully
imposed ‘Tiananmen amnesia,’78 Qin and Han emperors also compre-
hended the value of ‘propaganda efforts.’79 In particular, having them-
selves interpellated a common and unitary ‘Chinese’ identity over several
wars of conquest, successive dynasties legitimized their rule as essential
to defending Chinese unity, which they now retrospectively rewrote as
something organic, perpetual and divinely ordained.
As already mentioned, the Qin appointed scholars to write the Lushi
chunqiu to justify its wars of unification. The treatise promoted the idea
that ‘there is no turmoil greater than the absence of the Son of Heaven;
without the Son of Heaven, the strong overcome the weak, the many lord
it over the few, they incessantly use arms to harm each other.’80 If one
presumed that disunity necessarily meant chaos and war while unity was
the synonym for peace and stability, then it followed that the very success
of winning ‘all under Heaven’ represented a virtue. The writing of ‘one
history’ further granted legitimate succession to any victorious unifier,
irrespective of how he came to power. The unifier, by claiming to be the
Son of Heaven, became both the possessor and arbiter of heavenly
standards. As such, everything he did by definition accorded with
benevolence, righteousness, fairness and kindness. If the Son of Heaven
resorted to force, it was only to ‘recover’ territory or ‘punish’ ‘bandits.’81
Thus, after achieving unification with violence and cunning, the Qin’s
First Emperor ‘declared himself Sage,’ celebrated the success of ‘punitive
expeditions’ against ‘bandit rebels,’ and claimed that he put ‘the black-
haired people … at peace.’82 Han emperors, in their harsh assessments
of the Qin’s cruelty, were even more aware of the importance of legitim-
acy and compliance. The founding emperor’s high minister, Lu Jia
(d. 178 BCE), is known for saying that one could unify ‘all under
Heaven’ from horseback, but one could not preserve unity from horse-
back.83 However, Martial (Wu) Emperor developed a legitimation strat-
egy for Qin-style coercion. While he adopted the Qin’s practices, he
extolled Confucianism as the state doctrine, thereby rhetorically masking
77 78 79 80
Ibid., 208. Lim 2014. Pines 2012, 54. Ibid., 44.
81 82
Perdue 2005, 431–432. Pines 2012, 20, 55.
83
Pines 2000, 315. This observation is similar to Edmund Burke’s observation that ‘the
use of force is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the
necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is to be perpetually
conquered.’ Reus-Smit 2018a, 208.
the intensified external conquests, internal repression and forced sup-

pression of cultural and intellectual diversity that marked his reign.
Martial (Wu) Emperor’s better packaging of Qin’s rule allowed the
Han to last for four centuries. His model would be emulated by succeed-
ing dynasties, unified or divided, Han or alien. The best testimony to this
model’s success is the transformation of cultural diversity into relative
uniformity. As Ge Zhaoguang emphasizes, ‘a culturally unified “China”’
was firmly established during the long-lasting Han.84 Although post-Han
China ‘underwent numerous wars and territorial divisions, was the site of
the intermingling of different national groups, and was ruled by a long
line of leaders from various clans and national groups,’ the idea of
‘a China with political and cultural continuity’ would survive.85 What
subsequent interactions and hybridization contributed was to add layers
to the core of Han culture.86 Indeed, Martial (Wu) Emperor’s legitimiza-
tion strategy has been so successful that today’s Chinese and IR scholars
still believe that the Han exclusively promoted Confucianism and that
China’s tradition is Confucianism, so much so that any efforts to excav-
ate China’s historical plurality would seem like revisionist history. The
tenaciousness of the idea of Chinese cultural and political unity is a
tribute to the success of the Han and Qin dynasties in forcibly forging
unity out of diversity, as well as a testament to the utility of this ideal
and accompanying practices of coercive homogenization to subsequent
generations of Chinese rulers.
The Achievements and Limits of the Chinese Diversity

Regime of Coercive Homogenization
The historical achievement of successive Sinic dynasties in pursuing
mutually reinforcing projects of cultural and political unification, and
in suppressing diversity in the service of universal empire, is without
parallel. Formidable though they were, these dynastic efforts at coercive
cultural homogenization were far from total. Jim Millward’s chapter
illustrates the very different techniques of diversity management that
non-Han dynasties pursued when organizing cultural diversity to legit-
imize their rule. Equally, limitations in the Chinese state’s capacities
for direct rule and power projection compromised the success of coercive
homogenization. And China’s cultural diversity also periodically resur-
faced during those periods in history when universal empires
84 85 86
Ge Zhaoguang 2018, 19. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 120–121.
broke down, and more plural configurations of political authority tem-

porarily re-emerged.
China’s state capacity was unrivalled for most of human history. The
Chinese bureaucracy became the object of admiration by European
reformers in the early modern period. Jesuits, who began to arrive in
China at the turn of the seventeenth century, were immensely impressed
by Chinese administration and wrote many tracts on the subject. The
new knowledge of China reached Europe at precisely the time when
progressive reformers were searching for ways to rid their states of
venality. A work by Matteo Ricci appeared in five European languages
by 1648.87 Chinese influence was particularly strong in Prussia.
According to Herrlee Creel, when Europe’s first written civil service
examination was introduced in Berlin in 1693, ‘the inspiration came
from China.’88 Yet, by the nineteenth century, China had become the
object of scorn. Max Weber famously argued that China ‘represents the
purest type of patrimonial bureaucracy that is unencumbered by any
counterweight.’89
These competing assessments of Chinese state capacity dramatize the
fact that state capacity is not a unidirectional phenomenon. Like expert-
ise, it can be acquired and lost, strengthened and weakened.90 The
state of Qin in the divided Warring States era developed the capacity
for direct rule and even ‘the fine-grained administrative grid’ character-
istic of the ‘high modernist state.’91 As the Qin conquered pre-existing
states with similar centralized administration, they could easily turn them
into provinces and counties. But when the Qin dynasty expanded to
regions south of the Yangzi River that were then inhabited by Yue
peoples, who spoke unintelligible languages and who had no prior cen-
tralized structure to work with, the central court’s hold on them was
much more tenuous. During the Qin–Han transition, local leaders easily
restored independence.
Similarly, the Han dynasty originally unified only the territorial space
of the Warring States system. It was only under Martial (Wu) Emperor
that the Han imposed imperial rule over Qin’s former territories and
beyond. The burden of ruling much-enlarged ‘central territories’ meant
that Warring States-era direct rule was no longer feasible. Over newly
conquered territories, the central court had to depend on indirect rule via
local intermediaries. Even over the increasingly homogenized ‘central
territories,’ the imperial state turned to a hybrid form of administration
that combined direct rule and indirect rule.92 The central court
87 88 89 90
Creel 1970, 24. Ibid., 24. Weber 1978, 1102. Hui 2017.
91 92
Hui 2005, 180. Hui 2005, 221; Hui 2017.
appointed magistrates down to the department and county levels, but

gave them scant resources, so that they had to rely on the cooperation of
‘a range of extra-bureaucratic actors and groups, including local militias,
clan and lineage associations, and members of the local gentry.’93 The
imperial state also did not provide a budget for support staff, so that
magistrates had to rely on a sub-bureaucratic staff of clerks, secretaries
and tax collectors who made their livings from imposing surtaxes and
fees on local populations. This reliance on local notables created a semi-
autonomous gentry class who had the resources and the safe distances to
ignore court orders and subvert imperial power if and when they so
desired. If direct rule is the key to consistent cultural homogenization,
then such hybrid rule afforded ‘interstitial developments’ at the intersec-
tion between state power and local autonomy.94 This local autonomy
provided shelter not only to periodic rebellions, but also to cultural
diversity. It is remarkable that today’s Han Chinese still speak a myriad
of mutually unintelligible ‘dialects,’ so much so that the Chinese Com-
munist Party has recently redoubled the effort to harmonize them with
official Mandarin. This residual diversity is reflective of the fact
that coercive cultural homogenization over successive dynasties was not
total, due in part to geographic limits in the Chinese state’s penetrative
capacity, and also to periodic regressions in its overall capacities for
direct rule.
Beyond intrinsic limits in the Chinese state’s capacities for direct rule,
the Sinic model of coercive cultural homogenization was also consist-
ently compromised by the existence of political communities that
dwelled beyond the emperor’s grasp and refused to submit to his author-
ity. The existence of these communities forced an elaboration of China’s
diversity regime. This came in the form of a hierarchy that distinguished
the ‘civilized’ from ‘barbarians,’ and that reinforced the boundaries of a
unitary China by positioning it in opposition to a denigrated and
excluded ‘other.’
The Son of Heaven was supposed to rule ‘all under Heaven,’ or the
entire known world. What, then, should he do about known populations
beyond the ‘central territories’ and beyond his rule? Unified dynasties
repeatedly tried to subjugate the vast periphery that ringed the interior.
The Han dynasty (202 BCE–AD 220) and the Sui dynasty (581–618)
93
Thornton 2007, 24.
94
Zhao, Dingxin 2015, 33, fn. 17; 329; 346, fn. 110. Zhao is adamant that no social and
economic actors ever enjoyed political, ideological and military autonomy. Yet his
footnotes offer a hidden tale of ‘interstitial spaces’ where even marginal or censured
social actors could retain pockets of unintended autonomy.
sent armies to the Western Regions (the Zungharian and/or the Tarim
Basins), southern Manchuria, northern Korea and northern Vietnam.
The Tang dynasty (618–907) marched to the Western Regions, Mongo-
lia, eastern Tibet, southern Manchuria and northern Korea. The Yuan
dynasty (1279–1368) tried to subdue Korea, Japan, Yunnan, Burma,
Vietnam and Java (after conquering the vast Eurasian steppe zone and
the Song dynasty). The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) sent expeditionary
troops to the Western Regions, Mongolia, southern Manchuria, north-
ern Korea, Burma, Vietnam and beyond in South and Southeast Asia.
The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) dominated the Western Regions, Mon-
golia, Tibet, Nepal and Taiwan. For most of Chinese history, however,
even the most resourceful emperors repeatedly had difficulties projecting
power to the vast periphery. Even if they scored victories on the battle-
field, they could not hold on to distant conquests for long. Only the last
Qing dynasty succeeded, with the assistance of revolutionary develop-
ments in logistical support and Western cannons in the eighteenth
century.
Reus-Smit (quoting Pamela Kyle Crossley) suggests that cultural
groupings that are not amenable to the official representation could be
‘liable to be shrunken or obliterated.’95 If the Son of Heaven could not
make peripheral populations submit on the sword, what could he do to
avoid ‘meaningful comparison’ and still claim to sit on the top of the
known world?96 The easiest way out was to cast those beyond his rule as
being beyond the pale of civilization and not worthy of his rule. This
effectively turned diversity management into barbarian management.
The ‘standard of civilization’ trope is often taken to be cultural or
Confucian, but it is universal to all historical international orders.97 What
is more ‘Chinese’ is the possibility of using radicals for animals to refer to
‘barbarians’ in Chinese characters. In addition, the distinction between
the civilized and the barbarian (huayi) in the Chinese civilizational hier-
archy was more culturally than ethnically defined, so that the barbarous
could potentially transform themselves into the civilized. Given the
‘opportunity’ to better themselves, those who still ‘turned their back on
civilization’ – that is, those who dared not to submit to the Son of
95
Reus-Smit 2018a, 201.
96
According to Fei-ling Wang, unified China was ‘mandated to seek constant expansion’
because it cannot be ‘content, secure, and peaceful when there is any meaningful
comparison or competition outside of its control, internally or externally.’ Wang
2017, 46.
97
The trope of casting others as beyond the pale of civilization is universal because all states
systems have displayed insider/outsider mentalities and designated those outside as
‘barbarians.’ Reus-Smit 2018a, 91, 218.
Heaven, such as the Zunghar Mongols – should be exterminated.98

But those who ‘came to pay tribute’ – whether they were Khalkha
Mongols or Vietnamese or Koreans – were looked on favourably as being
more civilized. Even then, however, China’s civilizational condescension
frequently generated resentments and grievances, even among those
communities that chose to submit to Chinese suzerainty.99
The aforementioned policies – homogenization of the ruled and deni-
gration of the unruled – together encapsulated the diversity regime that
so decisively shaped much of China’s historical evolution. The China
case illustrates that diversity regimes by design under political unity were
heavily coercive. When order builders commanded high enough state
capacity to exterminate political rivals, the impulse was to flatten and
forcibly homogenize ordinary subjects as well.
In contrast, there was more diversity by default in eras of political
division when multistate systems predominated, and when no single
order builder could lay down the law for everyone else. The Chinese
have taken to heart that political division means ‘great chaos under
Heaven’ (tianxia daluan) while political unity means ‘great order under
Heaven’ (tianxia datong). However, Ying-shih Yü highlights that it was
exactly when ‘the Way seemed to be collapsing from Heaven’ in the
Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras that China’s intellectual
thought flourished.100 Although the Qin-commissioned Lushi chunqiu
asserts that ‘oneness of the ruler brings orderly rule; doubleness brings
chaos,’101 the Song era (960–1279) with ‘two Sons of Heaven’102 was
stable and prosperous. The Song dynasty did not unify ‘all under
Heaven’ but had to recognize the equality, even the superiority, of the
Khitan Liao and the Jurchen Jin. It was this political disunity that
nurtured neo-Confucianism, cultural pursuits and vibrant international
commerce. A recollection of these periods of political pluralism and
cultural efflorescence is sufficient to caution against uncritically
accepting the illusion of Chinese ‘manifest heritage,’103 and to acknow-
ledge the cultural diversity that has survived despite the formidable
pressures towards homogenization detailed here.
Conclusion
This chapter has aimed to uncover China’s buried and forgotten cultural
diversity, and to illuminate the distinctive diversity regime that sought to
suppress it through much of China’s history. Undeniably, studies of
98 99 100
Perdue 2005, 431–432. Lee 2017, 88; Zhang 2015, 77. Ge 2018, 101.
101 102 103
Pines 2012, 49. Tao 1988. Millward, this volume.
international orders should begin with the assumption of existential

cultural diversity. But we must also be mindful that Sinic dynasties that
achieved political unification typically took on the Wightian lens on
cultural diversity, seeing it as a threat, a problem or a bug that should
be eliminated. Success in flattening the cultural landscape, in turn,
enhanced and justified political unity. If today’s Han culture appears to
be more or less homogeneous, it is the product of a herculean policy of
homogenization that began under the first two unified dynasties, and was
reinforced in subsequent eras of political unity.
If today’s Chinese culture still manifests diversity among Han Chinese
and particularly among yesterday’s ‘barbarians,’ it is because China’s
historical state capacity – however high by world standards – was not
enough to eliminate contending states externally and autonomous
pockets internally. Seen in this light, it is highly significant that the
current Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has enhanced its
repressive capacity with artificial intelligence technologies such as iris
scanning, face recognition, voice recognition, biometric data and more.
The result is a horrifying assimilation campaign of Uyghur and other
Muslims in Xinjiang, which, notwithstanding its technological sophisti-
cation, reflects in large part an impulse towards cultural homogenization
that has deep historical roots.104
What does this analysis of China’s historical diversity and homogeniza-
tion mean for the ‘fear’ that ‘China is a “civilizational power” that will
seek to remake the international order in its own image’?105 The current
liberal international order may indeed be under strain. But this is not
because China’s rise represents ‘the next clash of civilizations.’106 Rather,
it is because many Chinese leaders view liberal values as a threat to
regime survival, and now have the growing capacity to homogenize
diversity and silence dissent both within and without.
104 105 106

Niewenhuis 2018. Reus-Smit 2018a, 223. Allison 2017, 80–89.
Part III
The Modern ‘Liberal’ Order
6 Cultural Diversity within Global
International Society
Andrew Hurrell
It is obvious that globalization brings together states, communities and

individuals with distinctive and often sharply conflicting ways of viewing
the world. It is also increasingly hard to ignore the fracturing of global-
ization, the intense contestation surrounding notions of a global liberal
order, and the extent to which this contestation is not just about power
and interests but reflects sharply contested narratives of the global –
nationalist, cultural, racial, historical and religious. Ethnicity, cultural
identity and religion have re-emerged as central features of global polit-
ics. Challenges of shifting power go hand in hand with claims and
assertions of cultural and religious difference. Transnational violence is
widely seen as stemming from religious identity and religiously inspired
grievances, often accompanied by powerful denunciations of the existing
international order and by alternative sets of values and visions. Culture
appears as deeply implicated with many of aspects of backlash politics –
populist nationalism; anti-immigrant sentiment; anti-elite and anti-
expert feeling; dissatisfaction with traditional political parties; and a
multifaceted reaction against globalization, ‘free trade,’ ‘universal liberal
values’ and global governance. And the pallid language of ‘ideas’ and
‘norms’ that dominated so much academic discussion within post-Cold
War international relations struggles to come to terms with the renewed
importance of cultural values and of the ideologies and discourses within
which they are expressed.
This chapter considers the challenges posed by cultural diversity to the
institutions of global international society. There are innumerable
ways in which cultural diversity might impact on global politics, most
obviously in relation to the sources of violent conflict.1 The focus here,
however, is on the relationship between cultural diversity and the insti-
tutions of international society – the relationship with international law,
with the power-political ordering practices centred on major powers, and
1
For claims about the role of religion in the ‘new new wars’ of our age, see Walter 2017,
469–486.
115
116 Andrew Hurrell
with the dense web of global governance institutions that have come to
regulate all manner of human affairs. The chapter views order in terms of
particular kinds of institutional solutions to the problems of coexistence
between separate political communities and to the obstacles that stand
in the way of sustained and effective social cooperation. It is concerned
with the two-way impact: on the one hand, the impact of cultural diver-
sity on the institutions of international society; and on the other, with the
capacity of those institutions (understood as ‘diversity regimes’ in this
volume) to allow cultural diversity to play out in the least disruptive
manner possible; and to find some space for the promotion of just claims
for cultural recognition.
It addresses five questions:
1. Why is cultural diversity a problem?
2. To what extent does the view of cultural diversity as a problem
depend on a particular view of culture?
3. How serious a problem is it?
4. What is wrong with the claims of a limited pluralist conception
of international society to provide a viable solution to the claims of
culture?
5. Where does this leave international society as a diversity regime?
Why is Cultural Diversity a Problem?

What many would take to be a common sense answer stresses four
points. It would begin with some claim about the irreducible diversity
and plurality of human life and of human society. Such claims often build
on the Herderian view that that humanity is divided naturally into cul-
tural groupings; that each cultural group has a particular character
defined in terms of common territory or place of origin, ethnicity,
customs, laws, beliefs, language, artistic and religious expression; that
individuals are shaped by this particular and unique environment; and
that language, myth and religion – different webs of meaning – play a
particularly important constitutive role.2 And, as we shall see, the
believers in this position remain deeply sceptical of modernization and
convergence narratives.3 The ontological bottom line, then, is that our
common humanity is constituted by an irreducible plurality of cultures,
2
In international relations these ideas coalesce into what Reus-Smit terms the ‘default
conception of culture.’ See Reus-Smit 2018a, 36–39.
3
For a recent treatment see Waldow and DeSouza 2017.
Cultural Diversity within Global International Society 117
religious commitments, moral and ethical values, and contrasting and

contesting political traditions and ideologies.4
Second, this view would describe how cultural diversity has become far
more salient within international society because of the what one might
call the ‘provincializing of Westphalia’ and the shift in power away from
the core Western industrialized world – historically first built around
Europe and the European colonial order and then around the United
States and the Greater West. There are, broadly, two ways in which a
global order might come into being. One is via the coming together on
more or less equal terms of a series of regionally based systems, whether
made up of states, empires or other political groupings. The other is by
the global dominance of what was an originally a regional system, and it
is this model that stands behind the global order of the twentieth century
with the expansion of an originally European international society onto a
global scale – first, through the globalizing force of capitalism and the
immense transformative impact that it has had on the regions and soci-
eties that were drawn into a deepening system of exchange and produc-
tion relations; second, through the emergence of an often highly
conflictual international political system that, as Halford Mackinder
argued, came to see the entire Earth as the single stage for promotion
of the interests of the core powers of the system;5 and third, through the
development of a global international society and its dominant institu-
tional forms (the nation-state and sovereignty, great powers and institu-
tionalized hierarchy, and international law).
For the first time in human history, then, there is a single global
political system with a common set of legal and political institutions,
diplomatic practices and accompanying ideologies that developed in
Europe and then, in the traditional parlance, ‘expanded’ to form a global
international society. The way in which this story is now told has been
extensively revised.6 There is now far greater emphasis on the agency of
the non-Western world; on the ubiquity of hybridity (for example, in
terms of the history of international law); on the role of hierarchy and
coercion; on the density of encounters, connections and contributions
from those within but on the margin of a single global order; on the
processes of mutual interaction and constitution; and on the way in
which, as Jeremy Adelman puts it, it is now a story ‘that brought in the
Rest to help explain the West.’7 Nevertheless, the result remains that we
4
Hannah Arendt provides one clear example of such a view and this can be seen in many
places in her work. For one example, see Arendt 1978.
5 6
Mackinder, 421–437. See, in particular, Dunne and Reus-Smit, 2017.
7
Adelman 2017.
118 Andrew Hurrell
live in a far more diverse world, with more participants and with a far
greater range of voices and views. Many of these participants come from
parts of the world that played a minor part in the creation of the global
order in which they are now playing a far more prominent role. Hence
there is a particular need – both political and ethical – to look at inter-
national order from the perspective of those who joined a now global
international society that was not principally of their making and that
reflected a very particular set of historical conditions and cultural and
religious values.
Third, there has been a diffusion of agency and the capacity of a
far wider range of states, social groups and societies to lay claim to
cultural recognition and to demand changes in the legal and normative
structure of international society. In recent years, the focus has been on
non-Western ‘rising powers,’ on Southern social movements or on non-
Western religious transnationalism. But the process of change and chal-
lenge is historically far more deeply rooted, and, for all the continued role
of hierarchy and inequality, the degree of institutional and normative
change has been very substantial. The most crucial dimension of ‘global’
does not, therefore, lie in the nature of the problems (climate change,
nuclear proliferation, etc.), nor in notions of interdependence and glob-
alization and the degree to which states, societies and peoples are every-
where affected by global processes. It lies rather in the increased capacity
of a far wider range of states and social actors to become active subjects
and agents in the politics and practices of international law and society.
It is the diffusion of agency and of political consciousness that has been
the most important feature of the globalization of international society.
This means that the historical self-understandings of a much wider and
more culturally diverse range of players need to be central to the theoret-
ical and practical analysis of both specific notions of international law and
broader practices of international ordering.
Fourth, there is the impact of globalization. Many of the features and
dynamics of contemporary global politics have sharpened the politics of
identity. The causes of this intensification are contested but are very
often related to the dislocations and disruptions associated with global-
ization, to the massive movements of peoples and ideas, and to the
increased intrusiveness and interventionism of both outside states and
international institutions. It is the disruptive and dynamic power of
global capitalist modernity that provides the ground for the intensifica-
tion of cultural claims. The much-acclaimed age of globalization is also
an age of cultural division and diversity. The forms that these struggles
for recognition have taken are varied. From an orthodox perspective one
would highlight the continued power of nationalism in all of the major
states and societies of the system. More broadly, the global politics of
cultural recognition include the claims of national groups either for their
own state or for a change in the political structure of existing states; the
demands of the world’s 250 million indigenous peoples that their culture
and ways of life be protected; the demands of cultural minorities,
migrants and refugees for recognition of their language and traditions;
and the claims of cultural feminists for equality within the constitutional
and legal order of states.8 In addition, we might wish to add the con-
tinued power of pan-regional ideas and civilizational groupings; the
revival of transnational religious identities; and the existence of inter-
nationalist commitments that took the classic form of political inter-
nationalism (as with the communist international), but which can be
seen in many aspects of contemporary political transnationalism within
global civil society.
Globalization is often understood as being deterministically driven by
market logics and by technology. But its development has been deeply
dependent on geopolitics, in periods of both expansion and of contrac-
tion and dislocation; the institutions of global governance have played a
central role in facilitating globalization and reinforcing the power of
particular economic actors and elites; and it is around such global gov-
ernance institutions and the elites that dominate them that so much of
the contemporary culturalist backlash has been aimed.
To What Extent Does the View of Cultural Diversity as

a Problem Depend on a Particular View of Culture?
The aforementioned account clearly contains a view of culture, but it is
important to draw out two particular ways in which culture is believed to
undermine international society and to promote disorder. The first, and
best known, are those accounts that stress the inevitability of civilizational
and cultural conflict. Recent debate has tended to focus on Samuel
Huntington. But civilizational accounts have a long trajectory within
international thought and provide a good example of where anthropo-
logical, imperial and geopolitical strands of thought overlapped and were
densely intertwined. The nineteenth century was full of debates about
the changing nature of power and the impact that industrialization and
modernization would have on the scale of social and economic organiza-
tion, and there was endless discussion of who would be the powers of the
future. But alongside discussions of the impact of the Industrial
8
Tully 1995, 1–15.
120 Andrew Hurrell
Revolution, there ran a continuous preoccupation with moral, cultural

and civilizational factors. These played a crucial role in determining the
status of ‘great nations’ and who was to count in the international
pecking order. Within Europe, Marx, Mill, Hegel and many others
believed in a hierarchy of nations, with only some possessing the neces-
sary moral character and the historically progressive potential.9 But it was
in relation to the non-European world that differentiation and hierarchy
were clearest: hence the widely held belief in the concept of civilization
and in a hierarchy of races;10 hence the elaborate debates as to the
principles, criteria and ‘standards of civilization’ by which non-European
states might be able to be accepted as sovereign members of the ‘society
of states’ or the ‘family of nations’;11 and hence the idea of Europe as the
unique site of a universal and universalizing modernity, in which, as
David Ludden suggests, the economic divergence between Europe and
the rest soon became a ‘global cultural phenomenon.’12 In all of these
ways, a particular historical narrative about the place of culture becomes
central to the legitimation of European and Western global order.
Although European discussion of the stages and levels of cultural or
civilizational development stressed the special place of Europe, there
were frequent bouts of cultural pessimism: Europe’s cultural supremacy
was challenged by decadence and racial impurity from within and by
the rise of the non-Western world from without. In the interwar period
the power of such ideas could be seen in the immense success of, for
example, Stoddart’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Suprem-
acy or Spengler’s Decline of the West. As Vitalis, Shilliam and others have
reminded us, it was with race and civilization that the early writers on
international relations were often most concerned, rather than with war,
conflict and interstate anarchy.13 The global racial order played a sys-
temically important role in understanding patterns of conflict, and it was
in this period that religious differences became racialized – and nowhere
is this more the case than in relation to Islam.
But there is a second, less brazenly conflictual, view of culture that
opens the way to viewing culture as a major problem and that again
highlights the parallel moves within both anthropology and international
relations. The functionalist model of culture, particularly popular in mid-
twentieth-century British anthropology, viewed culture in terms of a
necessary framework of rules, laws and institutions. Precisely because
human actions are explained in terms of rule following, deviance is
9
See Varouxakis 2007, 136–158.
10 11
For recent treatments see MacCarthy 2009; and Bowden 2009. Gong 1984.
12 13
Ludden 2002, 470. See Vitalis 2015 and Shilliam et al. 2014.
intrinsically divisive, cultural boundaries are problematic and under-

standings of membership greatly matter.14 Many of those writing on
international society in the mid-twentieth century absorbed the
structural-functional Zeitgeist, viewing international society and order
primarily in terms of normative consensus. The move from a culturally
homogenous European society of states to a global international society
is therefore profoundly worrying.
It is this concern that opens the way for a particular kind of engage-
ment with culture that can be found both within classical realist thought
and especially within writing on international society. On the one hand,
there is this shared concern with the allegedly macro-historical processes
of cultural development, evolution and conflict, especially those between
the West and the non-West. On the other, there is the idea that such
conflict may be moderated by the cultivation of particular cultural prac-
tices. So this is a view of culture as specific practices of meaning making
clustered by space and time but focused in and around institutions.
Hence English School work on the ‘culture’ of international relations
was often primarily concerned with what was described as diplomatic
culture: the shared values and world views of those state elites engaged
most directly in the ordering of international and global society.
The question asked was therefore: to what extent has the previously high
level of transnational engagement and shared values of traditional Euro-
pean diplomatic culture been eroded by the expansion of international
society? Or has this older ‘culture’ been replaced by alternative ‘cultures,’
especially ‘cultures of modernity’ – for example, the technocratic cultures
of global governance, or as examined empirically by those concerned
with how so-called emerging powers are socialized into international
institutions.
How Serious a Problem Is It?

Even if we accept the divisive impact of cultural difference, it has never-
theless been possible for many to argue that an international society
made up of sovereign states represents the least bad way of organizing
global politics. One of the perennial attractions of a state-based, pluralist
conception of international society is that it seems to provide one way –
and perhaps the least bad way – of organizing global politics in a world
where actual consensus on fundamental values is limited or where there
is widespread scepticism as to how a cross-cultural morality might be
14
See Risjord 2012.
122 Andrew Hurrell
grounded. If diversity and value conflict are such important features of

international life, then we should seek to organize global politics in such a
way as to give groups scope for a degree of national and regional separ-
ateness and thereby reduce the degree to which they will clash over how
the world should be ordered.
One celebratory – and easily caricatured – version of this story is given
by Kissinger:
The genius of the system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its
provisions were procedural, not substantive. If a state would accept these basic
requirements, it could be recognized as an international citizen able to maintain
its own culture, politics and religion, and internal politics, shielded by the
international system from outside intervention. The ideal of imperial or
religious unity – the operating premise of Europe’s and most other regions’
historical orders – had implied that in theory only one centre of power could be
fully legitimate. The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as its starting point
and drew a variety of multiple societies, each accepted as a reality, into a common
search for order. By the mid-twentieth century, this international system was in
place across every continent; it remains the scaffolding of international order such
as it now exists.15
The argument often takes the form of ‘yes, but’: yes, of course there were
earlier practices of diplomacy and diplomatic interaction; yes, of course
there were well-established practices of law and of contractual and treaty
relations; yes, of course there were ideas of power and practices of both
hierarchy and balanced power. But there is something distinctive and
special about the forms of international society that emerged in Europe
and subsequently became global. They were institutionally more embed-
ded, more self-consciously developed and, in separating secular from
religious authority, more successful than other forms of ordering the
relations between, and among, separate political communities.
Let us look briefly at two of the politically most salient markers of
culture: religion and nationalism. The overcoming of religious conflict
is one of the most deep-rooted elements of the mythology of Westpha-
lia. On the one hand, the wars of religion and the Thirty Years’ War
provided a particularly powerful and destructive example of the dangers
of religious passions and universalist religious claims and pretensions.
The religious wars of early modern Europe live on in the minds of
the Western secular imagination as exemplars of why religions are
particularly prone to violence. On the other hand, the result of these
conflicts was the Great Separation of religion and politics – domestically,
the secularization of political authority; internationally, the gradual
15
Kissinger 2014, 27.
consolidation of a pluralist but secular international society in which

sovereignty provided the primary container for difference (a diversity
regime, in language of this volume) and, just as importantly, where the
balance of power became the principal institution that would guard against
the claims of any universal or universalizing authority, religious or
secular.16
Now, of course, the mythologies of both Westphalia and the Great
Separation have been thoroughly deconstructed. But their political
power lives on, and not just within international relations. Within inter-
national law, for example, the essential lines of this standard account are
widely shared – from Schmitt’s celebration of the jus publicum Europeaum
and the replacement of a religiously based homogeneous order with both
the delimitation of territorial authority and a clear distinction between
secular and religious; to the progressive, civilizing and pragmatic liberal
reasonableness of a Hersch Lauterpacht. At the liberal end, some empha-
size the extent to which, however Christian its origins may have been,
international law provides a basis for a secularized pluralism, an insti-
tutional means of transcending religious passions, and ‘an eventual
reaching towards a “humanity” united beyond sectarian divisions,’ to
quote Koskenniemi.17
What takes place, then, as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd notes, is that this
narrative fixes a particular notion of ‘religion’ and of ‘secularism,’ and
entails a ‘presumption that religion has been privatized and is no longer
operative in modern politics or that its influence can be neatly encapsu-
lated in anthropological studies of a particular religious tradition and its
external influence on politics.’18 This notion of an external influence on
politics is especially important.
If religious differences are tamed and bounded, nationalism provides
an ideology of identity capable of absorbing an extraordinarily wide range
of cultural claims. Political nationalism has been the most persistent and
pervasive ideology and shared social imaginary of the modern world, not
least because of its capacity to meld and mesh with other ideological
systems, whether fascist (think of Hitler’s Germany), socialist (Soviet
Russia), liberal (the United States) or religious (post-revolutionary
Iran). It has been intimately implicated in the exercising of immense
political power – the power to redraw boundaries, to bring down empires
and to complicate all attempts at post-imperial coercive control. This
power derives in part from its international legitimacy, but also from the
processes of group mobilization and identification that underpin effective
16
For a particularly stark view of the Great Separation, see Lilla 2008.
17 18
See Koskenniemi, García-Salmones Rovira and Amorosa 2017. Hurd 2011, 167.
124 Andrew Hurrell
social power. Now, of course, nationalism and national self-

determination could be sources of conflict. But the more important
impact has been to reinforce the states system by creating a shared
language for cultural difference, and by providing such a politically and
morally powerful justification for living in a world made up of states.19
On this view, then, the system of nation-states therefore guards against
the tyranny of the world state or universal empire; allows for the diversity
of human values and cultures; and can be justified, in Mill’s terms, as a
way of safeguarding a plurality of ‘experiments in living.’ Mill’s succes-
sors have also seen the value of political nationalism in instrumental
terms as providing the social cement and cohesion necessary for active
citizenship and social welfare.20 The liberal position has been strongly
argued by Michael Walzer, who talks of the internationalist claim: ‘[t]hat
we and our fellows and others like us, are disturbers of the peace only
insofar as we are denied the protective and expressive powers of sover-
eignty. Hence the vindication of this critical principal, for every nation its
own state, would open the way to an international settlement.’21 But the
claim that nationalism represents a necessary element of a stable inter-
national order has been shared by many others. Thus anti-colonial
nationalists have valued nationalism as providing the effective solidarity
and unity and collective political agency necessary for effective resistance
and the defeat of the colonizers. Although often closely connected with
solidarist commitments, nationalism is a vital means of restoring a sense
of collective purpose and self-respect to colonized peoples who had been
humiliated, marginalized and often brutalized in the pursuit and main-
tenance of empire. And conservative and fascist movements – both in the
1930s and once more today – have argued that states are legitimate only
in so far as they embody and give expression to a geographically rooted
and concrete culture, and a peaceful international community is one
made up of racially or culturally delimited national communities.
These claims about the political power and normative benefits of a
pluralist society of states are buttressed by two kinds of convergence
stories that stress varying combinations of competition, socialization,
diffusion and emulation. One has to do with global geopolitics as a
phenomenon that explains why modern secular international relations
is both different from earlier periods and characterized by a self-
reinforcing set of logics and dynamics that will trump both cultural and
religious factors domestically, and the role of religious movements, ideas
and influences transnationally. In part, this follows from the centred and
19 20
On this dual impact, see Mayall 1900. Most notably, Miller 1995.
21
Walzer 1996, 229.
unequal globalization of the nineteenth century and the hierarchy and

inequality that both allowed the imposition of Western modernity and
the playing out of imperial conflicts and competition across Mackinder’s
global stage. This was the case of the classical era of European imperial-
ism, but it was even more true of the era of superpower conflict in which,
as Westad argues, geopolitical and military conflict involved a struggle to
export and impose across the Third World two particular models
of Western modernity.22 But in part it follows from the internal logic of
major power competition itself. Driven by the whiplash of geopolitical
necessity, engagement with European power meant emulating power-
political ideas, institutional forms and foreign policy behaviours. Build-
ing on these ideas, realist accounts of, say, the international relations of
the Middle East will certainly stress the extent to which geopolitical
rivalries are compounded by religions and doctrinal fissures and devel-
opments. But the crucial point is to emphasize the power of the geopolit-
ical and statist logics in explaining why religious revolutions are ‘tamed’;
why statist, regime and national imperatives win out over alternative
transnational visions, whether of conflict or of solidarity; and why state
borders have a stability unwarranted by the failures and weaknesses of the
states and societies that they are supposed to demarcate.
Within international society accounts, the drivers of convergence are
related but distinct. Yes, the power-political side follows classical
realism. Hence, from the early 1950s, Martin Wight saw a direct parallel
between the struggle of the revisionist powers in the 1930s and the
emerging situation in what is to become the Third World – the dynamics
of haves and have-nots.23 And, because of Wight’s concern with the
originally Christian roots of European international society and his belief
in the importance of shared cultural values, he was especially attentive to
the religiously influenced demands of the have-nots in the non-Western
world. But this account differs from the competitive dynamics of the
international political system in stressing the advantages and benefits of a
pluralist international society, rather than its conflictual logics, that play
the stronger socializing and ‘modernizing’ role. For the non-Western
world, international law and society has been both an instrument of their
subordination and also a vehicle for positive change, for the ending of
empire, for the promotion of particular values (such as racial equality)
and for the promotion of political and economic development. Each part
of the non-European world had to accept that its own world was no
longer ‘the’ world, and that, whatever pre-existing forms of intersocietal
22
See Westad 2005.
23
See, in particular, Hall 2006. On Bull’s development of this idea, see Ayson 2012.
126 Andrew Hurrell
organization may have existed, there was now only one global political
order. On this view, it is certainly important to pay close attention to
resistance and rejection, and also to the complexity of processes
of socialization, diffusion and localization by which the secular values
of international law and society spread. Nevertheless, the long-term
direction of travel is clear: non-Western societies would accept a pluralist
international society because it offers a degree of institutional protection
that, for the most part, their own power could never alone guarantee. As
with revolution, so would both religion and broader cultural differences
be tamed by the socializing pressures and political benefits of a now
firmly secular system of law built around a post-imperial world of
nation-states and state sovereignty.
What Is Wrong with This View?

There are five problems with this position. The first challenges the whole
notion that the institutions of international society represent a culturally
neutral set of mediating mechanisms. Such a view, for example, under-
plays the role of religion in general and of Christianity in particular in the
deeper structure of Western thinking on international relations, indeed
on politics and political life more generally. The core claim here is about
the hidden and ongoing legacies of Christianity on Western international
thought and practice. Some varieties of this approach take their cue from
Schmitt’s 1922 dictum that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory
of the state are secularized theological concepts’ – not just in relation to
sovereignty, but also in relation to private property and foundational
distinctions in Western international political thought between public
and private. Others underscore why many aspects of the reading of
international law as a secularizing project are wrong (as in relation, for
example, to understandings of Grotius) or deeply misleading (as in
accounts of just war thinking that neglect the role of punishment). Still
others concentrate on the multiple tensions between religion and the
secular concepts of international law.24 What emerges is partly that
religion does not ‘reappear’ in more recent times, since to argue in this
vein is to suggest that it ‘went away.’ In fact, its role within international
law and society is much more continuous and much deeper than this
‘going away and then reappearing’ story would have us believe. But it is
also that the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are historically contingent and
politically deeply contested.
24
See, for example, Bhuta 2014, 9–35 and Danchin 2006.
The result is a set of arguments that questions the whole notion of

international law and society providing a religiously and culturally neu-
tral set of institutions able to mediate claims of difference and conflicting
values. Charles Taylor brings out the extent to which the taken-for-
granted quality of what he calls the ‘immanent order’ is only explicable
against a very particular process of secularization.25 Equally, his work
underscores just how much of Western political and moral theory
depends on the taken-for-granted character of what he calls the Modern
Moral Order.26 As Taylor openly acknowledges, this will be “taken-for-
granted” only by those who have lived within a historical world that grew
out of Western Christendom.
The central point, then, is that the categories of cultural difference that
international society seeks to tame are themselves the product of histor-
ically contingent and culturally specific meanings and understandings.
The diversity regime represented by Western international law and soci-
ety is reflective of a particular cultural setting and trajectory.
Second, the cultural and civilizational context and content of inter-
national law is not just of historical importance. A great deal of work has
explored the intimate connections between international law and empire,
and a still larger body of work has discussed the role of race and civiliza-
tion. But their legacies and ongoing impact are still underplayed in the
mainstream discipline. Hence we should note here the long legacy of
nineteenth-century ideas about civilizational hierarchy and the way in
which they have lived on in the hegemonic presumption of the Western
world. It is striking how far nineteenth-century notions of status and
civilizational hierarchy persisted well into the twentieth century and
shaped views of today’s rising powers. For example, the close links
between European geopolitical thought and mid-twentieth-century
American realism are well known, above all in the work of Nicholas
Spykman. However, the overt role of racial hierarchy and civilizational
difference that had been central to European geopolitical thinking gets
downplayed. Race and civilization are submerged rather than wholly
dislodged until they reappear once more with full force in their Hunting-
tonian incarnation. Many believed that race was destined to disappear.
Alas, within many contemporary understandings of global order it
remains all too apparent.27
Third, the view of nationalism as the bulwark of state-based order
underplays its disruptive qualities. Those who argue in this way suggest
25 26 27
Taylor 2007. Ibid., 543. Pedersen 2016.
128 Andrew Hurrell
that it is rarely nationalism alone or in itself that is responsible for war and
conflict.28 Or they maintain that it is particular kinds of nationalisms that
are the source of the problem: the dark Durkheimianism of the ethnic
nation with its ethic of blood sacrifice, its role as a totalizing secular
religion and its capacity to transform limited political conflicts into the
total wars that scarred the twentieth century. Yet, ideas and ideologies of
national self-determination and of national liberation do represent a
recurring challenge to the society of states: by generating new sources
of conflict, by empowering and legitimizing nationalist and ethnic move-
ments to challenge both existing states and established political orders
within states, and by undermining the mechanisms and institutions that
were central to old-style pluralism (such as spheres of influence or the
balance of power).
These debates about the positive and negative qualities of nationalism
cannot be resolved by definitional or conceptual fiat, nor by simple-
minded attempts to differentiate good and bad nationalisms – civic
versus ethnic, most notably. The salience of both culture in general and
of nationalist claims in particular is not immutable or given by nature.
It rather depends, as Phillips and Reus-Smit stress in Chapter 2, on
historical processes and practices that create politically, or ‘interpellate,’
the very identities that are then held to embody cultural difference and
that then draw cultural boundaries in particular ways. The shifting sali-
ence of culture is therefore a product of historical processes and practices
that construct meanings and forge boundaries of exclusion and selective
inclusion. The dynamics of both capitalism and geopolitics – the heart-
land of academic international relations – are the two most powerful sets
of global practices, while the boundary-making role of global and inter-
national institutions has become central to understanding both the ways
in which cultural diversity is regulated and the patterns of cultural
inclusion and exclusion. On the one side, historical processes provide
access to power for groups to exploit those cultural claims that have
powerful resonance, and on the other, rather than simply reflect or follow
a dominant culture, what matters politically is how groups challenge,
resist, exploit or adapt to particular sets of cultural norms and practices,
with nationalist claims being among the most powerful.
Fourth, a pluralist order will rest centrally on the most powerful units
within the system and it is their relations that will do much to shape
the character of the order as a whole. A corollary of their international
or external power is that great powers will usually be large, complex and
28
See, in particular, Hutchinson 2017.
diverse. In so far as they are able to successfully mobilize power exter-

nally, this will depend on their ability to find stable means to manage
cultural, linguistic and religious diversity within their borders and around
their borderlands. A central element of the mythology of Westphalia is
that the nation-state has been the most powerful actor in the system. This
downplays both the historical importance of empires and the ongoing
role of imperial nation-states and other post-imperial hegemonic entities.
Modern European empires played a fundamental role in the historical
processes by which cultural identities were constructed and by which
imperial elites sought to manage cultural diversity. Empires provided a
range of alternative models managing religious diversity. Here we might
think of Kedourie’s (and others’) celebration of Ottoman pluralism
and tolerance (a view critically engaged by Ayşe Zarakol in Chapter 3).
But we might also place here the more recent work of James Millward on
diversity and pluralism within the Qing imperium, examined further in
Chapter 4.29 European empires were also central to the ways in which
Western understandings of religion, of the identity and characteristics
of the ‘world’s religions,’ were established and constituted in ways that
were deeply implicated in intra- and interimperial politics. The British
Empire ruled more than 40 per cent of the world’s Muslims, and the
establishment and manipulation of communal politics – including, for
example, the role of religious law – was an important feature of imperial
rule. The parallel role of imperialism in ‘inventing’ and constructing
ethnic and communal identities has been well established. In addition,
the role of imperialist nationalism, the physical infrastructure of empires
and the movement of ideas and peoples that this fostered, and the
racialization of religion and of religious difference all played important
roles in creating both notions of religious and cultural identity and in
fostering a wide range of alternative visions of world order. And finally,
the role of classical European empires, their superpower successors and
contemporary imperial formations need to be viewed as projects of world
order in their own right, but where the stability of intraimperial religious
and cultural politics was continuously challenged and upended both by
nationalist and statist drives and by geopolitical rivalries and conflicts.
This last point is perhaps most central: the deeply destructive interplay
between the internal means by which empires and other large and diverse
political formations have sought to deal with religious and cultural dif-
ference and the dynamics of geopolitical and interimperial rivalry –
whether in the era of European imperial competition (especially in the
29
Millward 1998.
130 Andrew Hurrell
Middle East and the Ottoman world); or during the Cold War (think of
the impact of Afghanistan both on the break-up of the Soviet Union and
on the Islamic world); or after the Cold War (think of the impact of
legacies of the multiple post-Cold War interventions in the Middle East).
A fifth and final set of difficulties with the pluralist account follows
from the ways in which that international society has changed empiric-
ally. Simply put, international law and society have long moved beyond
pluralist coexistence and have progressed ever further down the road of
complex global governance.
The crucial point is that vast swathes of international regulation, law
and governance are not about pluralist coexistence. There has been a
deepening of global international society and the intrusiveness of its
concerns because of the structural changes in the nature of the foreign
policy and governance challenges faced both by individual states and by
international society collectively. Dealing with these challenges – climate
change, stable trade rules, flu pandemics, a credible system of global
finance – involves the sustaining of rules that shape how societies are
organized domestically, that are structurally tied to transnational pro-
cesses, that go beyond entrenched notions of territoriality and sover-
eignty, that depend on the active and effective participation of a wide
range of actors and that necessitate many varied forms of governance,
international law and international political organization (developments
and processes explored by Ann Swidler in Chapter 9). This has brought
with it real changes in the normative and institutional structures of
international law and organization. The cultures of global governance
have become ever more deeply implicated in the domestic politics of all
societies; and as the waterline of sovereignty has been lowered, so it is
hardly surprising that the politics of cultural diversity has risen in salience.
It is precisely here that liberals see room for optimism. In the first
place, the complex structures of global governance and the growing
universalist commitment to human rights provide political and cultural
spaces both for new cosmopolitan identities and commitments and for
shifting global imaginaries.30 Liberal solidarist understandings of law and
society have sought both to give normative space to legitimate claims for
cultural recognition, and to undercut the attractions of what they see as
the disruptive claims of culture. One road has taken international law in
the direction of an ever-more expanded range of human rights, including
group and collective rights, together with a range of coercive and inter-
ventionist mechanisms to enforce those rights. Another road has involved
30
See the chapter by Ann Swidler in this volume.
external support for a wide variety of federal, consociational, non-

territorial rights and protections, and power-sharing models domestic-
ally. Both involve a rethinking of the international position of the state
and of traditionally hard notions of sovereignty as the sole anchor of
political authority. If the claims of culture are hard to dislodge and many
claims for cultural recognition are often legitimate, then let us seek a
solution in which we unpack and unravel sovereignty and promote
multilevel governance in which state responsibilities are dispatched to
various sites of power and the diversification of human loyalties is
encouraged. Conflict will be lessened if there is no longer one single site
of power and authority to be fought over and captured, or if there is a
broader political framework for the management of nationalist and cul-
tural conflicts. This is an old idea. It lay behind the arguments of many
imperialists that questions of ‘government’ should be separated from
questions of ‘nationality’ and that empires could provide different forms
of autonomy and political space that would facilitate the accommodation
of a wide range of communal attachments.31 In the contemporary
system, such views are widely propounded in the context of regional
groupings. A multilevel and neomedieval Europe is precisely the sort of
polity that can accommodate substate and transnational nationalisms.
The second source of liberal optimism is that interest-driven cooper-
ation fuelled by the all too obvious imperatives of living in a globalized
world will work to undercut the claims of culture (see John Ikenberry’s
discussion in Chapter 7). This picks up directly on the other nineteenth-
century convergence story to be found in both liberal and Marxist
accounts of modernity: that modern societies are characterized by func-
tional differentiation; by the increasing complexity and divergence of
different levels of social constitution; by the emergence of a public
sphere capable to subjecting religious and other cultural claims to critical
scrutiny, publicity and deliberation; and by the growth of more complex
forums of competition, above all in relation to the market. A broader
version places particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century origins
of global modernity and the immense transformative impact that this
has had on the intrinsic nature and dynamics of modern international
relations.32
Versions of this kind of modernization story can be found in a great
deal of recent liberal writing in international relations. Sociological insti-
tutionalists and world polity theorists suggest that the international
31
See Kedourie’s attack on nationalism in the developing world and his nostalgia for the
Ottoman Empire, Kedourie 1993.
32
Buzan and Lawson 2015.
132 Andrew Hurrell
system is increasingly dominated by a common culture in which specific

cultural forms of bureaucracy, rationality and institutionalization are
spreading transnationally and from the bottom up.33 But the legacy of
the modernization strand of secularization is also clearly visible within so
much post-Cold War liberal writing on global governance and global
order. The complexity of the governance challenges meant that inter-
national law and international regimes would necessarily increase in
number, scope and variety. This meant, in turn, that as large states,
including large non-Western states, expanded their range of interests
and integrated more fully into the global economy and world society –
as they ‘joined the world,’ in the idiom of the 1990s – they would be
naturally drawn by the functional benefits provided by institutions
and pressed towards more cooperative and ‘responsible’ patterns of
behaviour. In part, this was the result of a systemic Kantianism: the idea
of a gradual but progressive diffusion of liberal values, partly as a result
of liberal economics and increased economic interdependence, partly as
a liberal legal order comes to sustain the autonomy of a global civil
society and partly as a result of the successful example set by the multifa-
ceted liberal capitalist system of states. Modernization theory was
back in fashion, with its stress on the uniform and linear nature of
development and its emphasis on the deep linkages between economic
development, political democracy and societal modernization. Changes
within emerging countries were understood primarily in black-and-white
terms – incorporation versus exclusion, or fusion versus fragmentation.
Of course, almost all discussion of globalization recognized that its
impact was highly uneven, as some parts of the world are incorporated
into ever-denser networks of interdependence while other regions are
left on, or beyond, the margins. But, while the process would not neces-
sarily be easy or automatic, the broad direction of travel appeared to
be clear.
The difficulty is that the critiques and limits of these views have
become ever more evident. Analytically, academic debates on global
order were dominated by a dual liberal hegemony: a historicist hegemony
that has too easily assumed that history is moving down a one-way street;
and an analytical liberal hegemony that has tended to work with a narrow
notion of agency, with too little room for the historical analysis of the
structures within which supposedly ahistorical logics of rational
choice and collective action play out, and still less room for understand-
ing their temporal and geographical rootedness. Equally, linear narratives
33
Boli and Thomas 1999.
of secularization and of convergence now seem dramatically out of

place.34 And, as John Ikenberry argues in this volume, the shared social
purpose that had sustained an international liberal order within the
Western core has been diluted and placed under great strain as that order
has been progressively universalized.
Politically, as well, the strength of the critiques of the global liberal
order has grown. For much of the post-Cold War period the critiques
were mostly external – from Southern resistance to global neoliberalism
and alternative understandings of globalization and governance, espe-
cially in social movements such as the World Social Forum; to the views,
policies and values of a wide range of emerging and regional powers; to
those who stressed the pathologies of liberal intervention and state
making across the Global South. From this perspective, the obstacles
did not have to do simply with the selectivity and hypocrisy of human
rights and liberal interventionism, but also with the deeper problems of
whose identities are to be recognized and the struggles that ensue when
all are seeking to fit the same range of established cultural markers. From
this perspective, Western global governance writing appeared as a deeply
political analysis of how ‘we’ can order and ‘govern’ globalization in a
way that preserves Western cultural primacy. But, more recently and
with an ever-more overt cultural content, critiques have come from
within the West – critiques against the depoliticization of global govern-
ance; against the new class of liberal elites and experts who drive and
dominate global governance; and against those who have ignored the
inequality and economic dislocations of economic globalization and
the resentment against the repeated failures of liberal interventionism.
The very efforts to resolve the tensions and conflicts posed by cultural
claims via deeper forms of global governance and deeper forms of inter-
vention therefore appear to have generated their own backlash.
Conclusion
At the present time there has been a strong reassertion of the claims
of hard national sovereignty. Across many parts of the political spectrum
and in many different parts of the world, a desirable international order
is seen as necessarily centred around the ‘recovery’ of sovereignty in
order to defend legitimate national interests, to restore domestic eco-
nomic solidarity and to embody some notion of national cohesion
and belonging. Thus the 2016 Russian-Chinese Declaration on the
34
Pollack and Rosta 2017, 2.
134 Andrew Hurrell
Promotion of International Law seeks to reassert the centrality of the core

norms of sovereignty and non-intervention. Chinese and Indian leaders
see their countries as the embodiment of civilizational and cultural
claims. The Russian government stresses the role of the Orthodox
Church as a fundamental feature of Russian nationalism, and the
2016 foreign policy concept of the Russian Federation both notes the
increasing level of international tension and states that ‘this competition
has been increasingly gaining a civilizational dimension in the form of
duelling values.’35 On many parts of the right in Europe and the United
States, conservative groups believe that politics needs to reflect a rooted,
distinctive, exclusive ethnic community, purged of cultural or religious
infiltration and impurities. And statements from the US government
explicitly defend nationalism, attack global institutions and the perni-
cious ideologies of globalism and claim to want to build an international
order around strong and noble nation-states. Yes, many aver, inter-
national cooperation is necessary. But it should be international cooper-
ation that is built around strong claims to sovereignty and around
institutions that reflect the fundamental interests of the ‘peoples’ that
comprise member states. What is needed, it is claimed, is a non-
universalist globalism.
It appears, then, that the account of a pluralist international society has
tremendous ongoing power as a political project – given the relative
success of the universalization of state making and nation building
(in contrast to the Western obsession with state failure); given the power-
fully felt imperatives of state making; given the increasingly commonly
held view that global capitalist integration and religious and cultural
particularity can and should go together; and, finally, given the political
reality of a contemporary international order in which nationalism and
national sovereignty reflect the rhetoric and apparent priorities of almost
all of the major powers in the system.
But such views are incoherent, and dangerously so. While there may
well be a shared commitment to national sovereignty across all of the
major states of the contemporary system, this is accompanied by deeply
divergent perceptions as to the sources of instability and the responsi-
bility for that instability. For the United States, instability is down to ‘bad
states’ doing ‘bad things,’ as with Iran, Russia and, above all, China. For
many across the developing and emerging world, it is the United States
that has been the most strongly revisionist and disruptive state: in the
1990s, in terms of pressing for new norms on intervention and for the
35
The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation 2016.
opening of markets and the embedding of particular sets of ‘liberal’

values within international institutions; in the early years of this century,
in terms of its attempt to recast norms on regime change, on the use of
force and on the conditionality of sovereignty more generally. At the
present time, it is the perceived challenges to its economic and geopolit-
ical primacy, the loss of status, its inability to control the forces of
globalization that it has itself done so much to drive forward, and the
perceived unfairness of the constraints of international law and insti-
tutions that has animated both milder forms of US ambivalence towards
international law and institutions, as well as the more vehement and
strident rejectionism and nationalism of the present period.
Implicit in these conflicting claims and counter-claims are strongly
held substantive values about what acceptable international behaviour is
all about and about how cultural values and international norms should
relate to each other. But unless conflicts are to be resolved by power
alone, a stable order depends on some institutionalized means of recon-
ciling these divergent positions. It need not rest on consensus, but it has
to rest at least on rational contestation conducted within the bounds of a
shared discourse. Equally, and just as in the 1930s, claims to ‘fair’ and
‘just treatment’ abound. But notions of fairness and of states’ basic rights
can only be meaningful given a corresponding system of duties that
guarantee the same rights to others. International law and society cannot
be built or sustained by one-handed clapping.
One side of a pluralist view of international society is indeed about the
constitutive units, the idea of states as containers for difference and diver-
sity. It is in this sense that the sovereign state as the dominant locus of
political authority can be said to represent a primary institution of inter-
national society. But the other side is about those other primary insti-
tutions that are most directly concerned with the stable management of
shifting power and with the minimization of the dangers of coexistence
between separate and very diverse political communities. Two elements
of that ordering are crucial, indeed more crucial than the character of the
particular units: first, the management of power, the importance of pru-
dence and moderation, and the centrality of a balance of power between
states, societies and cultures; and second, the cultivation of a shared
political language for accommodation. The old realist language of power
and the balance of power has always been easy to criticize on empirical
grounds. But, like so much in the world of the so-called ‘realists,’ it
expressed a normative idea – that international life will be better, or again
less bad, if states and other political communities try to put aside argu-
ments about fundamental cultural values or deep ideological commit-
ments and instead concentrate on bargaining over limited interests and
136 Andrew Hurrell
the acceptance of mutual vulnerability; to recognize that ‘national’ secur-

ity is always and inevitably interdependent, that institutionalized cooper-
ation will always constrain sovereignty and that stability depends on a
shared understanding of legitimacy and of legitimate foreign policy behav-
iour. Of course this involves myth making and hypocrisy, but it can also
serve an important purpose, including a moral purpose.
Equally important in a culturally diverse world is the argument that
international society has the potential not just to help manage inter-
national conduct in a restrained way but also to create the conditions
for a more legitimate and morally more ambitious political community to
emerge: by providing a stable institutional framework within which sub-
stantive norms can be negotiated; by developing a common language in
which claims and counter-claims can be made and debated with some
degree of accessibility and authority; and by embedding a set of formal
rules that embody at least elements of equality and at least some restraints
on the power and ambitions of the strong. As I have suggested elsewhere,
the threefold challenge involves moral accessibility, institutional stability
and effective political agency.36 On this account – of course, rather easily
idealized – international law and society law can be viewed as a sociologic-
ally embedded transnational cultural practice in which claims and
counter-claims can be articulated and debated; from which norms can
emerge that can have at least some determinacy and argumentative pur-
chase. Such a view lays a heavy premium on living with conflict. Indeed, it
accepts the position with which this chapter began: that the ontological
condition of our shared humanity is constituted by a deep and irreducible
pluralism. The core goal is not an idealized discourse. It is rather both a
minimal procedural consensus able to moderate the perceived depth of
pluralism, and a shared language of bounded contestation able to contain
the dangers of religious and cultural ‘passions.’ It is more than the old,
‘thin’ culture of traditional diplomacy, but it falls well short of the ‘thicker’
institutional culture so clearly visible within the geographically limited
Western order of the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War periods.
This is the search for a language and practice of argumentation that
enables varied cultural stories to be told and heard; identities to be made
visible and available for potential recognition; justifications to be sought
from those that possess the power to suppress and repress; and in which
claims for cultural recognition and justice can be raised and rationally
debated even as they remain at the same time the focus of fear, the
embodiment of instrumental gain and the driver of conflict.
36
Hurrell 2007, chapter 12.
7 Liberal Internationalism and
Cultural Diversity
G. John Ikenberry
The Western-centred modern world order is built on an amalgam of

organizational logics and forms. In looking at today’s international order,
it is best not to think of it as a single ‘order,’ with a unified and coherent
set of organizational principles. It is an amalgam of orders, built around
often inconsistent and competing norms, principles, and political pro-
jects. There are different functional realms of order: security, political,
economic, and so forth. There are regional realms: European, East
Asian, Global South, and so forth. There are different layers of order:
deep principles, informal norms, functional institutions, and so forth.
These various realms and layers of order have built up and evolved over
the centuries. Indeed, in seeking to discern the logic and character of
modern international order, it might be best to put on the hat and boots
of a geopolitical archaeologist. International order is composed of an
accumulation of artefacts from various historical eras, deposited like
layers of geological strata. There are artefacts that date to the classical
age, the early modern period, the age of European imperialism, and the
two centuries of the liberal ascendancy.
Liberal internationalism can be seen as a set of ideas and political
agendas that reach back at least two hundred years. It is not a fixed
doctrine, but it is a family of evolving ideas and projects. As Michael
Doyle notes, liberalism ‘resembles a family portrait of principles and
institutions,’ and so too does liberal internationalism.1 In the most
general sense, liberal internationalism is a way of thinking about the
world. It can be defined more narrowly as a sort of ‘regime of thought
and action.’2 It emerged in the nineteenth century with the rise in the
West of liberalism, nationalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the eras of
British and American hegemony. In the nineteenth century, liberal inter-
nationalism was seen in the movements towards free trade, arbitration,
collective security, and the functional organization of the Western
1 2
Doyle 1997, 206. Ikenberry forthcoming.
137
138 G. John Ikenberry
capitalist system. In the twentieth century, it has moved through a

sequence of golden eras, crises, and turning points: Wilson and the
League of Nations; the post-World War II Anglo-American settlement
and the building of the US-led post-war order; crises of capitalism and
leadership in the world economy; the post-Cold War American ‘uni-
polar’ moment and the ‘globalization’ of liberalism and neoliberal ideas;
debates about Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and liberal intervention-
ism; and today’s crisis of the Western liberal order. What has united the
ideas and agendas of liberal internationalism is a vision of an open,
loosely rule-based, and progressively oriented international order.3
How has liberal internationalism – as a regime of thought and action –
dealt with cultural diversity? By cultural diversity I mean divergent racial,
ethnic, cultural, and religious identities and values.4 Liberal internation-
alism has many facets, and it has evolved over the last two centuries, so it
does not have a single approach or orientation towards cultural diversity;
it has various impulses and logics. In different times and places, liberal
internationalism has either celebrated cultural diversity, attempted to
escape from it, or sought to extinguish it. At some moments, particularly
in the nineteenth century, liberal internationalism was primarily a project
for building order among the Western liberal democracies, so the cul-
tural diversity of non-Western societies was essentially excluded from the
order. It was either ignored or caged in European empire. In other
moments, primarily in the twentieth century, liberal internationalism
was understood as a more global type of international order, but one in
which cultural differences would be pushed down into civil society.
States could remain culturally diverse within their societies, while oper-
ating globally according to common rules and standards. In still other
moments, particularly in the last half-century, liberal internationalism
has been understood as an even more ambitious project, one that antici-
pates the global spread of liberal values and principles. In this vision,
cultural diversity is seen as a transitional phenomenon, something that
will eventually erode and give way in the face of long-term world-histor-
ical processes of modernization and convergence, marked by the gradual
spread of universal and shared notions of human rights and liberal
democracy.
As such, liberal internationalism does not have a simple or singular
theory about cultural diversity and international order. One vision of
3
Ikenberry 2011. For studies of liberal internationalism, see Dunne and MacDonald 2013;
Jahn 2013; Smith 1994; and Mandlebaum 1994.
4
I am using the idea of cultural diversity in a way that is meant to be consistent with the
larger project.
Liberal Internationalism and Cultural Diversity 139
liberal international order is that it is – and always will be – a subsystem of

the larger international order. It is the subsystem of liberal democracies,
or as John Owen and Richard Rosecrance put it, ‘liberal democracies
form a system within a system.’5 Cultural diversity is not considered a
problem because it is thought not really to exist within this subsystem or
it is pushed down into civil society. Other visions of liberal international-
ism are more ambitious, and anticipate a ‘one world’ system of nation-
states – with liberal democracies at its core – that either tolerates cultural
differences or foresees the erosion and attenuation of these differences
within a global liberal evolutionary process.6
These alternative visions reflect a core tension that exists within the
liberal internationalist tradition. On the one hand, liberal international-
ism tends to frame its thinking about international order in modernist
and universalistic terms. It offers principles and norms for international
order that are seen as universal and global – abstract principles rooted in
Enlightenment thinking and visions of liberal modernity. On the other
hand, the liberal international project is rooted in a very historically
specific Western political formation, defined by the European and
Anglo-American experience. It grew out of a specific civilization and
cultural setting. The liberal internationalist conviction is that there are
ideas and principles – propelled by the powerful engines of modernity –
that can transcend and connect peoples and societies across cultures and
civilizations. But this universalistic conviction, which was so convincing
in the decade after the end of the Cold War, seems less so today. The
‘end of history’ notion that Western liberal ideals will spread worldwide
is not very convincing at the moment. Liberal internationalists have
tended to see history as a movement forward – as a great march towards
a progressive and convergent future. This vision, however, looks a bit
quaint today.
In the end, the liberal international approach to cultural diversity
hinges on whether liberal internationalism is a global project or a West-
ern project. If it is a global project, liberal internationalism will grapple
with cultural diversity through inclusion and engagement, pushing dif-
ferences down into civil society and seeking the long-term convergence
of peoples and societies. Alternatively, it might well be that liberal inter-
national order is really a Western project. If this is so, it is because liberal
order requires a strong sense of shared ‘social purposes,’ something that
5
See Owen and Rosecrance 2019, 87.
6
The strongest – and most famous – version of this ‘end of history’ version of liberal
internationalism is Fukuyama 1992.
is not capable of existing at the global level.7 Put differently, it might be

that the legitimacy of the liberal international order depends on the
presence of a thick fabric of shared social purposes – that is, a collective
sense among those within the order that its rules and institutions are
operating in a way to protect and advance a set of valued social or
political goals. During the Cold War, the social purposes of liberal order
were in part tied to the Western or ‘free world’ struggle with the Soviet
Union. This source of legitimacy of the order was lost when the Cold
War ended, the post-war, American-led order was globalized, and a
greater diversity of states and societies engaged and integrated into this
expanding order. It remains an open question whether this globalized
liberal order can acquire a new sense of shared social purpose so as to
give it legitimacy and standing in a pluralistic and multipolar world.
I develop this thesis in three steps. First, I look at liberal internation-
alism’s ideas about order and cultural diversity as they have travelled
from the nineteenth century into the current era. Liberal international-
ism is a multifaceted and shifting tradition, so it does not offer a simple or
unified theory of order and cultural diversity. Across the last two centur-
ies, liberal internationalism has made four ‘moves’ in grappling with the
presence of conflicting cultural values and identities in modern inter-
national order: building its vision of order on the foundation of West-
phalian sovereignty; organizing relations so that cultural values and
identities remain situated within diverse and autonomous civil societies;
embracing the developmental ideas of liberal modernization, where cul-
tural differences erode and give way as modernity and modern society
unfold; and, finally, employing institutions of ‘exclusion,’ manifest in
political hierarchies and, at the extreme, formal empire.
Second, I look at the great twentieth-century transition in liberal
internationalist thinking, which has had great implications for questions
of cultural and identity differences. In the age of Woodrow Wilson and
into the post-war era, liberal internationalism tied itself to various sorts of
civilizational, racial, and cultural foundations and hierarchies. These
cultural and civilizational underpinnings of liberal internationalism
reinforced Western – and specifically American – power and position in
the global system. These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural
and racial markers have been contested both from within the West and
from the outside, pushed forward in particular by the decolonization and
statehood movements of the post-1945 decades. As a result, these civi-
lizational and racial ideas have been pushed out of the core theories and
7
On the notion of ‘social purpose,’ understood as the shared orienting purposes of the
political order, see Ruggie 1982.
narratives of post-Cold War liberal internationalism, replaced with more

universalistic conceptions of human rights, multiculturalism, and civic
nationalism. In effect, the ‘children’ of liberal internationalism have tried
to escape the prejudices and parochialisms of their parents.
Finally, I will argue that the ‘globalization’ of the liberal international
order has its limits – and we are witnessing these limits today.
A globalized system of liberal internationalism is problematic because:
(1) modernity does not appear to be leading to full-scale convergence of
societies across the world, and (2) cultural values and identities are hard
to keep contained within civil society – largely because multiculturalism
and civic nationalism do not seem to be fully stable forms of liberal
democracy. Liberal internationalism is caught in a world-historical
dilemma. It is too ‘successful’ (i.e. functional, legitimate, and useful in
solving global problems) to remain contained within the West, where it
gains stability by resting on Western cultural and identity foundations.
But it is too contested and unstable as a global-universal set of ideas and
principles, because – stripped of social purposes to make it a global
organizing vision – it loses its cultural and identity foundations and
threatens to become a sort of disembodied and unwelcome neoliberal-
ism. If it takes on more social purpose (e.g. champions R2P and other
global norms movements propose) it again loses support and brings
fraught questions of cultural diversity and identity back into the centre
of international order.
Liberal Internationalism and World Order

Liberal internationalism offers a vision of order in which sovereign
states – led by liberal democracies – cooperate for mutual gain and
protection within a loosely rule-based global space. Glimmerings of this
vision emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
triggered by Enlightenment thinking and the emergence of industrialism
and modern society. Over the next century, a variety of economic,
political, and intellectual developments set the stage for the reorganiza-
tion of relations among Western states. Led by Britain, these states
entered into a period of industrial growth and expanding trade. Political
reform – and the revolutions of 1848 – reflected the rise and struggles for
liberal democracy and constitutionalism, growing middle and working
classes, and new political parties arrayed across the conservative, liberal,
and socialist spectrum. Nationalism emerged and became tied to the
building of modern bureaucratic states. Britain signalled a new orienta-
tion towards the world economy with the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Nationalism was matched with new forms of internationalism – in law,
commerce, and social justice. Peace movements spread across the West-
ern world. The great powers of Europe met as the patrons of Western
order in the Congress of Vienna. A new era of European industrial-age
imperialism began, as Britain, France, and other European states com-
peted for colonial prizes. Along the way, new ideas of ‘the global’
emerged, intellectual and political visions of a rapidly developing global
system. The idea of ‘modernity’ was invented.
In this setting, liberal internationalism emerged as a way of thinking
about Western and world order. It began as a variety of scattered
nineteenth-century internationalist ideas and movements. Liberal ideas
in Britain began with Adam Smith’s writings in the late eighteenth
century and continued with thinkers such as Richard Cobden and John
Bright in the nineteenth century. A general view emerged – captured, for
example, in the writings of Walter Bagehot and many others – that there
was a developmental logic to history, a movement from despot states to
more rule-based and constitutional ones. Kant’s ideas on republicanism
and perpetual peace offered a glimmer of evolutionary logic in which
liberal democracies would emerge and organize themselves within a
wider political space. Ideas of contracts, rights, and the law were
developed by thinkers dating from John Locke to John Stuart Mill.8
The connections between domestic liberalism and liberal internation-
alism are multifaceted, and they have evolved over the last two centuries.
In the nineteenth century, it is hard to see a distinctive or coherent liberal
international agenda. It was primarily manifest in ideas about world
politics that emerged from thinkers and activists committed to liberalism
within countries. It was seen in ideas about the liberalization of trade,
collective security, arbitration of disputes, and so forth. What emerges
during this era is a sense of an international sphere of action that was
opening up within the liberal democratic world, and a conviction that
collective efforts could and should be made to manage this expanding
international space. As Mark Mazower has argued, what was new was the
notion that a realm of ‘the international’ was growing and that ‘it was in
some sense governable.’9
What emerges in the twentieth century is a much more full-blown
sense of liberal internationalism, understood as a set of prescriptions
for organizing and reforming the world in such a way as to facilitate the
pursuit of liberal democracy at home. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson
and 1919, liberal internationalism emerged as an agenda for building a
type of order – a sort of ‘container’ within which liberal democracies
8 9
See Fawcett 2014 and Rosenblatt 2018. Mazower 2012, 15.
could live and survive. In the hands of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his
generation after 1945, liberal internationalism becomes even more so an
agenda for building an international community within which liberal
democracies could be stabilized and protected. Growing out of the
New Deal experience, the post-war ‘embedded liberal’ order was
designed in part to safeguard liberal democracies from growing risks of
economic and political upheavals generated by modernity itself. In this
way, liberal internationalism offered a vision of a reformed and managed
Western – and, eventually, global – order that provides the organizational
principles, institutions, and capacities to negotiate the international
externalities and dislocations that threaten the domestic pursuit of liberal
democracy.10
Indeed, it is the varied, evolving, and contested character of liberal
internationalism that is striking. What has varied in particular are the
‘social purposes’ that have been attached to liberal internationalism. In
the nineteenth century and at various moments in the twentieth century,
the vision of liberal internationalism has been quite limited: to build an
open system that protected property rights and facilitated transactions
and functional cooperation. In other eras, the social purposes have been
more ambitious, seeking to build a cooperative order that provided far-
reaching social and economic rights and protections. And within these
eras, debates about the social purposes of liberal internationalism were
never settled. Liberal internationalism has been seen as a vehicle to
realize great economic and social gains lurking and latent within a global
modernizing world, and at other times, and in the eyes of others, as a
desperate and last-chance bulwark against rising violence and threats to
liberal democracy. It has variously been a ‘map’ illuminating the path to a
better world and a ‘survival guide’ to be used in the face of impending
global calamity. Liberal internationalism has varied in its vision of how
universal or global it is or can be as an order. It has been conceived as a
political formation of various shapes and sizes: European, Anglo-
American, Western, free world, and global. Liberal internationalism
embodies a contested set of ideas and agendas – contested from outside
by rival ideologies and political projects, and from within the liberal
tradition itself.
Despite these shifts and tensions, liberal internationalism has several
core ideas that have travelled across the centuries and decades. One is
about openness. Trade and exchange are understood to be constituents
of modern society, and the connections and gains that flow from deep
10
For a survey of the varieties and historical shifts in the liberal internationalist vision, see
Ikenberry 2009.
engagement and integration facilitate peace and political advancement.

Second, there is a commitment to some sort of loosely rule-based set of
relations. Rules and institutions facilitate cooperation and create capaci-
ties for states to make good on their domestic obligations. Third, there is
a view that liberal international order will entail some form of security
cooperation. This might not take the form of alliances or a formal system
of collective security, but states within the order affiliate in ways to
increase their mutual security. Fourth, there is an expectation that liberal
international order will move states in a progressive direction, defined in
terms of liberal democracy. The order provides institutions, relation-
ships, and rights and protections that allow states to grow and advance
at home.
Liberal Internationalism and Cultural Diversity

Looking at the world from a Western liberal internationalist perspective,
what does cultural diversity mean? Generally speaking, cultural diversity
is seen in the great heterogeneity of ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural
identities and values arrayed around the world. Looking out into the
world, nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal internationalists saw
what everyone saw: a wide variety of civilizations, religions, races, and
peoples, out of which cultural diversity emerges. Beyond this, liberal
internationalists do not have a well worked-out theory of what produces
cultural diversity, how it might change over time, and what its impacts
are on world politics. They have implicit notions and assumptions.
International society is generally seen as richly diverse and organized
around various sorts of civilizational and cultural hierarchies, particular-
isms, and universalisms. Inevitably, Western societies see their own
particularisms as universal and the alleged universalisms of others as
specific and particular. Western liberals see the rise of liberal modernity
and the rise of the West as part of a single world-historical movement. In
it is this framework that liberal internationalists try to make sense of
cultural diversity and the evolutionary promise of modern liberal
global order.
Liberal internationalists have made four ‘moves’ over the last two
centuries that reflect efforts to grapple with the existence of worldwide
cultural diversity. The first is in their embracing of the Westphalian
system of state sovereignty that, in effect, gives respect and protection
to cultural differences. The second move, building on the Westphalian
logic, is to ‘push’ cultural differences into civil society and out of the
formal rules and institutions of global order. The third move is to be
patient and wait for the long-term processes of modernization and
globalization to work, eroding cultural differences with the gradual uni-

versal embrace of shared ideals and values. The great lapping tides of
modernity do the work of shaping and reshaping global order, and
cultural differences weaken in the process. Finally, absent these more
inclusive and evolutionary responses, there is also a more brutal move
that has marked earlier eras: the strategy of exclusion. This involves
solving problems of cultural diversity through hierarchy and control –
and in the extreme version, this means empire.
Westphalian Sovereignty
The first move is liberal internationalism’s embracing of Westphalian
sovereignty and the state system. The Westphalian system emerged in the
early modern era of Europe as a general settlement over the terms of
sovereignty, religion, territory, and political authority. The founding
location of the Westphalian project was, of course, Western Europe.
Great powers, empires, and universal religious authority competed for
dominance of the continent. Through wars and peace settlements, rules
and norms of the Westphalian order took shape and evolved. Emerging
from centuries of war and diplomacy are what we call Westphalian norms
of sovereignty, which enshrine the idea that states are formally equal and
independent, possessing the ultimate authority over their people and
territory.11 Over the centuries, the Westphalian system has evolved as a
set of principles and practices and expanded outward from its European
origins to encompass the entire globe.
The founding principles of the Westphalian system – state sovereignty,
territorial integrity, and non-intervention – reflected an emerging con-
sensus that states were the rightful political units for the establishment of
legitimate rule. Norms and principles that subsequently evolved within
the Westphalian system – such as self-determination and non-
discrimination – served to further reinforce the primacy of states and
state authority. These norms and principles have served as the organizing
logic for Westphalian order and provided the ideational sources of polit-
ical authority within it. Under the banner of sovereignty and self-
determination, political movements for decolonization and independ-
ence were set in motion in the non-Western developing world.12 As
Leo Gross argues, this Westphalian settlement marked the passage
11
For depictions of the Westphalian state system, see Hinsley 1963 and Bull 1977.
12
For the story of the rise and spread of sovereignty as the core institution of global political
order, see Buzan 2017.
through the ‘majestic portal which leads from the old into the new
world.’13
The hallmark of the Westphalian system is its principled move to leave
great questions of religion – and by extension culture, values, and iden-
tity – to the internal machinations of sovereign states. The rulers of
European polities established a framework that gave them authority over
religion within their sovereign territory. This was enshrined first in the
Peace of Augsburg in 1555 with the famous Latin dictate cuius regio, eius
religio (the religion of the ruler would be the religion of the realm). The
later conferences at Munster and Osnabruck in 1648 that ended
the Thirty Years’ War – the Peace of Westphalia – further elaborated
the idea of state sovereignty and the territorial basis of authority. To be
sure, this sovereignty has never been fully absolute in either principle or
practice. The Westphalian settlement, for example, affirmed minority
rights and protections. But what did emerge is a relatively simple and
durable principle of international order – that states that are recognized
within this order have the right to choose their own form of government
and religious orientation.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberal internationalists built
their project on this Westphalian foundation. The vision was of sovereign
states operating within a community of states. The members of the liberal
international order were to be autonomous and self-determined. Ideas
about popular sovereignty and the rights of peoples to self-rule can be
found in late medieval and early modern thought, and they were brought
into Western political struggles with the American and French revolu-
tions. They were further developed in the nineteenth century as liberal-
ism and nationalism emerged in Europe. Political groups were
understood to be constituted by ‘a people.’ A people were understood
to have a certain group – or national – consciousness and identity, and
this would be reflected in the organization of the world’s political group-
ings. As such, the principle of self-determination came to be embedded
in both the evolving Westphalian order and the Western movements for
liberal democracy and nationalism.14
The idea of self-determination made its twentieth-century appearance
as a principle of order in Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points and
in the peace making at Versailles in 1919. It guided the way Western
leaders of this era – and later generations – would think about the
organization of political order in the aftermath of empire, beginning with
the disposition of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and
13
Gross 1948, 28.
14
For a history of the ideas of self-determination, see Fisch 2015. See also Cobban 1969.
Russia’s former Baltic territories. After World War II, the principle of
self-determination was enshrined in the United Nations Charter and it
became a driving force in the post-colonial independence movements.15
Over the decades, liberal internationalism has embraced the dual ideals
that states have a right to choose freely their own economic, political, and
cultural ways of life, and the people – as a people – have a right to
constitute themselves or freely determine their form of association within
an existing state.
The Westphalian order is based on the principles of mutual recogni-
tion and reciprocity. Each state within the system has the right to choose
its own political institutions and religious orientation. It is an order
premised on political autonomy and formal equality. ‘The genius of this
system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions
were procedural, not substantive,’ argues Henry Kissinger. ‘If a state
would accept these basic requirements, it could be recognized as an
international citizen able to maintain its own culture, politics, religion,
and internal policies, shielded by the international system from outside
intervention.’16 It is an organizational vision that accepts the multiplicity
of societies and political regimes, operating according to a ‘live and let
live’ ethic. For centuries, the Westphalian state system was a type of
order that coexisted with a wider world of Western domination and racial
and civilizational hierarchy. But within the Westphalian system – initially
within Europe and later encompassing more of the world – a framework
existed for reconciling cultural difference and political interdependence.
Liberal internationalism has built its modern projects on this foundation.
Civil Society and Liberal Democracy

The second way that liberal internationalism has attempted to escape
from conflicts of cultural diversity and identity has been to ‘push’ them
into civil society. As noted earlier, the rise of liberal internationalism is
deeply tied to the emergence of liberal democracy and modern national-
ism. The notion of civil society dates back to classical Greek and Roman
ideas of political community and rule-bound civilization. In the eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries, it emerged again as an idea in
Western theories of natural right, the social contract, and theories of
the state. Here it is seen as a realm of social life, manifest in a rich
diversity of associations and activities – market exchanges, voluntary
associations, churches and professional groupings, self-organizing
15 16
See Manela 2007. Kissinger 2014, 27.
cultural and ethnic communities, and so forth. In idealized form, civil

society exists independent of and prior to political authority and the state.
This notion of civil society emerged together with ideas about popular
sovereignty and liberal democracy. Modern society was emerging in the
nineteenth century, with a growing diversity of groups, classes, and
associations. Civil society was where these increasingly complex profes-
sional and cultural identities were given free rein. As civil society gained
substance and gravitas, it was seen as an important counterweight to the
power of the modern state.17
In this way, nineteenth-century ideas of civil society and nationalism fit
together. Thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Mazzini
championed the nation and nation-state as the modern embodiment of
political community. It would be within the nation-state that liberalism,
democracy, and social justice would be most fully realized. Liberalism
and liberal democracy would exist only as abstract ideals without the
nation and national identity. Across Europe, ‘[m]any of these new
nationalist leaders drew on liberal ideas of political self-determination
and individual liberty in their struggles against the old order,’ Paul Kelly
notes. ‘The early nineteenth-century rise in nationalist sentiment com-
bined Romantic ideas of national identity and solidarity with liberal ideas
of political liberty, individual freedom and constitutional government.’18
At the same time, this sort of civic or democratic nationalism was seen as
a necessary step or building block towards larger forms of political
community and confederation.19 Civil society and nationalism, properly
conceived, were the foundations of internationalism.
The liberal international vision of order draws heavily on this view of
civil society and liberal nationalism. Inside of states, liberal democracies
rest on political principles that depend on pushing cultural, ethnic, and
religious identity into civil society. In an idealized form, citizenship in
liberal democratic states is based on a sort of civic nationalism.20 People
are citizens and enter into the political realm based on equality before the
law. That is, political community is defined by the constitution, citizen-
ship, and shared political principles, and not by ethnic or religious
identity. It is ‘what one believes’ and not ‘who one is’ that determines
citizenship and standing in the system. Ethnic and religious identity –
and cultural diversity – is celebrated, but it is also pushed down into civil
society. In an ideal world, citizens check their ethnic and religious
17 18 19
See Keane 1988. Kelly 2012, 13. Recchia and Urbinati 2009.
20
For the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, see Kohn 1944. See also
Gordon 2017.
identities at the door when they enter the realm of politics within liberal
democracy.
The same logic is thought to apply within the liberal international
order. Liberal democracies enter into the international political realm
as states with rights and obligations set out in the rules, norms, and
institutions of the order. In ideal form, participation in this order is not
shaped by specific cultural, religious, and ethnic characteristics. The
rules and institutions of the liberal international order are narrowly
bound, seeking to avoid the ‘regulation’ of cultural, religious, ethnic,
and racial identities. The idea is not to extinguish cultural diversity but to
remove it as much as possible from the governing principles and insti-
tutions of the international system. In effect, these identities are ‘semi-
privatized’ and pushed down into civil society. In an international order
composed of liberal democracies that are civic national in character, civil
society itself will be internationalized.21 Networks of professional associ-
ations, non-governmental organizations, religious and cultural organiza-
tions, and so forth, will infuse the order.22
This notion of semi-independent realms of civil society is integral to
the logic and character of liberal international order. It is an order that is
not ‘totalizing’; it is a realm that people, societies, groups, and states
enter into, and in doing so they leave behind their societal lives and
identities. In a liberal democracy, when a person acts in the political
realm, he or she is a citizen – but not an African-American, Muslim, or
white Christian. You do not lose your identity; you simply leave it behind
in civil society. In the same way, within a liberal international order, your
interaction with other people and groups – and with other liberal demo-
cratic states – is based on agreed-upon rules, institutionalized forms of
cooperation, and a community of shared but limited social purposes. As
I will argue later on, when the social purposes of a community of states
grow and deepen, it is harder for the liberal international order to remain
a limited realm of political activity that leaves civil society free and
independent.
Indeed, there are limits to this vision of civil society as a semi-
privatized realm. As the twentieth century has unfolded, liberal democ-
racies – and the wider community of states within the Westphalian
system – have found it harder and harder simply to ignore what goes
on within other countries’ civil societies. As a general observation, rising
economic and security interdependence between states makes what goes
on in other countries – and within civil societies – increasingly relevant to
21
See Deudney and Ikenberry 1999.
22
In this project, this view is developed by Berrey in Chapter 8.
each state’s security and well-being. Bad economic policies in one coun-
try can trigger a cascade of reactions that destabilize and undermine the
world economy. Growing violence capacity in the hands of terrorist
groups, hiding within one country’s civil society, can become a danger
to countries far over the horizon. Health pandemics, refugee flows, and
other artefacts of modern interdependence make it harder to simply
operate in a ‘live and let live’ system.23 Cultural diversity can remain
lodged in civil society, but the societal vulnerabilities generated by rising
economic and security interdependence put constant and growing pres-
sure on states to become more interested in what goes on inside other
countries, including in their civil societies.
Liberal Modernity and Globalization

The third way that liberal internationalism has dealt with cultural diver-
sity in the global system is to rely on the deep forces of globalization and
liberal modernity. The first glimmers of the liberal internationalist vision
emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the Indus-
trial Revolution and societal transformations were on the rise, overturn-
ing old systems of economy, authority, and rule. Something called
‘modern society’ was coming into being. Scholars of this era were seeking
to understand the logic and future of these new and emerging societal
formations. Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Condorcet, and Herder were
among the foundational thinkers. New assumptions and understandings
were taking shape about the world, emerging from the discourses of the
Enlightenment and the rise of the natural sciences. In Europe, it was
increasingly clear that modern society represented a break with older
feudal and ancient societal formations. Societal change was seen as the
product of the accumulation of knowledge, discovery, and evolved social
institutions. These transformations had a developmental logic, with laws
and dynamics that could be discovered. At the centre of these grand
transformations were humans, manifest in various capacities – as agents,
innovators, interest groups, classes, and thinkers.
In this liberal modernist vision, the world is seen as undergoing a
continuous and unfolding global transformation. All the peoples and
societies are part of it. ‘Modern society’ may appear in some places
before it appears elsewhere. There may be vanguards and laggards. But
the structures and setting of modernity have a universal logic. All the
23
For an overview of the problems generated by growing levels of economic and security
interdependence, see Patrick 2018. See also Jones et al. 2009 and Ikenberry and
Slaughter 2006.
world is in motion. Whether societies are on the top or the bottom, they
are all struggling with the problems of modernity. As Bjorn Wittrock
argues, ‘we may look upon modernity as an age when certain structuring
principles have come to define a common global condition.’24 Liberal
internationalism sees the world through this modernity vision – a sort of
‘grand narrative’ of the world. As Anthony Giddens argues, this under-
standing of modernity involves the creation of an ‘overarching “story
line” by means of which we are placed in history as beings having a
definite past and a predictable future.’25
The world’s societies and civilizations are rooted in a vast diversity of
particularities of culture and tradition. But modernization is moving
them forward along a common trajectory of development and transform-
ation. In the strong version of this modernist vision, there is an expect-
ation of a long-term grand convergence of peoples and societies as they
travel modernity’s pathway. In different eras over the last two centuries,
this liberal modernist orientation has ebbed and flowed. It reached a peak
at the turn of the nineteenth century, as Western technology, wealth,
power, empire, and ideas commanded the world. The world wars and the
coming of fascism and totalitarianism cast doubt on the progressive
character and direction of modernity. In the world seen from Europe in
the 1930s or 1940s, modernity was not moving societies along a liberal
democratic pathway. It was generating more powerful and illiberal states.
In the post-war era of American dominance, the ideas of liberal mod-
ernism returned again and were recast as ‘modernization theory.’ As
Edward Shils, writing in 1958, put it: to be a modern state is to be
‘democratic and equalitarian, scientific, economically advanced and sov-
ereign … Modernity involves universal public education. Modernity is
scientific. It believes the progress of the country rests on rational tech-
nology, and ultimately on scientific knowledge … “Modern” means
being western without the onus of following the West. It is the model
of the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and
locus.’26 The driving forces of modernity were the deep forces of indus-
trialism and capitalism development. In the view of industrial society
theorists, such as Ralf Dahrendorf, Raymond Aron, and Seymour Martin
Lipset, the imperatives of industrialism were common to all industrial
systems – whether they were socialist or capitalist – rooted in the forces of
production. These imperatives were leading all industrial societies to
converge towards a common modern industrial state form, one that
facilitated and managed the complex tasks of science, technology,
24 25 26
Wittrock 2000, 55–56. Giddens 1990, 2. Quoted in Gilman 2003, 1–2.
education, markets, and continuous socio-economic adaptation.27 The

states that would emerge and flourish in this modernizing world would
be open, accountable, pluralistic regimes. With the end of the Cold War,
this liberal modernist thinking reappeared again, famously captured in
Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, ‘the end of history.’28
Hierarchy and Empire

Finally, liberal internationalists have dealt with cultural diversity through
hierarchy, separation, and exclusion. In its most extreme form, this has
been manifest in empire. Liberal internationalism has had a complex
relationship with empire and imperialism. Across the last two centuries,
it has both provided an impetus for Western imperialism and inspiration
for movements that have opposed it.29 The sources of European imperi-
alism run deep in Western society and capitalism. If empire has a core
logic, it is one of hierarchically organized domination by one people over
others. Empire in the ancient and modern world has come in many
different varieties: formal, informal, maritime, land-based, and so forth.
But what all empires have in common is the hierarchical differentiation of
peoples. As Burbank and Cooper argue, empires ‘maintain distinction
and hierarchy as they incorporate new people,’ organizing political space
to reflect the ‘non-equivalence of multiple populations.’30 For most of
the modern era, European states have simultaneously involved them-
selves in the building of the Westphalian state system and a world of
empire. Inside of the West, the logic of sovereign equality and the rules
and institutions of multilateralism has prevailed. The logic of order has
rested on a rough equality of power between nation-states. Outside of the
West, the logic of hierarchy, separation, and exclusion has prevailed,
enshrined in global amalgams of empire. In effect, Western states have
dealt with cultural diversity – manifest in relationships with weak, non-
Western societies – by placing these societies outside the boundaries of
the nascent liberal international order.
In these four ways, the liberal internationalist tradition has dealt with
cultural diversity. It has sought both to accommodate and transcend this
diversity. It has sought to push cultural diversity ‘down’ into civil society
and ‘out’ into the peripheries of empire. It is not that cultural diversity –
that is, divergent ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural identities and
values – disappears. It gets moved downward into sovereign states and
27 28
See Aron 1968. Fukuyama 1992.
29
For a thoughtful and comprehensive account, see Bell 2016.
30
Burbank and Cooper 2008, 8.
into civil society and organized within global political hierarchies. The
international political order does not try to regulate cultural diversity, but to
celebrate it, ignore it, privatize it, and exclude it. An open, loosely rule-
based, and progressively oriented international order does not need to
grapple with all the complexities of humanity’s vast and diverse traditions
and identities of civilization and society. The rules and institutions of
liberal international order are seen as more limited in scope and purpose.
Moreover, as modernity unfolds, gradually enveloping the whole of the
global system, there will be additional dynamics that support an open
and rule-based international order. The states themselves will increas-
ingly grapple with the same problems – how to manage industrialism and
modern capitalism – and they will be drawn to the same sorts of ‘solu-
tions,’ which entail convergent adaptations of their regimes. Finally,
along the way, modernity is seen to be generating a future in which all
countries will be seeking to take advantage of its ‘upside’ (i.e. the possi-
bilities for progress and advancement) while guarding against its ‘down-
side’ (i.e. the dangers and mutual vulnerabilities that come from rising
economic and security interdependence).31 These are the circumstances
that allow liberal internationalists to dream of a ‘one world’ international
political order.
The Limits of Liberal Internationalism

Liberal internationalism has multiple approaches to dealing with cultural
diversity, or at least it does in an ideal world. In an ideal world, the liberal
ascendancy of the last two centuries will continue, and liberal democracy
will spread worldwide. It will do so on a foundation of Westphalian
sovereignty, which is now a worldwide reality and the most universal
and widely shared global norm. Within large and expanding realms of
civil society, diverse identities and values will be protected and thrive. In
the meantime, liberal democracies will champion an open and rules-
based international order. The ongoing forces of modernization and
political development will push and pull the world towards common
ground. Racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural uniqueness will coexist
with nation-states committed to operating within a cooperative global
system. In such a world, empire and imperialism, as tools of exclusion
and domination, will eventually give way to a global system based on
sovereign equality and liberal multilateral rules and norms of order. With
31
See Deudney 2007.
the ghost of Immanuel Kant looking on, this is the modernist evolution-
ary logic that stands behind the liberal internationalist vision.
But in the real world, this vision has shown its limits. This is particu-
larly true today, in the post-Cold War era, as the Western liberal order
has spread outward. To put it simply, the liberal ascendancy has not
unfolded as the grand narrative of liberal modernity might have expected.
To be sure, civil society is the place where racial, ethnic, religious, and
cultural identities and values tend to reside. But these identities and
values have never stayed ‘contained’ within civil society. Indeed, they
are a powerful – perhaps growing – presence and source of political
conflict within Western democracies. The same is true around the world.
Civic nationalism, which enshrines the nineteenth-century idea of liberal
or democratic nationalism, is equally troubled. Modern democracies –
Western and non-Western – are crowded political spaces where citizens
and political parties ‘bring forward’ rather than ‘leave behind’ their racial,
ethnic, religious, and cultural identities and values. Identity politics –
coming from both the right and the left – are at the centre of the political
struggle within modern democracies.32 Liberal democracy itself has
suffered setbacks in the last decade, as populism, authoritarianism, and
backlash politics have gained ground. It is not necessary to subscribe to
the full critique of liberal modernity to appreciate the vagaries and
dysfunctions that afflict the liberal democratic world.33 If these problems
are real and growing, liberal internationalism’s efforts to escape from or
transcend conflicts of cultural diversity will certainly fall short.
Liberal internationalism’s other approach to escaping conflicts over
cultural diversity has been through hierarchy and exclusion, which ultim-
ately has meant empire. There is a double irony here. One is that the
ideology of liberal modernity has tended to give cover to Western imper-
ial projects. European states could pursue empire while also maintaining
that these efforts would ultimately lead to modernization and advance-
ment in the colonial world. The time was not yet ripe for sovereignty and
self-rule, but the imperial patronage of the West would pave the way for
it. Liberal modernity was a sort of ‘promissory note’ for a future moment
of self-determination, and so empire and imperialism could, ironically,
be seen as a progressive move in world history.34 The other interesting
irony is that liberal internationalism, at least in the twentieth century,
advanced ideas and principles that did indeed served to undermine
and delegitimate formal empire. Its ideas about sovereign equality,
32
For a recent critique of identity politics in the United States, see Lilla 2017 and
Fukuyama 2018.
33 34
See Mishra 2017. See Morefield 2014.
self-determination, and political rights and freedoms were the grist of

movements for national self-rule and the end of empire. But this univer-
salization of notions of national sovereignty, self-determination, and
political rights and freedoms was driven less by the ‘push’ of the West
as by the ‘pull’ of the non-Western developing world. The ideas may have
originated in the West, but the political agency of change did not.35
Beyond this, there is the lurking question of precisely how universal
liberal internationalism is. Liberal internationalist ideas can be under-
stood and defined in universalistic terms. As abstract principles of order,
they are not tied to a particular people or geographic space. Openness,
multilateralism, rights and protections, progressive development,
cooperative security – these are all ideas that can be seen as universal
or global in scope. Yet they are also ideas that are deeply rooted – and
tied – to the Western experience. The Westphalian and liberal inter-
nationalist projects are both manifestations of the centuries-long Euro-
pean and Western political and economic ascendancy. Western
Christendom, the European state system, the Industrial Revolution, the
rise of Western liberal democracy, and the eras of British and American
hegemony provide the foundations for modern liberal international
order. Put differently, liberal internationalism has emerged and gained
dominance within a historically unique political formation. Liberal inter-
nationalism has only existed in the two centuries of Anglo-American
dominance. The great question is: do the principles and ideas of liberal
internationalism have wider relevance outside this political formation? Or
are they really simply expressions of American and Western values and
interests?
Liberal internationalists argue that the ideas and principles are arte-
facts – not of Anglo-America or the rise of the West, as such, but of the
deeper unfolding forces of the Enlightenment and modernity. They are
not ideas and principles that are ‘invented and owned’ by the West, but
are more generic ideas that adhere to humanity and the universal search
for human betterment. But is this right? Liberal internationalism
emerged in its current phase after World War II as an organizing vision
for the Western-led order. Paradoxically, in doing so, it both became
framed as a more universalistic project and became more deeply tied to
American hegemonic power. This duality became all the more glaring in
the aftermath of the Cold War, and it is at the heart of the crisis of liberal
internationalism today.
35
See Reus-Smit 2013b.
The universalism can be seen in the United Nations Charter and in the
Universal Declaration. In the 1940s, liberal internationalism became
reframed. The liberal internationalism of the Woodrow Wilson era was
built around civilizational, racial, and cultural hierarchies. It was a crea-
ture of the Western and white man’s world. The 1940s saw a shift or
reformulation of these ideas. Universal rights and protections became
more central to the ideological vision. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four
Freedoms were the defining vision for this new conception of liberal
international order.36 The post-war order was to be a security commu-
nity – a global space where liberal democracies joined together to build a
cooperative order that enshrined basic human rights and social
protections. At the same time, these universal rights and protections
were advanced and legitimated in terms of the American-led Cold War
struggle. To be inside this order was to enjoy trade, expanding growth,
and tools for managing economic stability. In other words, in the post-
war era, liberal internationalism became both more universal in its ideas
and principles and more tied to an American-led political order.
With the end of the Cold War, the universalism of the liberal inter-
national project drove world order building. The Soviet Union and its
subsystem collapsed, and the United States and its subsystem were left
standing. In the years that followed, the liberal international order spread
outward, and countries in various regions made political and economic
transitions and integrated into this expanding order. For a while, this
global process looked like a triumph for the liberal international project.
All the ‘good things’ in the liberal project seemed to be on the upswing –
human rights, markets, security alliances, multilateralism, and the pro-
gressive advance of liberal democracy. But during this moment of tri-
umph, the seeds of crisis were being planted. The liberal international
order expanded, but it also got ‘thinner.’ It began to lose its social
purpose as a security community. Liberal internationalism began to look
more like a framework for international capitalist transactions.
This leaves the liberal international order in a difficult position to cope
with cultural diversity. All the strategies that we have identified as liberal
approaches to cultural diversity have weakened. As noted earlier, rising
economic and security interdependence has made the Westphalian and
civil society solutions to global cultural diversity less tenable. Countries
care more and more about what goes on inside other countries, either
because of the rise of human rights norms or because of the growing
dangers of transitional harms: climate change, refugee flows, health
36
See Keene 2002 and Borgwardt 2007.
pandemics, and trade and financial linkages. It is harder and harder for
people to exist as islands of social, cultural, economic, or political inde-
pendence. Sovereignty and civil society are not the containers they used
to be, or at least they are not what liberal internationalists hoped they
would be in an ideal world. At the same time, the long-term processes of
liberal modernization also seem to be weaker than they would be in an
ideal liberal world. The liberal democratic pathway no longer seems to be
the only route to economic growth and political advancement. Finally,
the old and most coercive solutions to conflict generated by cultural
diversity – empire and hierarchy – are also, thankfully, illegitimate and
discredited. As liberal internationalism struggles today to find its footing,
it will need to grapple anew with its approaches to a world of cultural
diversity.
Conclusion
Liberal internationalism has tried to escape the traps of cultural, racial,
and religious identity. It is a vision that sees the possibility of a world
civilization. It is a vision that seeks to celebrate cultural diversity and
identity, but urges that the celebrations take place inside civil society and
outside the political realm. This universalistic framing of liberal inter-
nationalism is a source of legitimacy, but it also reflects the view that
liberal democracy – and a community of liberal democracies – tends to
grow and strengthen over the long term as the world system undergoes
deep evolutionary and developmental change. It is not surprising, there-
fore, that when the Cold War ended, liberal internationalism gained
ground around the world. It was a readily available set of rules, insti-
tutions, and organizational logics for world order. The problem, how-
ever, is that the ‘globalization’ of liberal internationalism seems to
undermine the political foundations and security community logic that
made it successful. The modernist foundations of liberal international-
ism are today being put to the test.
The future of liberal internationalism depends on the degree to which
it can rebuild its sense of social purpose. If it is to be a global system of
order, liberal internationalism may need to have a relatively ‘thin’ social
purpose. It might simply be a vision of a barebones system of openness
and rules, perhaps along the lines of what prevailed in the nineteenth
century. Alternatively, liberal internationalism might return to its more
circumscribed realm within the Western liberal democratic world. It
would be an ‘inside’ system again, building social purpose around shared
history and traditions. It would try to regain its ‘thick’ social purpose,
built around alliances and security cooperation and the older post-war
system of ‘embedded liberalism.’ Liberal international order would sur-

vive by shrinking its global ambitions and expanding its Western regional
ambitions. Alternatively, liberal internationalism might seek to reorient
itself as a twenty-first-century system of global order, emphasizing the
way its rules and institutions of multilateral order can be useful across the
global in responding to cascading problems of rising economic and
security interdependence. Liberal internationalism would not be seen
primarily as a vision of liberal democratic order. It would not be a
blueprint for making the world ‘safe for democracy.’ It would not assume
a future defined by liberal modernity. Rather it would be a vision of
expanding global multilateral cooperation, aimed at providing security
from the growing dangers of human catastrophe brought on by global
warming, nuclear proliferation, health pandemics, and so forth. In this
future, liberal internationalism would not try to escape cultural diversity,
transcend it, or organize it within a global political hierarchy. It can
simply manage it through appeal to the growing vulnerabilities that
people face – vulnerabilities they face as a human race.
8 When Liberal States Bite Back
The Micro-politics of Culture
Ellen Berrey
In the early 2010s, as the right-wing populist Tea Party movement

swelled across the United States, some activists set their sights on local
sustainability planning. They cited a variety of reasons for opposing local
governments’ proposals to curb sprawl and pollution, but many pointed
to an unexpected adversary: Agenda 21, a voluntary sustainable develop-
ment initiative of the United Nations. According to these political opera-
tives, the UN’s Agenda 21 is a sinister plot masterminded by a
totalitarian one-world government and implemented through land use
planning. Under a so-called green mask of environmentalism, the United
Nations is usurping American sovereignty and the property rights and
freedom of the American people. This populist-nationalist opposition to
Agenda 21 was animated by fantastical and generally misinformed
understandings of the United Nations and liberal internationalism.
Spokespeople characterized Agenda 21 as ‘an all-encompassing prescrip-
tion for regulating every aspect of human activity’ that will ‘cause fuel
prices to rise, businesses to leave the United States, remove you from
your land, take your property, manipulate our economy, take away our
Constitutional Rights and depopulate our planet.’1
At the helm of the anti-Agenda 21 campaign were conservative, afflu-
ent and middle class older, white American property owners in rural and
suburban communities. Their campaign was fuelled by the rise of the
Tea Party movement and, like that movement, largely absorbed into the
Republican Party. On the ground, the anti-Agenda 21 mobilization was
impactful. Activist and sympathetic politicians successfully stopped city-
and county-level planning initiatives, introduced anti-Agenda 21 legisla-
tion in twenty-six states, passed it in five, and prompted the Republican
National Committee (RNC) to add an anti-Agenda 21 position to its
presidential platform. The mainstreaming of the movement is indicative
of both the tacking of American conservativism to the extreme right and
1
Simpson 2011a. See also, Agenda 21 Radio, n.d. 2017. Available at https://
paulprestona21r.podbean.com/p/about/. Accessed 16 May 2018.
159
160 Ellen Berrey
the burgeoning transnational far-right backlash against multilateralism

and multiculturalism.
This chapter uses the case study of the anti-Agenda 21 mobilization to
examine how the meaning of international order is formulated through
local identities and culture and to identify the political consequences of
that meaning making. This case serves as a Petri dish for connecting
populist-nationalist politics at the community level within the United
States to the international arena. While many analysts have discussed
the ways in which liberal internationalism is threatened by an illiberal
world – by the rise of non-Western great powers, the spread of trans-
national religious insurgencies, the resurgence of authoritarianism – that
emphasis neglects the cultural transformations taking place in America’s
liberal heartland. This chapter demonstrates the significance of the
micro-politics of culture within the global hegemon. Through meaning-
making practices, anti-Agenda 21 activists associate the international
order with locally salient issues that may appear, to the outsider, com-
pletely irrelevant – namely, land use planning by local governments.
These political actors present coordination of global activity by a central
organizing body as a threat to American freedom. In doing so, they reject
linchpins of the liberal hegemonic project: global institutions and norms
of global cooperation.
In these micro-politics, an abrasive tension between three diversity
regimes is in play. The United Nations’ hegemonic paradigm of globally
motivated local governance, with a diversity regime of multiculturalism
predicated on cosmopolitan internationalism, faces a bottom-up challenge.
Agenda 21 opponents endorse an aspirational far-right paradigm of
reactionary-nationalist local governance, with a diversity regime of an
idealized homogenous nation at risk, sometimes implicitly and sometimes
explicitly characterized as white, male dominated, and Christian. Those
nationalist politics defend America’s deeply institutionalized diversity
regime of colour-blind racism: widespread racial inequality coupled with
denial of the existence, extent, and structural causes of that inequality.
The case of the anti-Agenda 21 campaign illustrates how cultural (mis)
understandings, formulated at the local level, inform a reactionary
opposition to liberal internationalism that is transforming American
politics. Ideas of a corrupt, conspiring globalist elite establishment and
America under siege have become institutionalized in public policy, state
law, media coverage, and the political theatre at both the national and
subnational level. The political ascendance of Donald Trump is an
outcome. The Trump administration is redefining a more than sev-
enty-year-old conception of America’s national interest, to reject the
United States’ central role in leading a liberal international order.
When Liberal States Bite Back: The Micro-politics of Culture 161
Ultimately, cultural politics at the micro level within the hegemon are
having a destabilizing influence on the liberal international order.
Challenging Scholarly Conceptions of Cultural

Consensus and International Order
The case of the Agenda 21 opposition diverges from traditional scholarly
conceptions of cultural consensus and international order. It challenges
two prevailing views. One perspective, associated most notably with
Martin Wight, holds that ‘cultural unity’ among the members of inter-
national society is essential, as it facilitates the cooperation necessary to
maintain international order.2 For Hedley Bull, a shared culture among
states, and the normative cohesion it engenders, enables states to coord-
inate their interests and more effectively build institutions.3 Accordingly,
international society will falter without the cohesion that common cul-
ture makes possible. With its emphasis on systemic processes, this per-
spective tends to discount domestic dynamics, as well.
A second approach, associated with John Ruggie and (in this volume)
John Ikenberry, understands cultural consensus and international order
by foregrounding the domestic cultural identities of dominant states.4
Their focus is the post-1945 international order, which they explain as
rooted in the liberal identities of the hegemonic state and its allies. They
argue that the United States and allied states shared a common liberal
social purpose, which provided the foundation for international cooper-
ation, particularly multilateralism. According to Ruggie, embedded lib-
eralism made international economic liberalization possible.5 As he
writes, the compromise of Pax Americana was that multilateralism and
global markets needed to be compatible with liberal states’ normative
frameworks and institutional practices, such as social welfare and domes-
tic stability. In Liberal Leviathan, Ikenberry points to the overwhelming
influence of the United States, as the sole hegemon with both economic
and military dominance, on the liberal international order.6 Of great
importance, he argues, is the United States’ ability to condition the
global context in which states interact. Christian Reus-Smit’s The Moral
Purpose of the State theorizes that sovereign states create the foundation of
cooperative order by producing institutions based in their state identities
and in the morals that define those identities.7 His analysis supports the
view that the liberal international order and the values that constitute it
2 3 4 5
Wight 1977, 33. Bull 1977. Ruggie 1982; Ikenberry 2012. Ibid.
6 7
Ikenberry 2012. Reus-Smit 1999.
162 Ellen Berrey
originate in the domestic politics and identities of dominant states, which

tend to be liberal.
However, these two perspectives have flawed analytic conceptions of
culture and politics. Both perspectives, particularly the second one,
assume that the culture of the American hegemon is consistent and
homogeneous. Both treat cultural uniformity as a necessary prerequisite
of liberal internationalism. Both presume that the liberal order is shaped
foremost by progressivism and progressive social forces. And both too
often cleave off internal domestic politics, including micro-level cultural
politics, from a conception of international order. Consequently, these
dominant approaches to international order largely miss the domestic
and international consequences of local cultural contestation.
As the analysis here makes clear, micro-politics of cultural contestation
within the liberal hegemon are far more complicated and, as it turns out,
more ominous. These politics have emerged, in large measure, in
response to post-Cold War upheavals in the global order that follow from
American liberalism, such as an uncritical faith in capitalist enterprise.
Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century transformations, such as
free trade agreements that facilitate corporate outsourcing and a growing
population of immigrants of colour, have incited economic and cultural
fear among many Americans. Those fears have empowered the rise of the
far right.
This chapter challenges the assertion that liberal states have a domin-
ant, monolithic cultural orientation towards international order. That
assertion is based on a misconception of how culture actually operates.
Culture is not static, consistent, or all-encompassing. The notion of a
national culture is a misnomer, as an analysis of micro-politics makes
clear. Drawing on insights from cultural sociology, this chapter relies on
a more nuanced, evidence-based conception of culture that foregrounds
meaning making and locates it within institutional contexts.
An Interpretive Cultural Sociology of International Order

Interpretive, relational cultural sociology provides a useful framework for
examining contestation over international order within nation-states.
Such a framework directs attention to the ways in which the international
order is constituted through the discourses, politics, and institutional
activities of people who live within sovereign states or participate in
transnational networks. It prioritizes interpretation in two respects: inter-
pretation as a fundamental feature of social action embedded in insti-
tutional environments, and thus a practice to be studied; and
interpretation as central to the doing of social science, thus requiring
readers’ trust in the analyst’s authority as an interpreter.8 A central tenet

of cultural sociology is that practices of meaning making are fundamental
to political activity.9 People formulate and express meaning relationally
as they engage with each other, organizations, and institutions.10 Their
meaning-making practices, and meanings themselves, are dynamic, mal-
leable, multivalent, and contentious.11 Through meaning making, they
construct their interests and perceptions of their social environments.
Through meaning making, they exercise and contest power. In fact, an
individual or group’s ability to exercise power depends, in large measure,
on its ability to legitimate its preferred conception of the world.12 This is
symbolic politics, the use of ideas to exercise power.13
The symbolic politics of international order are comprised of discur-
sive, contextualized contests over meaning making – a point also made by
some constructivist international relations scholars such as Andrew Phil-
lips, who directs attention to the ‘normative complexes,’ or webs of
meaning, that enable sovereign states to exert their authority and bring
order into being.14 Fundamental concepts such as democracy or sustain-
able development do not exist a priori to social action, but rather are
created through collective interpretations and social activity.15 Likewise,
international organizations and the relationships between political units,
such as sovereign states and their domestic populations, come into
existence through people’s understandings of them. And for most
domestic actors, their conceptions of international order are informed
not by first-hand participation in global governance or deep knowledge,
but through their interactions and engagements in their everyday lives,
mediated by organizations, institutions, political and media discourses,
and various means of communication. In developed countries, television,
talk radio, and social media are especially consequential. Thus, many
people know the United Nations (if they know of it at all) as an abstract
symbol. Their interpretations of the United Nations may have much
more to do with their personal lives, projected emotions, interactive
relationships, and political environments than how the organization actu-
ally operates. In other words, their immediate institutional environments
give rise to cultural meanings and become anchors for those meanings.
Within the global hegemon, local interpretations of international
order, however outlandish or misinformed, are politically influential, as
the case of the anti-Agenda 21 campaign reveals. Such interpretations,
8 9 10
Geertz 1973. Norton 2004; Swidler 1986. Berrey 2015; Emirbayer 1997.
11 12 13
Finnemore and Sikkink 1998. Simpson 2011a. Edelman 1985 [1964].
14
Phillips 2010. See also Reus-Smit 2013b.
15
On the absence of shared meanings, see Hurrell 2007.
164 Ellen Berrey
and their political mobilization, are contributing to the unravelling of

international liberalism. To understand the micro-politics of anti-
Agenda 21 activism, these politics must be contextualized within a
broader far-right nationalist uprising against the hegemony of UN-
centric multilateralism and its diversity regime of multiculturalism.
Diversity Regimes at Odds

Anti-Agenda 21 activists’ resistance to the United Nations, sustainability
planning, and Agenda 21 can be understood by analysing each side’s
conflicting paradigms of political governance and their corresponding
diversity regimes. There are fundamental differences in each side’s con-
struction of legitimate political authority and political membership, in the
forms of cultural difference each side authorizes, and in the institutions
each relies upon. At the core of the campaign against Agenda 21 is a
challenge to the United Nations’ hegemonic conception of political
membership. This conflict plays out in the context of America’s deep-
seated if unacknowledged racial system of white domination. Hence,
three diversity regimes are in play: the United Nations’ hegemonic
regime of multiculturalism, America’s entrenched racial regime, and
anti-Agenda 21 activists’ idealized, mercurial regime of nativism.
The United Nations is a centrepiece of the contemporary global
system of liberal internationalism, state sovereignty, and multilateralism.
This has been true since its creation in 1945, an effort shepherded by the
United States, with allied nations, to construct a post-war global order
according to its interests.16 Representing 193 nation-states, the United
Nations has the stated purposes of maintaining global peace and security,
coordinating worldwide activity, and promoting norms of global cooper-
ation and human rights.
The cosmopolitan internationalism of the United Nations rests on a
hegemonic paradigm of globally motivated local governance. According
to this paradigm, members of a nation-state are regulated state subjects
and also, crucially, global citizens, with responsibilities for both humanity
worldwide and a shared global ecosystem.17 As such, states’ methods of
local rule should be incentivized by international actors, international
norms, and international law and policy. In turn, local governance and
regulation should aim, in part, to serve the global common good and
global values. This paradigm is well institutionalized and has oriented US
foreign policy for decades (with significant qualifications).
16 17
Ruggie 1993. On cosmopolitanism, see Singer 2004.
Since the 1990s, the United Nations’ reigning paradigm has endorsed
a diversity regime of liberal multiculturalism, one that is now hegemonic
in the context of global governance institutions. UN-style multicultural-
ism conceives of the state as the possession of all citizens, not of a
national majority or a powerful ethno-racial or religious faction.18 Liberal
multiculturalism supports some collectivist norms and institutions, such
as human rights and protections for subjugated groups like Indigenous
peoples. The professed purpose is to enhance democratic citizenship.
Group membership is foundational and minority group rights are essen-
tial, although both are secondary to ‘universally recognized human rights
and fundamental freedoms,’ as specified in the UN Universal Declar-
ation on Cultural Diversity.19 For adherents, the multicultural accom-
modation of difference is far superior to a paradigm that ideologically
reifies ethno-racial hierarchy and champions white, Western superiority.
The United Nations’ diversity regime of liberal multiculturalism
extends to sustainability. Indeed, the United Nations frames sustainable
development as a globally minded antidote to the problems of local
urban growth: all too often haphazard, environmentally destructive,
socially regressive, and driven foremost by short-term profit motives.20
Furthermore, the United Nations calls for the simultaneous consideration
and regulation of cultural, social, economic, and environmental issues.
Recently, in 2015, the organization announced its 2030 Agenda for Sus-
tainable Development (the successor to UN Agenda 21) with goals that
include ‘gender equality,’ ‘reduced inequalities,’ and ‘sustainable cities
and communities’ that are ‘inclusive, safe, resilient.’21 (Despite such
endorsements, the states that dominate global governance all prioritize
security, geopolitics, and short-term economic growth over a coherent
ideology of liberal multiculturalism, minority empowerment, or environ-
mental protection.)22
The parochial anti-globalism of the anti-Agenda 21 campaign pushes
back against post-Cold War liberal internationalism. Supporters’ aspir-
ational, counter-hegemonic paradigm of nationalistic-reactionary local
governance opposes global governance on principle. They define their
political interests and identities as self-interested property owners and
concerned citizens, with loyalties foremost to their nation. Within this
regime, international governance is an external menace and multilateral
coordination is not a means of ensuring sovereignty but rather a threat to
it. On these grounds, anti-Agenda 21 activists reject a role for the United
Nations in coordinating state action and resolving collective global
18 19 20
Kymlicka 2007. Ibid., 6. See, General Assembly 2012.
21 22
United Nations 2015. Boulden and Kymlicka 2015.
166 Ellen Berrey
problems. They call instead for a robust, America First role for the
nation-state and for local governance and regulation, one that protects
rights-bearing citizens from external threats. In typical populist fashion,
the conspiracism of the campaign vilifies and scapegoats its opponents as
untrustworthy ‘globalist’ elites and abetting bureaucrats, who are crush-
ing ‘the people’ – the hard-working American middle class – from
above.23 These activists have used the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory as
symbolic politics. The narrative enables them to push a political agenda,
generate anxiety and panic, and quash debate and dissent.24
Anti-Agenda 21 activists engage in counter-interpellation of the
United Nations’ diversity regime of multiculturalism, but in ways that
require analytic unpacking. When anti-Agenda 21 activists directly
engaged with the American government in local community forums,
they did not usually focus directly on race, nationality, or other cultural
differences. Nonetheless, their counter-insurgency endorses an idealized,
counter-hegemonic diversity regime premised on white supremacy,
sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. This is apparent both in
their mobilization of colour-blind racism and in the correspondence of
their campaign with the flourishing far-right populist-nationalist global
movement, elaborated here.
Anti-Agenda 21 activists mobilized in defence of the prevailing racial
system of the United States. That complex system is characterized by
colour-blind racism layered atop deeply rooted systemic white domin-
ation, alongside a more fragile programme of cultural pluralism, minority
rights, and ‘diversity.’25 Colour-blind racism has become a dominant
racial ideology in the United States of the past fifty years. It is institu-
tionalized through law, public policy, ideology, and practices that are not
racialized at face value but are racially discriminatory in their design,
implementation, and consequences. Colour-blind ideology is character-
ized foremost by a denial of the existence, extent, and structural causes of
that inequality. Common expressions of colour-blindness include rhet-
oric on abstract liberalism (e.g. individual choice, market fundamental-
ism) and seemingly race-neutral terms that function as stigmatizing racial
code words.26
Colour-blind racism ignores or outright denies the fact that the Ameri-
can social structure is racialized and hierarchical in ways that largely
advantage white people across a variety of institutions.27 Yet it bears
directly on the American racial system, in which different racialized
23
Berlet and Lyons 2000.
24
On the use of conspiricism in elite politics, see Fenster 2008; Barkun 2003.
25 26 27
Berrey 2015. Bonilla-Silva 2014. Ibid.
groups have collective interests according to their place in the racial

hierarchy. In that system, white people act, very often, as a social collect-
ive, even if they do not see themselves that way and do not openly express
racial intentions (by, for instance, professing that they ‘don’t see race’).28
Furthermore, through interlocking and systemic processes, practices,
ideologies, and institutions, white people are usually able to preserve
their advantages and power, while most people of colour experience
systematic oppression.29
Colour-blind racism, and its defence of white domination, helps to
further explain how an oppositional political mobilization like the anti-
Agenda 21 campaign, which shies away from overt racial rhetoric, still
bears directly on matters of cultural difference. Of particular relevance is
the profound racial and class segregation of American geography, char-
acterized by overwhelmingly white, affluent suburban and rural regions
and majority-minority cities. These patterns are due largely to govern-
ment policies of homeownership, transportation, taxation, and (until the
1960s) lawful racial segregation, all created by and for white people.30
These policies have directly facilitated white people’s suburbanization,
homeownership, accumulation of wealth, and access to better-funded
schools, nicer amenities, and environmentally safer spaces. Commensur-
ately, people of colour have been systematically deprived of economic
opportunity and geographic mobility and also have suffered from greater
exposure to hazardous, dangerous environments.31 Thus, anti-Agenda
21 activists’ calls for property rights and sovereignty defend those very
policies and their biased effects. In other words, their colour-blind diver-
sity regime reinforces and defends the entrenchment of white favourit-
ism. These activists partake in a long tradition of social movement
organizing by white homeowners in suburbs and rural areas, done in
the name of protecting their property interests, wealth, and way of life.
What is relatively new, in historic terms, is these homeowners’ colour-
blind refusal to recognize their racialized interests and their defence of
white domination.
The racist diversity regime of anti-Agenda 21 activists becomes all the
more evident when considering the unmistakable correspondence
between their campaign and the flourishing far-right global movement
of white-dominated populist nationalism. That extremist movement has
found a home in the Republican Party, as the party tacks to the far right,
and in the administration of President Trump. In countries such as
Poland and Russia, it is empowering nationalist, authoritarian leaders.32
28 29 30
Lewis 2004. Feagin 2014. Rothstein 2017.
31 32
See, for example, Bullard and Wright 1986. See, for example, Sunstein 2018.
168 Ellen Berrey
In its myriad forms, it reacts against liberal internationalism’s normative

and institutional pillars: globalization, cosmopolitanism, and multicul-
turalism. Both the anti-Agenda 21 campaign and that global movement
rely on unfounded claims of a nation at risk, mistrust of international
governance, antagonism towards cosmopolitan urbanism, misinforma-
tion, and incitement of cultural anxieties, all facilitated by online com-
munications.33 Likewise, that global movement advocates a nativist
diversity regime characterized by overt and thinly coded racism, sexism,
xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia. Within the
United States, such virulent nativism has ideological support on the
ground, from high-profile Republican politicians to right-wing militia.
Yet this counter-hegemonic diversity regime remains largely aspirational.
It has not been formally institutionalized in governance structures –
although that is changing somewhat under the Trump administration
and some institutionalization is happening covertly, such as through
white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement and the military.34
In the anti-Agenda 21 campaign, activists’ civic nationalism (which
idealizes American national identity and property ownership) readily
dovetails with both white nationalism (which valorizes Western culture
and white men as superior) and Christian nationalism (which calls for the
defence of America’s religious heritage as a Christian nation). All of these
versions of nationalism customarily scapegoat immigrants, people of
colour, and religious minorities. This is most apparent in the YouTube
videos, chat rooms, and other online forums that continue to circulate
the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. There, a bigoted white and Christian
nationalism clearly informs the opposition. Implicit claims of white
ethno-racial solidarity and overt claims of white superiority are common-
place. According to this diversity regime, on the side of liberal ‘globalists’
are also minority ‘others’ who share cosmopolitan values, diversity, and
lack of faith. Together, those actors threaten the rights and identities of
the purportedly virtuous, homogeneous, authentic citizens who represent
the nation.35 In sum, the campaign’s use of conspiracism to provoke
cultural panic about global governance and its compatibility with a far-
right politics of minority scapegoating run counter to fundamental pre-
cepts of liberal internationalism and the United Nations’ diversity regime
of global multiculturalism.
As with the larger far-right movement, the campaign’s counter-
hegemonic diversity regime is an idealized vision of how norms and
33
Müller 2016.
34
As reported, for example, see Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 2006.
35
Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008.
practices should relate to categories of difference, as the preferred bases of

material power and cultural claims. This is not a fully realized diversity
regime, at least not yet.
These various dynamics of cultural contestation are played out in the
minutiae of regional urban planning. To grasp how opposition to Agenda
21 emerged and became impactful, it is necessary to understand what,
exactly, Agenda 21 calls for.
The Anti-Agenda 21 Mobilization: A Domestic

Challenge to Liberal Internationalism
The United Nations created Agenda 21 in the early 1990s, at a time of
post-Cold War optimism (albeit short-lived) about the organization’s
potential as a neutral, empowered facilitator of a realigned liberal inter-
national order.36 For proponents, the United Nations had the moral
authority to legitimate norms essential to upholding that order and the
capacity to facilitate democracy building. It was in this context that, in
1992, the United Nations hosted the most important international envir-
onmental meeting to date, the UN Conference on Environment and
Development, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Out of this so-called Earth
Summit came Agenda 21. The non-binding, voluntarily implemented
plan was signed by US President George H. W. Bush and leaders of
177 other nations. The preamble references social disparities, poverty,
hunger, and the deterioration of ecosystems as the impetus. The stated
goals are ambitious: improved living standards, the management and
protection of the natural environment, and prosperity for all. Its objective
is to prompt national governments and local communities to generate
responses. Originally described as ‘a comprehensive blueprint for
action,’37 Agenda 21 recommends the promotion of sustainable devel-
opment at the international, national, and local levels, through global
consensus and commitment: ‘No nation can achieve this on its own; but
together we can—in a global partnership for sustainable development.’38
It creates no legal obligations for participants, provides no means of
enforcement, and lacks meaningful funding.
A twenty-year assessment of Agenda 21 cited its highly variable imple-
mentation and its overwhelming failures on many fronts, evidenced in
worldwide declines in almost all measures of environmental well-being.39
The assessment identified modest successes, as well. Among them,
36 37
Barnett 1997. United Nations Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future 2012.
38
United Nations Conference on Environment & Development 1992, 3.
39
United Nations Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future 2012.
170 Ellen Berrey
Agenda 21 had ‘brought the concept of sustainable development into

common parlance if not making it a common household phrase.’40 It also
had produced international legal instruments and facilitated a much
greater emphasis on participatory decision making, most notably by
incorporating non-governmental actors into planning. The assessment
noted that Local Agenda 21 – an initiative to apply Agenda 21 at the city,
town, and county level, overseen by ICLEI-Local Governments for
Sustainability (International Council for Local Environmental Initia-
tives), a non-profit organization – had been particularly effective.
Yet, from the vantage point of many rightist political operatives and
media outlets within the United States, the facts of Agenda 21 are irrele-
vant. They consider Agenda 21 a menace to their way of life. Their
opposition is rooted in long-standing conspiracy theories and nationalist
resistance to global governance, combined with conservative and liber-
tarian ideologies of property rights and small government and implicit
and overt white supremacy.
Tracing the Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theory and

Far-Right Political Mobilization
Long-Standing Fears of a New World Order

Conspiracy theories have long been interwoven with American political
culture. Agenda 21 opponents allege that a world government function-
ing through the United Nations is perniciously undermining American
sovereignty. This is a version of the New World Order conspiracy theory,
which dates to at least the early twentieth century and features fearful
narratives of a nefarious global super-government.41 The phrase ‘new
world order’ was popularized in the early 1990s by President George
H. W. Bush, to convey hope that a post-Cold War international system
would facilitate collective security.42 But extreme-right and Christian
millenarians adopted the term to claim that a very powerful, secretive
group – of communists, global elites, or demonic forces – ostensibly
seeks to subvert national institutions and dominate the world.
The New World Order conspiracy informed the first major domestic
campaign opposing the United Nations, soon after the organization was
created. That campaign reacted against multilateralism defined by
American hegemony, and it played up Cold War antagonisms. It was
40 41
Ibid., 5. Barkun 2003.
42
The phrase ‘new world order’ is the title of a 1940 book by science fiction writer H. G.
Wells, calling for countries to work together to end war and attain peace.
led by the John Birch Society, an extremist right-wing fringe organization

founded in the late 1950s by a group of white male ideologues and
businesspeople.43 The organization, which specialized in conspiracy the-
ories, aimed to ferret out communists who were supposedly embedded in
the US government (it erroneously accused President Dwight Eisen-
hower of being a communist agent) and to persuade the United States
to withdraw from the United Nations. Its slogan, ‘Get the U.S. Out of
the United Nations,’ still appears on country billboards, bumper stickers,
and online images.
Anti-Agenda 21: From Far-Right Activists

to the Conservative Centre
Opposition to Agenda 21 began on the far-right right-wing political
fringe soon after the United Nations created the plan in the early
1990s. It was first spotlighted in a white paper produced by the Schiller
Institute, an obscure conservative think tank run by the wife of Lyndon
LaRouche, a well-known white conspiracy theorist.44 Based in easily
refuted arguments and irrational explanations, the report cautioned that
Agenda 21 would lead to depopulation through involuntary abortions
and sterilization.45 It was part of a broader post-Cold War trend in
extremist right politics, in which adherents replaced their conspiracy
theories about an outsider communist threat with narratives about glob-
alists subverting domestic institutions and freedoms.
The anti-Agenda 21 cause was quickly taken up by other far-right
activists and organizations, including the John Birch Society.46 Promin-
ent among them has been Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center,
a small non-profit organization ‘leading the fight for American property
rights and sovereignty.’47 DeWeese, a white, middle-aged American,
decries Agenda 21 as ‘the United Nation’s [sic] blueprint for the com-
plete restructuring of nations to fit into the proper environmental
mold.’48 This would happen, he claims, through the federal govern-
ment’s ‘massive acquisition of private property.’ His early efforts coin-
cided with the Patriot movement, a collection of extremist and
sometimes violent militia members, tax opponents, survivalists, and
43
Among them was Fred Koch, the founder of the major petroleum company now known
as Koch Industries and a parent of the influential Koch Brothers, David and Charles
Koch. Their family fortune has been used to subsidize libertarian and conservative
causes, particularly anti-regulatory lobbying and activism and, notably, denial of
human-caused climate change.
44 45 46
Shaffer 2015. Ibid. Norton 2014.
47 48
Southern Poverty Law Center 2014. DeWeese 2002.
172 Ellen Berrey
white supremacists who claimed that individual liberties were under

assault by power-hungry government leaders. In 1999, under the leader-
ship of DeWeese and allied organizations, a ‘Freedom 21’ network began
hosting annual conferences. DeWeese remains a popular anti-Agenda 21
spokesperson, and the American Policy Center continues to distribute a
Stop Agenda 21 action kit.
The adoption of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory by far-right
organizations is not surprising. American conservative ideology and
jurisprudence have long guarded against the intrusion of international
and foreign law as threats to US sovereignty.49 American industry and
white suburban conservatives reacted with resistance when progres-
sive civil rights and environmental movements in the 1960s and 1970s
established new rights for people of colour and women and new
environmental protections, achieved through the expansion of federal
government. The conservative opposition gelled into a vibrant, large-
scale ‘New Right’ movement. That movement gained institutional
power with the realignment of the Republican Party and the 1980 elec-
tion of US president Ronald Reagan, who appointed conservative
judges and political officials and defunded regulatory agencies.
Beyond electoral politics, new conservative media outlets, elite think
tanks, foundations, law firms, and other partisan advocacy organiza-
tions created a counter-intelligentsia and a massive infusion of money.
These movement actors continue to push for the ideal of free enter-
prise and property rights, minimal government intervention to prevent
social and environmental harms, and colour-blind judicial rulings,
achieved largely through Republican control of federal and state
government.
The white-dominated New Right movement has included many
diverse strands: fiscal conservatives, libertarians, military hawks, right-
wing populists, Christian fundamentalists, guns rights proponents, and
hard-line white racists. Its leaders have long allowed for the far-right
fringe. This has meant that the movement’s faux anti-establishment
ideology has been intertwined with conspiratorial paranoia, denial of
basic facts, and uncompromising politics.50 But the centre of the move-
ment, abetted by the lucrative business model of sensational right-wing
media, has shifted farther and farther to the right over the decades. This
set the conditions for the mainstreaming of the Agenda 21 conspiracy
theory.
49 50
Blumental 1986. Brownell 2017.
Right-Wing News Media Personalities

and the Appeal of Conspiracism
The anti-Agenda 21 conspiracy theory went viral around 2011, and
opposition to Agenda 21 apexed soon after. It became a pet cause for
Glenn Beck, a flamboyant conservative television and radio host and
conspiracy theorist who, in a 2009 Gallup poll of American adults,
ranked as the fourth most admired man in the world.51 Beck, a white,
middle-aged man, ran headlines such as ‘Agenda 21: The U.N. plan to
take control of individual and American freedom.’52 His Beck and
Parke–coauthored 2012 dystopian novel Agenda 2153 was followed by a
2015 sequel, Agenda 21: Into the Shadows, which tells of the ‘once-proud
people’ of a country formerly known as America becoming obedient
minions of ‘the autocratic, merciless Authorities.’54 In his Fox News
television programme, he warned of conspiratorial infiltration at the local
level and cautioned that ‘sustainable development is just a really nice way
of saying centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth.’55
Similar conspiratorial talk about Agenda 21 was circulated by Amer-
ica’s extensive conservative media sphere: Fox News (among the most
watched cable news networks), talk radio shows (almost all hosted by
conservatives, with an estimated audience of 35 million daily listeners),
alternative online media (including the content and comments sections
of extremist right-wing and fake news outlets), and a litany of websites
such as Agenda21news.com.56 A two-part article posted on RightSide-
News.com and Breitbart.com alerts readers: ‘Globalist Totalitarian
Dictatorship Invading a Town Near You—with Your Permission.’57
That the conspiracy narrative is legitimated by many different sources,
including mainstream news, makes it seem all the more credible to its
believers.
The content disseminated by the conservative media echo chamber,
which has an overwhelmingly white audience, frequently contains anti-
‘globalist’ discourse and colour-blind racial cues, along with overt big-
otry.58 Such communications can easily prime the racist ideologies of its
audiences. For instance, a quote in the RightSideNews article points to
51 52 53
Gallup 2009. Beck 2012. Beck and Parke 2012.
54 55
For a description, see Beck 2015. Beck 2011.
56
On talk shows, see Berry and Sobieraj 2014. For a few of the many anti-Agenda 21
websites, see, for example, End Agenda 21 n.d. www.endagenda21.com. Accessed
12 March 2017. Also see What Is Agenda 21 2011. www.whatisagenda21.net. Accessed
12 March 2017.
57 58
Simpson 2011b. Sonnet, Johnson, and Dolan 2015.
174 Ellen Berrey
similarities between ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘sustainability,’ which it char-

acterizes as a ‘weasel word’ of the ‘hard left.’ It ominously warns of ‘the
drive to push us into cities [and] … chase us out of the country.’59
From Local Tea Party Chapters to National

Republican Electoral Politics
The Tea Party movement propelled the anti-Agenda 21 political cam-
paign and grounded it in local politics. The Tea Party is a decentralized,
populist, conservative grass-roots movement led by white, middle class
and affluent, 45+-year-old Americans in suburban and rural areas.60 The
movement emerged in reaction to the 2009 inauguration of President
Barack Obama, an African American and Democrat. It grew rapidly and
quickly gained a national identity, amplified by a sympathetic right-wing
media and conservative elite funders, including the Koch Brothers,
whose father was one of the first leaders of the John Birch Society. Tea
Party activists protested Obama’s liberal economic and social pro-
grammes and what they perceived as Republican capitulation to Demo-
crats. The movement’s politics are heterogeneous, combining social
conservatism and libertarianism to rhetorically champion liberty, small
government, low taxation, and the free market. It successfully pushed the
Republican Party further rightward. Likewise, the Republican Party
worked to absorb the movement, using it to rebrand their party as
revolutionary and of the people.
Tea Party activists express feelings of cultural marginalization and
anxiety about their future economic prospects.61 Their politics exempli-
fies the hegemonic colour-blind diversity regime of the United States.
Although participants typically deny having any racist motives, some
research findings point to the important role of racial animus in their
movement. According to experimental studies, white people who believe
that the racial status of white people is currently under threat find the
movement attractive.62 Tea Party activists’ colour-blind racism is evident
in their objections to Obama, immigration, Islam, and government wel-
fare programmes and in the implications of the policies activists prefer.63
They commonly couch their criticisms in derogatory, stigmatizing cul-
tural stereotypes.64 They denounce unearned ‘handouts’ to ‘freeload-
ers’ – presumptively racial minorities, immigrants, low-income people,
and young people.
59 60 61
Simpson 2011b. Skocpol and Williamson 2012. Hochshild 2016.
62 63
Willer, Feinberg, and Wetts 2016. Burke 2017.
64
Skocpol and Williamson 2012.
While not all Tea Party activists took up the anti-Agenda 21 cause, and
not all activists opposed to sustainability planning were Tea Partiers or
conspiracy theorists, suburban and rural Tea Party activists formed the
backbone of the Agenda 21 opposition.65 In counties across Virginia,
local Tea Party chapters were instrumental to anti-Agenda 21 organiz-
ing.66 Scholars estimate that the anti-Agenda 21 campaign was com-
prised of several thousand people in a group called Americans Against
Agenda 21, along with other unaffiliated individuals who relied heavily
on internet communications.67 Local anti-Agenda 21 activism quickly
spread, from the foothills of North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains to
the city of Edmond in the Plains state of Oklahoma to the state house in
the western state of Arizona. Ethnographic and interview studies between
2009 and 2011 document Tea Party activists’ mobilization in the name
of Agenda 21 and their concerns about a United Nations’ socialist
invasion and deceptive environmentalist ideology.68 Leaders of local
Tea Party chapters in fifty cities told researchers that they had learned
(mis)information about Agenda 21 from speakers at Tea Party chapter
meetings and on talk radio.69
At the peak of the movement in 2012 and 2013, Agenda 21 opponents
relied heavily on civil disobedience. Most notably, they interrupted and
obstructed public community planning consultations. They did so to
protest proposals for regional transportation, traffic decongestion, bike
paths, and smart meters that they alleged were motivated by Agenda 21.70
Many wove a conspiratorial narrative about the United Nations into their
claims. They characterized sustainable land use planning interventions as
subversive, one-world assaults on private property rights, national sover-
eignty, individual liberties, and the American way of life. They argued
that unelected planning agencies were unconstitutional. Government-
sponsored public engagement forums were shams, they said, staged to
endorse predetermined sustainability plans that were eerily similar across
the country.71 They claimed that the government’s real agenda was to
take away Americans’ homes and cars and force people into high-density
urban neighbourhoods near mass transit.72 To support their claims that
this was a conspiracy in fact, not a fantasy, activists pointed to the
65
Norman 2017; Berry and Portney 2017; Westermeyer 2016; Frick 2013. Note that local
residents’ participation in Tea Party politics may have preceded, or followed from, their
concerns about an Agenda 21 conspiracy.
66 67
Norman 2017. Frick, Weinzimmer, and Waddell 2015.
68 69
Westermeyer 2016; Norman 2017. Berry and Portney 2017.
70
Ibid.; Frick, Weinzimmer, and Waddell 2015; Southern Poverty Law Center 2014.
71 72
Frick, Weinzimmer, and Waddell 2015. Ibid.
176 Ellen Berrey
extensive replication of local sustainability plans across the country and

the federal government’s seemingly invidious ability to withhold funds.73
The cultural politics of race and class informed the opposition.
Notably, these activists rarely proposed alternative regional planning
strategies, much less recognized how current suburban and rural devel-
opment came to be.74 They presumed that suburbia and rural regions
were the products of the free market and natural forces, rather than so-
called big government. But, in fact, they were defending long-standing,
systematically biased government regulations and land use policies, with
the counter-hegemonic twist of opposing the spectre of liberal
internationalism.
Some activists insinuated, in colour-blind fashion, that the beneficiar-
ies of sustainability planning would be undeserving poor and non-white
people purportedly on welfare, city residents, and non-traditional house-
holds.75 In the San Francisco Bay Area and Arlington, Virginia, older
white activists denounced plans for ‘affordable housing’ – in local com-
munity politics, a term that is frequently code for black people or other
low-income people of colour. At an Arlington town hall meeting, many
of the more than four hundred attendees, nearly all of them white and
middle-aged or older, erroneously complained that proposed new apart-
ments were not needed, given that up to half of renters in North Arling-
ton received housing assistance.76 In fact, only 3 per cent of households
in the city received housing vouchers at the time.77
Conservative state-level politicians across the United States soon took
up the cause, too. Between 2012 and early 2013, state legislators in
twenty-seven states introduced ‘anti-Agenda 21’ legislation.78 In 2012,
Alabama became the first (and remains the only) state where elected
officials passed binding anti-Agenda 21 legislation; four other state gov-
ernments passed non-binding resolutions.79 Even though the US Consti-
tution already protects Americans from being deprived of their property
without due process, Alabama SB 477 forbids the state from infringing
on or restricting private property rights without due process ‘as may be
required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to
“Agenda 21”.’80
Anti-Agenda 21 state legislators borrowed heavily from the text of a
resolution passed by the Republican Party leadership, the RNC, in
January 2012. That resolution condemned Agenda 21 as ‘a comprehen-
sive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global
73 74 75
Ibid. Norman 2017. Frick 2013; Whittemore 2013.
76 77 78
Whittemore 2013. Ibid. Frick, Weinzimmer, and Waddell 2015.
79 80
Ibid. Alabama State Legislature 2012.
political control.’81 The 2012 RNC presidential campaign platform

declared opposition to Agenda 21 while quieting the conspiratorial nar-
rative: ‘We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American
sovereignty.’82 That statement remains in the party’s platform today.
Mainstream Republican politicians, such as Senator Ted Cruz and
former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, warn of Agenda 21’s
dangers. Since 2014, critics have set their sights on UN Agenda 2030,
which the John Birch Society describes as Agenda 21 ‘on steroids —
deeper, more radical, more draconian, and more expensive … the prac-
tically undisguised roadmap to global socialism and corporatism/
fascism.’83
While the anti-Agenda 21 campaign is overwhelmingly an American
phenomenon, online evidence indicates collaboration among opponents
across the United States, Europe, and Australia.84 The first senatorial
speech made by Malcom Roberts, an Australian senator representing the
right-wing One Nation party, described Agenda 21 as a ‘declaration for
global governance’ by a United Nations intent on ‘destroying our
national sovereignty.’85
By 2014, political fervour over Agenda 21 and US urban planning
largely quieted down, although it has never fully subsided. Researchers
have found that, despite the campaign’s visibility, it seemed to not have
many observable systematic effects on municipal sustainability planning
in large cities (although that is not where most activism was concen-
trated).86 Nonetheless, the opposition achieved successes large and
small. Locally, activists delayed and thwarted countless sustainability
plans, and they scared local governments from pursuing sustainability
planning in the future.87 In his case studies of anti-planning Tea Party
organizing in eight Virginia cities and regions, Spencer Norman observed
that anti-Agenda 21 sentiment fed right-wing political organizing: ‘In all
localities that experienced activism, Agenda 21 greatly magnified the
intensity of opposition to planning.’88 At the state level, the campaign
generated and justified legislative activity intended to restrict local
81
Republican National Committee resolution on file with the author.
82
Newman 2016.
83
The New American, 6 January 2016. Available at www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/
item/22267-un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism. Accessed 21 May 2018.
84
Frick 2016.
85
The Guardian, 14 September 2016. Available at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/
2016/sep/14/agenda-21-is-conspiracy-theory-but-dont-dismiss-malcolm-roberts-as-a-
harmless-kook. Accessed 8 November 2018.
86 87
Berry and Portney 2017. Frick, Weinzimmer, and Waddell 2015; Norman 2017.
88
Norman 2017, 119.
178 Ellen Berrey
sustainability policy.89 Those legal restrictions, together with anti-

Agenda 21 narratives, undoubtedly have had ‘chilling effects’ on city
and county sustainability planning.90
The Agenda 21 conspiracy theory still thrives online. On YouTube,
‘Agenda 21, The Plan to Kill You,’ a talk by British conspiracy theorist
David Icke, has been viewed more than 2.6 million times.91 In these
forums, anti-Agenda 21 sentiment more blatantly comingles with Chris-
tian nationalism and white nationalism, and the logic becomes more far-
fetched. Agenda 21 The Movie: The Megacities, plays scene after scene of
video-recorded urban planning sessions and drive-by tours warning of
the ‘stack and pack’ apartment buildings, set to a soundtrack of ominous
music.92 In one scene, a spokesperson from NASA explains that unsus-
tainable growth is stressing the water supply. Over this, the narrator
whispers a xenophobic code word, ‘Where is that growth coming from?
Open borders.’93 Even more extreme is the video ‘Six Deceptions
Needed for Agenda 21,’ viewed almost 430,000 times, with scenes from
old films showing white men herded to slaughter.94 The comments
sections are replete with responses such as, ‘The elitists are the children
of Satan, they bow to him they worship him,’ and ‘The sad thing is most
people are to [sic] dumb to understand and grasp this.’95
Undermining the Legitimacy of Liberal Internationalism

The campaign against Agenda 21 exemplifies the swelling opposition to
liberal internationalism. While local anti-Agenda 21 activism has not
demonstrably impacted the international order, the antagonism towards
global governance that informs the campaign is highly consequential.
Within the contemporary domestic US context, the Cold War imagin-
ation – with its polite bipartisan consensus on American liberalism, the
principle of universal equality, and the United States’ global obligations –
is dissipating.96 This is a dramatic departure from the country’s long-
standing political orientation to the liberal international order. More-
over, it presents a threat to that order, which is already strained by forces
such as the rise of authoritarian regimes and cyber warfare.
89 90 91
Frick, Weinzimmer, and Waddell 2015. Portney 2015. Icke 2016.
92
Agenda 21 The Movie 2016.
93
Agenda 21 The Movie: The Megacities Are Coming, 27 February 2016. Available at www
.youtube.com/watch?v=mZhI9vvZ2Wo&t=1591s, minute 31:10. Accessed 21 May 2018.
94
Six Deceptions Needed for Agenda 21, 18 May 2016. Available at www.youtube.com/
watch?v=sGCkSRXo-jk, minute 9:02. Accessed 21 May 2018.
95 96
Ibid. Rana 2018.
Anti-globalism ideology cuts across the political spectrum, but its polit-
ical force is from the current wave of extreme conservativism and liber-
tarianism, right-wing populism, and white nationalism.
Indeed, Trump rose to political power on an anti-globalist populist
wave. His America First ideology, cultivated with his (now former)
nationalist adviser Stephan Bannon and captured in his ‘Make America
Great Again’ slogan, catapulted him into office and sustains his support.
It taps into an ethno-nationalist sentiment, shared by many American
voters, that the United States should be a white, Christian, English-
speaking nation with highly restrictive immigration rules. As the most
powerful political leader in the world, Trump legitimates opposition to
liberal internationalism with his persistent rhetoric that other countries
are taking advantage of the United States. Moreover, he is institutional-
izing anti-globalism in American foreign policy. This is evident in actions
ranging from his withdrawal of the United States’ participation in multi-
lateral trade agreements to his refusal to staff the State Department with
diplomats to his ousting of so-called globalists in his administration.
Trump openly disdains the United Nations, which he untruthfully dis-
parages as a ‘club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.’97
In sum, Trump rejects a vision of an American-led international order
based on cooperation. As he told the UN General Assembly in Septem-
ber 2018: ‘[Americans] reject the ideology of globalism and we embrace
the doctrine of patriotism.’98 He frames international affairs as a zero-
sum game in which America is getting exploited. Notably, his adminis-
tration eschews the ‘liberal’ element of the liberal international order by
downgrading liberal values, particularly the promotion of democracy and
human rights. He scorns the norm of global cooperation for addressing
large-scale environmental problems, most evident in the federal govern-
ment’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord in 2017. Likewise,
Republican politics is now pervaded with the false assertion, echoed in
anti-Agenda 21 thinking, that fighting climate change harms American
interests.
Trump’s unilateralism and Republican complicity do not bode well for
the future integrity of the United Nations. Trump’s 2018 budget request
called for cutting in half the United States’ annual spending on the
organization (which comprises about 22 per cent of the its $5.4 billion
97
@realDonaldTrump, Twitter post on 26 December 2016.
98
The Guardian, 26 September 2018. Available at www.theguardian.com/us-news/
2018/sep/25/trump-united-nations-general-assembly-speech-globalism-america. Accessed
26 September 2018.
180 Ellen Berrey
core budget and 28.5 per cent of its $7.9 billion peacekeeping budget).99
Although the Republican-controlled Congress rejected the drastic cuts,
they reflect the administration’s political priorities. Trump’s agenda of
undermining the legitimacy of the United Nations and the liberal global
governance project more generally would not be possible without the
micro-politics of anti-globalist resistance that buoyed him into office and
sustains his support.
Conclusion
The United States’ orientation to international order is shaped by the
micro-politics of culture. At the local level, people create meaning
through their interactions with institutions, real and illusory, and lever-
age those meanings to try to influence politics. There is good reason to
think this fundamental cultural dynamic plays out in any nation, whether
a dominant Western state or a country marginalized from the epicentre of
global governance. In the case of the current American right-wing mobil-
ization, symbolic politics both on the ground and up through the highest
levels of governance can exert a powerful force, especially when coupled
with decision-making authority and economic influence. Through sym-
bolic politics, the American right is helping to undermine the hegemonic
governance paradigm of American-led multilateralism and the corres-
ponding diversity regime of UN-style multiculturalism.
The case of the anti-Agenda 21 campaign casts doubts on arguments
made by Ikenberry and Swidler in this volume. Ikenberry predicts that
the fate of the liberal international order rests on proponents’ reconstruc-
tion of its social purpose, as perhaps a ‘thin’ agreement on openness or a
‘thick’ but narrow commitment to tradition. Yet his analysis disregards
the ways in which domestic cultural conflict within powerful sovereign
states can undercut the very project of liberal internationalism. Today,
local-level politics within the bulwark of the global order are a key factor
threatening the consensus around liberal forms of internationalism.
Likewise, Swidler’s identification of an emerging global social imagin-
ary that augments global governance may be too optimistic. She right-
fully recognizes that, in people’s everyday lives and interactions, their
understandings and experiences of the current global order are complex
and emotion-laden and can constitute new institutional forms. Yet Swi-
dler does not acknowledge the antipathy towards globalism in the
groundswell of populism across wealthy liberal democracies, most
99
Nichols 2016. On halving the budget, Lynch 2017.
significantly in the United States and Western Europe. In doing so, she
overstates the unity of both a collective globalized polity and the ground-
level embrace of an internationalized regulatory system. The global
imaginary and the global action and institutions it enables are likely more
fragile than Swidler recognizes. A fruitful direction for future research
would be to consider how a global social imaginary coexists alongside or
contradicts global political imaginaries, which include conspiracy theories
that question the legitimacy of centralized global power and motivate
collective action.100
100
On conspiracy theories as political imaginaries, see Iqtidar 2016.
9 Global Institutional Imaginaries
Ann Swidler
In their Introduction, Phillips and Reus-Smit underscore the idea that

cultural understandings both make possible, and depend upon, insti-
tutions that embody and enact them. In giving an account of contempor-
ary diversity regimes and their institutional foundations, however, it is
easy to neglect the most important new institutional forms, those of an
emergent global polity, a set of incipient institutions with a still inchoate
shape. Their origins lie primarily in multilateral organizations represent-
ing the community of sovereign nations, but they have transcended those
limits, both practically and in their effects on the global social imaginary.
The many practical weaknesses of these organizations only highlight the
way global expectations have congealed around them, both infiltrating
and undermining the nation-state.
I make several arguments about diversity in the liberal international
order. I suggest first that a narrow focus on the liberal international order
is inadequate for understanding both the future of ‘order’ in world
politics and how diversity is organized globally. I argue instead that a
distinctive global polity – still perhaps too messy and inchoate to be
called an ‘order’ – is evolving, which goes beyond the liberal international
order. In its institutional practices, this global polity enacts its own sort of
diversity regime, enshrining the moral primacy of the individual. While
the global polity emerged from attempts to overcome the limitations of
the liberal international order, it has taken on a life of its own, both
practically, its filaments creating a web of global governance, and ideo-
logically, in conjuring a global social imaginary. In both these ways, the
global polity is in significant tension with the nation-state. Finally, I argue
that a focus on the emergent global order highlights not only the value of
the concept of diversity regimes, but also some of the concept’s limita-
tions: how it can flatten out diversity, obscuring local forms of govern-
ance that underlie both new and persisting forms of difference.
I begin by noting a disorienting change in our own moral intuitions
about the nation-state as a dominant legitimate form. I start with an
anecdote – something like a thought experiment – that illustrates the
182
Global Institutional Imaginaries 183
limitations of the nation-state in an era moving towards an increasingly

globalized social conscience: Several years ago, I was contacted by a
bright, creative Harvard donor who had sponsored a successful confer-
ence on ‘Big Ideas in the Social Sciences.’ He had a brainstorm: another
conference at which scholars would identify current practices or insti-
tutions, now taken for granted, that in future decades or centuries would
be deemed morally unacceptable – as slavery or the laws of couverture
are today. He suggested health data as an objective indicator of such
hard-to-see injustices. I pooh-poohed the idea, saying that health dispar-
ities were a heavily researched field unlikely to yield dramatic new
insights.1 But turning away from my computer, I was suddenly struck
by an idea: what generates major health disparities, and in a few decades
or a century will come to be seen as morally unconscionable? The nation-
state! Why should a baby’s chances of dying in infancy, of being stunted
by malnutrition, or of acquiring a fatal infection be vastly greater only
because it is born in Malawi, rather than in Sweden or Norway?2 What
gives the United States or any other nation the right to turn desperate
people away at its border? Why should North Sea oil belong exclusively
to the Norwegians? And why are 25 million people in North Korea fated
to live – or to starve – in what amounts to a giant concentration camp,
simply because they are born into a brutal dictatorship? The nation-state,
which was supposed to guarantee the well-being of its citizens, now
conflicts with a powerful universalizing morality: that of the global
order.3 The moral conviction that every human being has equal import-
ance has become a driving force in responses to the refugee and migra-
tion crises that roil our world, even as the threat of those same migrants
and refugees is blamed for the rise of authoritarian nationalisms.4 These
1
Hall and Lamont 2009 and Hall and Lamont 2013 provide recent treatments of health
disparities, including cross-national ones.
2
According to The World Factbook [www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/geos/mi.html], Malawi’s infant mortality in 2018 was 43.4 deaths/1,000 live
births, Sweden’s 2.6 deaths/1,000 live births, and Norway’s 2.5 deaths/1,000 live births.
Life expectancy at birth was 61.7 years for Malawi, 82.1 years for Sweden, and 81.9 years
for Norway. For comparison, US infant mortality was 5.8 deaths/1,000 live births; life
expectancy at birth, 80 years. See Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 2018.
3
These contradictions have only grown in the twenty years since Barnett 1997, 538, wrote
of a ‘shift away from the sovereign state as the principal actor in global politics and
toward, first, identity-based groups such as nations, indigenous peoples, women, and
ethnicities, and, second, the individual as a central actor. There has always been tension
between the UN’s role as representative of sovereign states and its role as representative of
peoples and individuals who have universal rights and deserve the protection of the
international community.’
4
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation slogan, ‘Every Person Deserves the Chance to
Live a Healthy, Productive Life,’ exemplifies this stance.
184 Ann Swidler
contemporary crises, along with renewed surges of genocide and ethnic

cleansing, make us vividly aware of these contradictions. As the thought
experiment described above indicates, an increasingly universalized
sense of the human community and a shared planetary fate is in inherent
contradiction to the nation-state’s structure: borders, exclusive citizen-
ship rights, and sovereignty.5 The web of international and transnational
organizations has provided the grounding, and shaped the lineaments, of
this increasingly globalized consciousness.
This universalizing morality may have currently reached its political
limit. Nonetheless, our thought experiment points out the contradiction
that is emerging between an increasingly globalized set of institutional,
emotional, and moral commitments – a new ‘social imaginary’ – and the
limitations of the nation-state.6 Ikenberry portrays the liberal inter-
national order as having lost its animating purposes. I argue instead that
a rich tapestry of global and transnational purposes and meanings is
emerging, fostered by complex, multilayered forms of global governance.
An Emergent Global Polity

John Ikenberry, in this volume, and others such as Mark Mazower, point
out that the liberal international order and its institutional embodiments,
the League of Nations and the United Nations, grew out of efforts, in
Ikenberry’s words, to build ‘a sort of “container” within which liberal
democracies could live and survive.’7 But Ikenberry and others tend to
look from on high, so to speak, seeing the international order of sovereign
states, but missing the rich set of institutional practices – the concrete,
on-the-ground activities – that have given the global order substance and
meaning. Far from being a container for nation-states (liberal or, increas-
ingly, illiberal), the global order is starting to fill up with international,
transnational, and global actors and activities. My argument here is that
these activities increasingly, incrementally, build the sinews and arteries
of a global polity.
If, as Ikenberry says, the initial impetus behind the creation of the post-
war international order was to provide ‘organizational principles,
5
For a classic analysis, see Soysal 1994.
6
My use of the idea of a social imaginary comes from Charles Taylor and from Benedict
Anderson’s description of how the sense of nationhood emerges from the cultural activity
that creates imagined communities. Yasemin Soysal and her collaborators have described
the spread of transnational forms of legitimacy in social protests and in such mundane
forms as school curricular materials around the world. See Soysal 1997; Schissler and
Soysal 2005; Soysal 2015.
7
Ikenberry, this volume.
institutions, and capacities to negotiate the international externalities and

dislocations that threaten the domestic pursuit of liberal democracy,’8
that international order has become much more. The outlines of a new
order are emerging at three levels: first, in the vast web of international,
multilateral, and transnational actors, including United Nations (UN)
agencies, multilateral organizations like the World Bank and the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (IMF), bilateral donors like USAID and the
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) (among
many others), and a mind-boggling array of international agreements,
including ecological, investment, trade, and other treaties and agree-
ments; second, in the practical, nitty-gritty work of activists and develop-
ment professionals, international organizations, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), transnational activists, church groups, and indi-
vidual volunteers; and third, in the ideological construction of a new
moral universe, given plausibility, if not effective authority, by a welter of
global treaties and statements of principle, but also by such symbolically
powerful (if ineffective) vehicles as the International Criminal Court, the
UN Human Rights Council, and various ad hoc tribunals meant to
symbolize the possibilities of transnational justice.9
Global Citizenship/Membership Envisioned

through Practical Action
There is by now a vast, intricate web of international, multilateral, and
transnational actors. Many scholars, notably Anne-Marie Slaughter and
Mark Mazower, have described this expansion of global governance, and
many others have described the increasing influence of transnational
social movements and non-state actors.10 Global governance is accom-
plished through UN agencies like the United Nations International
Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the Global Fund
(GFATM); powerful multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the
UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and the International Rescue Commit-
tee; and bilateral donors like USAID and the German international aid
agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
(among many others). Other actors attempt to shape the global agenda
8
Ikenberry, this volume.
9
It is hard to grasp the scale and complexity of these global arrangements. John Meyer’s
many students and collaborators give some sense of the sheer variety of treaties and of
international NGOs. See, for example, Dobbin, Simmons, and Garrett 2007; and Boli
and Thomas 1997. Watkins, Swidler, and Hannan 2012 discuss the difficulties of
estimating the numbers of NGOs and assessing their effects.
10
Slaughter 2004; Mazower 2012.
186 Ann Swidler
for development, human rights, global health, and environmental sus-

tainability. They include international agencies that concentrate expert-
ise, like the World Health Organization (WHO), and a multitude of
private foundations, myriad contractors and subcontractors, schools of
public health, as well as NGOs, church groups, and individual altruists.
This welter of institutions – chaotic, clueless, and inefficient as it some-
times is – has nonetheless had a powerful influence both on human well-
being, primarily in poor countries, and also on the collective imagination
of those in both poor and wealthier ones.11
These varied forms of global governance constitute a global order
much richer in practices and meanings than analysts usually recognize,
suggesting the extent to which there is already an emergent global
polity.12 A polity is different from a state: a polity includes the whole
penumbra of organizations and associations, the varied interests brought
to bear, and the organizational vehicles through which those interests are
mobilized and articulated, as well as the broad set of expectations and
meanings that surround concrete governing institutions. A global polity
can form even when there is not – and likely never will be – a unified
global state.
An implicit sociology lies behind these claims, which it is best to make
explicit. Institutions and concrete social practices may arise to serve
actors’ specific purposes and may initially reflect those purposes. But
institutions and practices also generate new meanings, new interests, and
new purposes.13 Institutionalized practices and organizational forms
provide the basis for the plausibility and emotive force of those mean-
ings.14 This relationship between institutional forms and meanings is
complex and recursive, sometimes purposeful and explicit (as when
rulers seek religious legitimation or corporate CEOs create mythologies
to enhance their power), and sometimes subterranean and implicit,
immanent in the activities themselves. The taken-for-granted practices
11
Mazower 2013 describes the growing role of science and transnational organizations
from the early nineteenth century onward, as well as the complex politics shaping the
League of Nations and the UN.
12
John Meyer and his colleagues use similar terms, referring to the ‘world polity’ and
‘world culture.’ While their insights have informed my own, their conceptualization is
nearly the inverse of mine. They see institutional rules emanating from a relatively
unified world culture, of which concrete organizations and actors are simply indirect
manifestations. I see the actors and organizations, and their concrete practices, as
generating meanings.
13
Selznick 1957 provides the classic argument: to build loyalty among employees and
legitimacy among other organizations, leaders must create a compelling vision of the
larger purposes the organization serves. Thelen 2004 and 2012 provides a politically rich,
historically grounded articulation of this view.
14
See Swidler 2001, especially chapters 6 and 8.
that structure people’s lives become encrusted with value and meaning
because these are the realities upon which they depend. Joel Migdal
explains the enduring appeal of clan, tribal, religious, and chiefly author-
ities, because in many societies these authorities have ‘the right and
ability to make the countless rules that guide people’s social behavior.’15
If such ‘traditional’ structures as clan elders or religious authorities have
become imbued with meaning because they regulate daily life, then the
emerging institutions of the global polity, to the extent that they provide
structures that govern daily life, will also generate their own legitimation,
supported by powerful moral claims like those for human rights or
gender equality.
Discussions of the changing shape of the global order usually focus on
highly visible shifts in power and politics that appear to challenge the
existing international order: the loss of American hegemony and the rise
of China as a great power; the emergence of revanchist political move-
ments, like those claiming inspiration from fundamentalist Islam, that
reject existing nation-state forms; the surge in migrants, refugees, and
asylum seekers; and the rise of nationalist, often racist populisms that
oppose globalization in principle even while they practice their own
transnational politics. But the less visible extension of the sometimes-
subversive infrastructures of global governance, their multiple forms, and
their myriad networks of collaboration (despite occasional conflict) may
have more lasting influence.
Models of Global Governance

I start from the varied practices through which global governance activ-
ities are actually conducted, rather than assuming that the global order is
composed primarily of sovereign nation-states. It is important to recog-
nize the extraordinary variety of activities that actually constitute the
current global order, and to be attuned to the social imaginaries they
enact and make plausible. Such models do not displace sovereign states
and their traditional priority in the global social imaginary. But by creat-
ing an intricate web of institutions, organizations, and social practices
that enact global governance, the global polity gains substance and
texture – in the everyday experience of ordinary people, in the work of
legions of development professionals and individual altruists who carry
them out, and in the collective imagination out of which a new polity and
a new institutional order are emerging.
15
Migdal 2001, 64.
188 Ann Swidler
Governing Refugees and Other Displaced Persons

Global institutions directly govern those who fall outside the authority of
nation-states: refugee populations and other displaced persons who end
up under the authority of UNHCR or other international and intergov-
ernmental relief agencies, such as the International Organization for
Migration, with actual authority often subcontracted to various NGOs.16
For the estimated 68.5 million forcibly displaced persons globally (easily
equal to a mid-sized country), and especially the more than 25 million
who are officially refugees, the UN and its subcontractors are a govern-
ment, responsible for schooling, housing, sanitation, livelihoods, and
policing, as well as rudimentary judicial and other legal responsibilities.17
Refugees, along with many facing persecution or discrimination who
have not become refugees, make their claims in universalistic terms,
calling on their status as global citizens.18 As Elizabeth Holzer observes
of the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana:
What struck me most about refugee rights talk was … [its] form: The protesters
anchored their claims to rights in a special relationship to the international
community rather than host [country] obligations. The placards that protesters
carried offered a particularly clear window into this global (not local) approach:
‘UNHCR-Geneva are we not entitled to good health, shelter, education, and
good life as refugee?’ and ‘Geneva we want resettlement injustices to be
investigated.’ The protesters did not appeal to ‘Ghana’ or ‘camp authorities’—
they explicitly referenced the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, which had
become in their minds, their closest connection to the international
community.19
The mobilization of a vast international effort by volunteers and NGOs
to assist endangered or stranded migrants – rescues at sea, food and
shelter for those who make it to Europe’s shores, NGOs to fight human
trafficking – attempt to complement the efforts of sometimes over-
whelmed international organizations. The International Rescue Com-
mittee and the International Committee of the Red Cross are among the
many humanitarian organizations that provide basic services and
16
Describing a Ghanaian camp for Liberian refugees, Holzer 2015, 74, shows persuasively
that the refugees themselves frame their experience in terms of ‘a new and increasingly
common form of politics in the global South: transnational government.’
17
For numbers of refugees and displaced persons, see UNHCR 2018.
18
Soysal 1997, 512, notes that Islamic groups in France and Germany, even when making
claims for ‘particularistic’ practices, like women wearing the veil, make those claims in
universalistic terms of human rights: ‘The postwar era … has witnessed an increasing
recasting of (national) citizenship rights as human rights. Rights that were once
associated with belonging to a national community have become increasingly abstract,
and are defined and legitimated at the transnational level.’
19
Holzer 2013, 863.
whatever governance there is – law and order, food, shelter, infrastruc-

ture, health care – for those who are without a state.
Regulation, Commerce, and Civil Law

A second set of transnational institutions operates as something like an
incomplete, fragmented regulatory state, working through multinational
agreements and global and regional regulatory bodies to stabilize and
regulate global markets, to manage global currencies, and to set global
standards. Mark Mazower describes the complexity of this global
architecture:
Today there is more global policymaking, in more varied forms, than ever before,
and the unwary student soon finds him- or herself stumbling through a landscape
of obscure acronyms that stretch endlessly into the bureaucratic haze. There are
military alliances, such as NATO and WEU; intergovernmental organizations in
the classic mold, from the UN to specialist agencies such as the ILO, ICAO,
ICC, WHO, and GATT; regional bodies, like the Council of Europe, the
European Commission, and the Organizations of American and African states;
postimperial clubs, like the Commonwealth and the Organisation internationale
de la Francophonie; quasi-polities like the European Union; and regular summit
conferences like the G-20. Nor should one ignore the vast number of NGOs of all
kinds, many of which also now play a more or less formalized role in shaping
global politics.20
The descendants of the Bretton Woods institutional framework, espe-
cially the IMF, The World Bank, and the World Trade Organization,
supplemented by a network of global and regional trade agreements,
trade associations, regulatory bodies, and international non-
governmental organization (INGO) monitoring groups, regulate
banking, balance-of-payments issues, and currency convertibility. These
instantiate a recognizable pattern, that of a regulatory state, even if such
agreements are the result of multilateral negotiations among sovereign
nations, rather than a global government. The United States’ position in
this global system is currently under threat from protectionist impulses,
but even if trade wars loom, damaging the US position in the global
order, the institutional fabric of the global economic order is only likely
to grow denser. There is taken-for-granted commitment to maintaining a
global financial system, through which an estimated three to five trillion
dollars a day in currency trades now flow.21 Each time the global
20
Mazower 2012, xvii.
21
Such a figure is very difficult to calculate. See CNBC, 13 March 2017. Available
at www.cnbc.com/2017/03/13/reuters-america-daily-fx-trade-more-like-3-trillion-than-
190 Ann Swidler
financial architecture proves inadequate, immediate moves are made to

renegotiate arrangements to shore up the system.
Many more international agreements of all sorts regulate trade, the
quality of globally traded goods and services, labour protections, fair
trade compacts, and many other matters. Negotiations through the
World Trade Organization (WTO) (however dominated by national
and industry-level interests) nonetheless create a massive global regula-
tory system that has produced climate change agreements, environment
and labour-regulating bodies, standards for food and other consumer
goods, and shared knowledge and regulatory standards for medicines
and medical devices.
The scope of the global regulatory system is apparent in the vast array
of interest groups, lobbyists, trade associations, and politicians trying to
insert their interests into global forums. Global social movements aiming
to affect the WTO and agitating for global standards about labour,
worker safety, the environment, and many other issues suggest a very
active global polity, including activist NGOs that see themselves as
bridging the democracy gap created by powerful global actors with no
direct accountability to global citizens.22
Providing Services: Global Health and Welfare

As the previous examples of global financial regulation, trade agree-
ments, and labour regulation indicate, in some domains there is already
something approaching a global regulatory state. In poor countries, there
is also something like a global welfare state, inadequate and patchy as it
is. Global actors – sometimes mobilizing local and nation-state
resources – have pressed to expand schooling, eradicate diseases, and
shore up infrastructure, from roads and bridges to electrical systems.
Donors provide food during famine years (or during the ‘hunger months’
before the new harvest); they offer new seeds and crop advice for farmers;
5-cls.html. Accessed 24 November 2018. Thanks to Fred L. Block for help in finding
this estimate.
22
Keck and Sikkink 1998 provide the classic discussion of how transnational NGOs reach
outside nation-states, leveraging international influence to pressure local actors. Merry
2006, Wong 2012, and Stroup 2012 provide valuable descriptions of how global
advocacy NGOs actually operate. Bartley 2018 describes agreements between
transnational corporations and international NGOs to prevent labour exploitation and
environmental degradation.
and they have encouraged – even demanded – the expansion of schooling

and the equalization of educational opportunity between girls and
boys.23 Except in rare cases (the provision of antiretroviral drugs for
HIV treatment in poor countries), the global community does not fund
on an ongoing basis what it views as national government responsibilities.
Nonetheless, the health budgets of many countries in Africa, Latin
America, and Asia are partially or primarily funded by foreign donors.24
Even more often donors fund ambitious projects, such as innovative
community health projects, that they hope countries will adopt as
their own.
Global actors provide or subsidize a vast array of social services,
especially health. If we ask not whether there is a ‘state,’ but how global
challenges are met, we see both the inventive, chaotic ‘institutional
bricolage’ and the scope and effectiveness of an emergent global polity.25
The coherence of these efforts emerges particularly dramatically in global
health governance, quintessentially the global response to the AIDS
epidemic, almost certainly the single largest coordinated response to a
global crisis since World War II and its immediate aftermath.26
The provision of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV infection exemplifies
effective global governance in the absence of any central authority.27
A complex campaign, involving remarkably diverse actors, developed
into a coordinated program – still with no central authority – that has
delivered low-cost drugs to millions of people around the globe who
would otherwise have died. Access to these ‘essential medicines’ was
initially sharply limited by the Doha Accords. Challenged by a trans-
national political alliance that included at various points the Brazilian
government, South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF), Oxfam, CPTech, the Clinton Foundation,
Indian generic drug manufacturers, and many other international
NGOs, the giant pharmaceutical companies were forced to retreat, and
generic HIV drugs came to dominate the global market. Now the WHO
reviews and certifies generic combination drugs for antiretroviral treat-
ment of HIV, and national governments, international donors, and
23
For Malawi, see Frye 2012.
24
McCoy, Chand, and Sridhar 2009, and Lu et al. 2010 give a sense of the magnitude of
assistance from all donors. A comprehensive report by the Gates Foundation-funded
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2018, Table B6, 124–133) shows that for
many governments in Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America, external health
expenditure far outstrips government health expenditures.
25
Cleaver 2012.
26
In the next several paragraphs, I draw on Swidler and Watkins 2017.
27
This account draws on Kapstein and Busby 2013.
192 Ann Swidler
global health NGOs follow its recommendations; the global scientific

community revises recommendations about such matters as breastfeed-
ing by HIV-positive mothers, or when antiretroviral treatment should be
begin, in light of the latest research, and local actors implement the new
recommendations. When in 2003, Jim Kim, the WHO director, sug-
gested the 3×5 Initiative – getting three million people on antiretroviral
treatment by 2005 – the goal sounded wildly unrealistic. As of 2018, the
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reports,
23 million people were on antiretroviral treatment, and deaths from
AIDS had fallen by half from their peak.28 Through the US President’s
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the United States pays for a
large share of HIV treatment in Africa.29 But financial contributions and
global mobilization to combat AIDS also come via international insti-
tutions such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis
and Malaria, and funds from an array of donor countries.30 The World
Bank, foundations such as the Gates Foundation, and a host of subcon-
tractors make AIDS prevention, treatment, and care happen on the
ground.
In the global response to AIDS, as well as to other threats like Ebola or
SARS, we see an enormously complex web of (sometimes poorly) coord-
inated effort. Nonetheless, this is in essence a global system of public
health that mobilizes a wide array of actors, from small church groups, to
coordinated global health surveillance that tracks disease prevalence
around the globe, to the global provision of antiretroviral drugs.31
From the point of view of the global polity, two things are significant
about the welter of global altruism. One is its hidden mechanisms of
coordination, and the second is the sheer volume of spontaneous partici-
pation it engenders. The AIDS epidemic, in particular, both mobilized
and expressed an emergent sense of global community. But development
efforts of all sorts, providing goods as varied as clean water, girls’
empowerment, and assistance for orphans, have moved governments
and publics around the world.32 This outpouring of global empathy,
facilitated by modern transportation and communications, has created
a global volunteer enterprise, from commercialized ‘voluntourism’ to
28 29
UNAIDS 2019. Swidler and Watkins, 2017, 37.
30
UNAIDS 2008 provides a bracingly frank history of the conflicts, the negotiations
between donor countries and the WHO, and the failures and false starts that led to the
creation of UNAIDS.
31
See Cleland and Watkins 2006 and Robinson 2017 on continuities between the family
planning movement and the AIDS enterprise as global public health efforts.
32
Moore 2016 describes a girls’ empowerment project and the transnational aspirations it
engenders.
spontaneous efforts by individuals to reach out across vast geographic,

cultural, and social distances. Someone meets an African on an airplane
and decides to found an NGO to help in that person’s home village;
students volunteer in droves to do good work abroad; churches send
their young people on short-term mission trips; and health professionals
volunteer by the thousands.33 This mobilization on the part of those from
wealthy countries is met by a warm embrace from the other side, as
people in isolated villages, like their more educated countrymen in towns
and cities, come to see themselves as members of a cosmopolitan com-
munity, inspired by the hope of material help and economic opportunity,
but also seeking access to globalized identities, as persons with human
rights, genders, sexual identities, and status as participants in a global
order.34
The explosion of global altruism – volunteering and fund-raising – in
some ways resembles Benedict Anderson’s description of how a new
national consciousness emerged as nineteenth-century Indonesians read
novels and newspapers that helped them imagine their connections to
other members of an emergent national community.35 People learned
about the others with whom they shared a national community, and
became aware that those anonymous others were reading and sharing
some of the same experiences. In a similar way, the contemporary expan-
sion of global humanitarianism helps to build consciousness of a shared
global community and instantiates the moral meaning of a global
polity.36
Informal Coordination in the Global Polity

I have been describing global governance largely as coordinated through
international or multilateral organizations based in Washington, Geneva,
Brussels, Jakarta, or Gaborone. There is, however, another form of
coordination among the myriad actors that constitute the global insti-
tutional order – coordination through focusing the attention of disparate
actors on shared priorities. Early in the response to the AIDS epidemic,
for example, global health leaders, foundations, and NGOs insisted that
AIDS was a global emergency. This insistence focused myriad global
actors, from NGOs and foundations to nation-states and UN agencies,
33
Trinitapoli and Vaisey 2009; Offutt 2011; Lasker 2016.
34 35
See, for example, Nguyen 2010. Anderson 1983.
36
The proliferation of NGOs contributes to global governance but also to global
consciousness. John Meyer and his many students and collaborators have emphasized
the role of international NGOs enacting world society. See Meyer et al. 1997.
194 Ann Swidler
on the same problem at the same time. For a ‘system’ without a central
executive or administrative core, publicity that centres attention on a
small set of high-priority problems provides a major mode of
coordination.
In the case of AIDS, all sorts of organizations threw themselves at the
problem, but often from inconsistent, duplicative, or even conflicting
angles. Sometimes the global AIDS enterprise most resembles the ‘NGO
scramble’ Cooley and Ron describe, with NGOs viewing each other as
competitors and working at cross-purposes.37 Nonetheless, the global
community, over time, moved towards more effective ways to approach
the AIDS crisis, solving problems, cohering around shared goals, and
defining priorities and timelines. The creation of major international
vehicles – UNAIDS (founded in 1997) and the Global Fund for AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria (which began in 2001) – was itself a matter of
gradually coalescing international agreement, punctuated by highly vis-
ible symbolic gestures: Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General, donated
$100,000 to the nascent fund, and Bill Gates provided seed money in
2002.38
Despite the weaknesses built into its governance structure, the WHO
also plays a crucial role in coordinating global AIDS activities.39 Its
Technical Working Groups, composed of experts and representatives
from multiple countries, develop authoritative guidance about what
medical approaches to AIDS and other diseases are effective. The
WHO has no means to enforce these decisions: foundations, govern-
ments, and NGOs could choose drugs or drug regimens not validated by
the WHO’s expert panels, but they do not.
Another dramatic example of ‘voluntary’ global coordination is the
global success in (nearly) eradicating polio. Kristin Jafflin has analysed
how a coalition of global funders, coordinated by the WHO, but also
since the mid-1980s by a set of new supranational coalitions, such as the
Task Force for Child Survival and the GAVI Alliance (Global Alliance
for Vaccines and Immunization), managed to keep donors engaged while
solving one technical problem after another to wage a global effort that
had to reach into villages, schools, and homes in every corner of the
globe. Pockets of resistance to vaccination in parts of Pakistan and
northern Nigeria, however frustrating for the goal of global eradication,
only demonstrate how effective and persistent the global effort has been.
There is no global government, but the effort to eradicate polio by
37
Cooley and Ron 2002.
38
Wikipedia 2018a suggests a gradually coalescing global consensus.
39
See Chorev 2012.
making sure virtually every child on the planet has been vaccinated is an
achievement most national governments could only envy.40
A final (and more controversial) example of such coordination through
focused publicity is the success of the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs). Adopted through a UN ‘summit’ in 2000, the set of eight goals
to be achieved by 2015 ranged from the wildly unrealistic (‘eradicate
extreme poverty and hunger’) to the plausible (‘reduce child mortality’
and ‘improve maternal health’). Specific targets seemed to have been
pulled from thin air. Nonetheless, these goals were used to prod coun-
tries (all 189 United Nations member states adopted the goals), which
had to report their progress annually through the United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly Special Sessions (UNGASS) process. More important,
the MDG process led a group of international organizations, including
the World Bank and the IMF, but also the G8 and other donors, to focus
on a common agenda and to pay attention to common indicators of
success in achieving that agenda. While they have been criticized on
many fronts, the MDGs – with no ‘teeth’ and no direct enforcement
mechanisms – nonetheless produced real results: substantial progress in
expanding primary education and increasing the enrolment of girls in
school, dramatic reductions in infant and maternal mortality (on the
order of 50 per cent in many of the poorest countries), and enormous
progress in combating AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.41 The commit-
ment of major international organizations to the same set of goals, and
the creation of specific targets and reporting requirements, created many
elements of global governance, albeit subject to the willingness (or eager-
ness) of states and international organizations to cooperate.42 Simply the
fear of being embarrassed by a failure to meet targets, or the hope of
global approbation for success in achieving one or another MDG target,
motivated both national governments and international donors to focus
on specific priorities.
40
Jafflin 2013. Leonard Seabrooke and his collaborators have also pointed to the
importance of global professional communities in shaping the global order. See
Seabrooke and Wigan 2016.
41
While improvements in health are at least relatively easy to track, improvements in
educational enrolments do not necessarily mean improvements in education, as Bold
et al. 2017 note.
42
Weiss 2012, 1, refers to the MDG process as ‘idea mongering,’ but notes that the
‘United Nations plays an exceptional role in seeking consensus about norms governing
the planet and legitimating those with a potential worldwide application … The MDGs
represent a consensus on development policies and targets, even in the absence of a
common understanding of what constitutes development or agreement on the best
strategies.’
196 Ann Swidler
Other critical actors in coordinating the emerging global polity are

networks of issue-oriented professionals, who shape the priorities – and
the policies – that the global system embraces. These professionals often
move back and forth among positions in international development
organizations, jobs with international NGOs doing global advocacy,
positions in universities and research institutes, and work in donor-
country or recipient-country governments. While their roles are hard to
pin down, these professionals frequently generate the ideas that become
animating forces in global governance. Perhaps the most famous example
is the role that the charismatic physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer
played in making AIDS treatment for HIV-positive people in poor coun-
tries a reality. Working in Haiti, Farmer and his colleagues developed an
inspiring record of bringing health care to some of the poorest people on
Earth. They founded Partners in Health (PIH), which pioneered
community-based approaches that became the WHO-recommended
standard for health care in poor countries. Along with his close friend
and colleague at PIH, Jim Yong Kim, Farmer collaborated with other
NGOs to demonstrate that HIV-positive people living in South African
slums could take antiretroviral drugs successfully and be restored to
health. Jim Kim became director of HIV/AIDS programmes at the
WHO, spearheading the 3×5 Initiative, which ramped up the provision
of antiretroviral drugs in poor countries. Throughout the early 2000s,
Kim and Farmer, both based at the Harvard School of Public Health,
collaborated to expand global access to health care.43 In 2012, Kim
became president of the World Bank, where he served until February
2019, while Farmer still guides PIH, which operates in some thirteen
countries from Haiti to Rwanda.44 Thus a close friendship between like-
minded professionals leveraged a global transformation in community
health care and inspired a programme of AIDS treatment that ultimately
saved millions of lives.
43
Aspects of this story have been told in a 2017 documentary, Bending the Arc, a best-
selling book (Kidder 2003), and numerous books and journal articles by Farmer and his
colleagues.
44
The complex, intertwined careers of both men are described on their Wikipedia pages.
See Wikipedia 2018b and Wikipedia 2018c. A sense of the global ambition of their
interconnected projects is conveyed by this sentence from Dr Kim’s page, describing a
recent Harvard-based program: ‘Kim spearheaded the development of a new field
focused on improving the implementation and delivery of health interventions in poor
communities around the world. His programs operate with the philosophy that progress
in developing more effective global health programs has been hindered by the paucity of
large-scale systematic approaches to improving program design. This new field will
rigorously gather, analyze, and widely disseminate a comprehensive body of practical,
actionable insights on effective global health delivery.’
Most globalized professional networks are not made up of people as

powerful and influential as Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim. Nonethe-
less, these networks provide much of the coordination, the connective
tissue, that keeps the unwieldy global polity moving in a reasonably
coherent direction. These professionals have now begun to consolidate
around the goal of universal access to healthcare.45
Global professional networks matter for coordination across fields
from environmental policy to human rights to international trade policy
making to establishing new agencies and policy domains.46 While they
are largely invisible to publics in rich and poor countries alike, except in
the person of an inspiring figure like Paul Farmer, these professional
networks shape the wider global discourse about everything from the
urgency of human-caused climate change to the priority that should be
given to women’s reproductive health or girls’ education. Precisely
because global elites lack a centralized administrative authority, they
operate through a kind of rolling consensus, in which technical expertise
is brought to bear in spasms of attention to particular issues. As AIDS
supplanted family planning as a global priority, AIDS itself is now
moving into the background to be supplanted by climate change, gender
equality, and other issues.47
Global Justice: Practically Impotent, Symbolically Powerful

A final institution of international global governance – the international
court or tribunal – has largely symbolic rather than practical authority,
but plays an important role in the global institutional imaginary. The
International Criminal Court and other transnational tribunals, such as
the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), while largely ineffective,
have made institutionally plausible a concept of ‘universal human rights’
that transcend the authority of particular nation-states. The possibility of
enforceable justice beyond the authority of sovereign states makes
45
The Gates Foundation-sponsored Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation 2018
report notes that ‘[t]he pursuit of UHC [Universal Health Care] and the completion of
the unfinished agenda from the MDGs are dependent on adequate financing for health
systems around the world.’ This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky rhetoric by a few health
economists. Countries as disparate as Thailand, Brazil, and South Africa have moved
closer to ‘health universalism’ as national policy, even where they face serious budget
constraints. Alliances between a global professional community and local professional
elites have moved this process forward even against opposition. See Harris 2017.
46
See the case studies in Seabrooke and Henriksen 2017.
47
For an analysis of how the personnel and administrative structures of one wave of global
governance provide templates for the next, see Robinson 2017.
198 Ann Swidler
plausible a globalized polity, in which sovereign states may be the

authoritative members, but are not the ultimate source of legitimacy.48
Kathryn Sikkink has analysed the ‘justice cascade’ as international
lawyers along with Amnesty International developed conceptions of
international individual criminal responsibility, eventually leading to
the CAT and to national and international prosecutions of a few high-
profile cases, and ultimately to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Sikkink notes that these accomplishments were as much a matter of
cultural transformation – and international publicity – that changed the
horizon of possibility for legal action as they were concrete institutional
achievements. Recent decisions by South Africa and Burundi to leave the
ICC and the humiliating failure to prosecute Kenya’s leaders have chal-
lenged the Court’s legitimacy, but not the basic principle that standards
of global justice exist that are superior to those of nation-states.49
Human Rights
All these constituent elements of the global polity reinforce a broad
global commitment to ‘human rights’ that transcend the boundaries of
nation-states.50 Human rights involve not just sympathy with others in
far-off places, or a concern for others’ suffering. Concrete policy initia-
tives by UN organizations, foundations, bilateral donors, and a wide
range of NGOs promote policies to expand education, improve health,
empower women and expand women’s rights, fight human trafficking,
end child labour and early marriage, and extend legal and political
protections for sexual minorities and other vulnerable groups. Attempts
to propagate the model of autonomous individuals, empowered to assert
their individual rights, extend far beyond the realms of law and regula-
tion. Many interventions address the intimate realms of family life:
UNICEF campaigns to ‘end the epidemic of child marriage,’ pro-
grammes to fight intimate-partner violence, or projects to break down
48
For a critical view of the courts’ effectiveness, see Vinjamuri 2010.
49
Sikkink 2011. Her newest book, Evidence for Hope, 2017, marshals varied data to
demonstrate the ever-growing, if uneven, success of global human rights.
50
Contemporary scholars see the ideal of global human rights as having a very old
pedigree. Hunt 2007 discerns the origins of human rights discourse in the French
Revolution, while Stamatov 2013 finds that, as early as the sixteenth century, wherever
Christian empires went, missionaries roused activist opposition to the most brutal
imperial treatment of the natives. This culminated in Quaker anti-slavery activism, and
eventually the modern transnational humanitarianism we know today.
the traditional division of labour between men and women in rural Africa
by encouraging them to cook together.51
What Happens to Diversity in a Global Polity?

I want to conclude by making two seemingly contradictory – but I believe
interconnected – points about diversity in the emergent global polity.
The first is that, as modern institutions and modern global culture
penetrate around the world, some groups accentuate ‘traditional’ cul-
tural identities precisely as a way of making very modern claims. The
second is that the very concept of ‘diversity regimes,’ as this volume’s
editors have conceptualized them, is a product of a globalizing polity, but
it does not fit as well with forms of difference based in local patterns of
governance that resist the global polity.
Modernizing Aspirations Can Accentuate Cultural Difference

Recognizing the modernizing aspirations involved in recasting selected
elements of existing cultures as vaunted ‘traditions’ – for example, the
ideologization of contemporary forms of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or
Christianity – has important implications for how we view a global diver-
sity regime.52 In a world where people from Jakarta to Johannesburg to
Jaipur are likely to be wearing blue jeans and sneakers, they may also be
asserting religious, ethnic, or cultural identities in distinctively
modern terms.
In the global polity, forms of difference related to ethnicity, religion, or
culture are legitimate. What are not legitimate are differences that com-
promise the fundamental equality and autonomy of the persons who
stand as global citizens. Recognizing cultural diversities of all sorts is
perfectly compatible with the global polity’s implicit ideals of order,
51
UNICEF’s interest in extending child rights goes far beyond child marriage, to issues
such as birth registration, child labour, child trafficking, sexual violence against children,
and a host of other issues. See UNICEF 2018. On transnational activism to end gender-
based violence, see Merry 2006. Bezner Kerr et al. 2016 describe ‘recipe days’ and other
programmes to improve nutrition by teaching African women and men to cook together.
See also Danielsen 2017 on using chiefs to make women give birth in clinics rather than
at home, and Pot 2018 on how chiefs and other traditional authorities have been
encouraged to mandate breastfeeding, to forbid early marriages, and to formally
register every child’s birth.
52
Collier 1997 shows how an insistence on the value of ‘tradition’ emerges from the
hegemony of modern institutional patterns, particularly labour markets and nation-
states, among people who reject the everyday practices of their own parents and
grandparents as backward, foolish, or immoral.
200 Ann Swidler
which converge around a universal individual, with a standard package of

individual human rights. This is the ideal implicit in most global insti-
tutional activity. Inequalities between rich and poor, men and women, or
inequalities in health, education, infant mortality, access to clean water,
or access to social justice and the rule of law, all violate the basic
principles of the emergent global order. In the global polity, universal
human rights – including the right to maintain distinctive ethnic, reli-
gious, or other traditional cultural elements – trump diversity, unless
diversity can be made into another universal right.
If we think of the varieties of difference organized by a diversity regime
as varied accentuations of traditional loyalties and symbols, however, we
miss how new social formations generate very modern aspirations. Much
of what we experience as conflict arising from greater diversity instead
derives from greater commonality. Global convergence can exacerbate
conflict, as religions, peoples, and states compete to be, and do, the same
things. Global acceptance of the sovereign state as a normative ideal –
reinforced by the UN’s practices for authorizing such states – drove anti-
colonial and independence movements in the post-war period. The
global consensus on the nation-state as a normative model leads virtually
every group – even those that long struggled to escape rule by any state –
to insist that they want a state of their own.53 Religious traditions that had
taken-for-granted legitimacy now aspire to the same sort of authoritative
doctrine and scriptural authority that Protestants and Catholics sought
during the Early Modern period of religious confessionalization and
conflict.54 The fierce aspiration for more disciplined, rigorous forms of
religiosity, as Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic, serve to create
disciplined, autonomous, rationalized modern selves, and indirectly to
create disciplined, rationalized modern societies.55 These developments
are then as much a result of the hegemony of a basic model of modernity –
what a state should be, what a religion should be, what a person should
be, and what human rights people can and should claim – as of diver-
gence. Even what looks like the resurgence of archaic patterns – as when
ethnic conflicts are attributed to perduring communal tensions, or when
53
John Meyer 1987 has long pointed to the growing hegemony of the nation-state model.
On resistance to rule by states, see Scott 2009.
54
See Gorski 2003 and Fulbrook 1984 to be reminded of the violent, expansionist
rigourism of Early Modern Protestantism. Indeed, the Taliban’s destruction of the
Bamiyam Buddhas bears many similarities to Protestant iconoclasts’ destruction of
religious images, especially statues, in churches across England and Western Europe in
the wake of the Reformation.
55
Geertz 1968 made a very similar point about the modernizing impulse behind
Scripturalist Islam, as people go from being ‘held by’ to actively, ideologically
‘holding’ their religious traditions.
ISIS invokes early Islam to justify its brutalities – are in many ways
distinctively modern formations, from the strategic calculations made
by political leaders about how ethnic rivalries can advance their geopolit-
ical interests to very untraditional demands for strict adherence to reli-
gious codes of public and private life.
A Global Polity and a Liberal International Order

What then is the relationship of the emerging global polity – the practices
that give it shape and direction, and the ideology it enacts – to the liberal
international order of sovereign states, national boundaries, international
agreements, and formal rules? Are they competitors, or does the global
polity that has grown out of the liberal international order complement it?
The answer, I think, rests again on a richer, more sociological under-
standing of where institutions come from and how they evolve.56 If there
is one important lesson here, it is that institutional forms transcend their
origins: they grow roots down into the social subsoil; they develop a
penumbra of meanings, justifications, and expectations; they acquire
constituencies that go beyond – and sometimes conflict with – the
interests of those who initially created them.
One way to understand the global polity is to say that it emerged from
attempts to address problems the liberal international order was unable
to solve: waves of refugees and displaced people after wars, which led to
humanitarian relief organizations and attempts to stem the refugee flow;
diseases that do not respect national borders, leading to the WHO and
related bodies; the need for an international financial architecture to
manage currencies, rescue failing economies, and facilitate global trade;
attempts to manage such often-mundane matters as shipping, air travel,
and scientific exchange; and of course the effort to avert or limit wars. In
some respects, these arrangements can be seen as simply agreements
specifying elements of the liberal international order, which, like various
trade pacts, largely reflect the interests – and the power – of the nation-
state signatories to those agreements. From the perspective I offer here,
however, these institutional innovations, however chaotic and unruly,
ground new imaginaries, new identities, new values, and new practices
that in turn generate a new, if multiplex, global order.
As the anecdote with which I began suggests, I do think there is
a fundamental tension between the emergent global polity and the
liberal international order. Those contradictions revolve around the
56
Useful for thinking about institutional legacies and transformations are Biernacki 1995;
Hall and Taylor 1996; Armstrong 2002; Thelen 2004, 2012.
202 Ann Swidler
fundamental problems of the nation-state, about which much has been

written. There is already a global narrative in which a planetary crisis,
climate change, transcends national boundaries and requires efforts that
nation-states cannot make on their own. National political systems
appear too fragmented and unstable to solve collective action problems
at either the national or transnational level. There is even a growing
recognition – most evident in the European Community’s tribulations –
that the constituency that elects a nation’s political leaders is far different
than the community that is urgently affected by its actions. All these
combine with the vivid asylum and refugee crises, and the broader
morality of universal human rights, to throw the idea of the nation-state,
and thus the liberal international order composed of nation-states, into
question.
Is All Diversity Really ‘Diversity’?

This volume argues that the organization of difference in any historical
era should be understood as a ‘diversity regime,’ which induces, legitim-
ates, or accentuates some kinds of difference and not others, that
‘curates,’ in the editors’ wonderful phrase, the kinds of cultural symbols
that constitute difference, and that marks some distinctions while erasing
others.57 This conceptualization moves away from essentialist conceptu-
alizations of diversity and also from the notion that diversity is a sudden,
new problem disrupting international, national, or local orders. Rather,
the editors argue, ‘diversity’ is always present in all societies but is
differently constituted, accentuated, and organized in different societies.
I would like to add a caution here.
The view of ‘diversities’ as universal features of human communities,
differently organized in differing institutional arrangements, is itself a
kind of universalizing or levelling view, which fits very well with an
emergent global polity. At one level, this view (a tremendous advance
over earlier formulations) recognizes that different civilizations, in differ-
ent historical eras, have accentuated some identities and suppressed or
ignored others, and that new forms of difference can be generated by new
forms of power and new institutional arrangements. On the other hand,
this way of conceptualizing difference homogenizes or levels very differ-
ent kinds of difference and implies, though it does not explicitly argue,
that all these kinds of difference are in some fundamental way similar,
57
See also Reus-Smit 2017.
perhaps reconcilable if they all can be granted that universal salve,

‘recognition.’58
Indeed, the very term ‘diversity regimes’ implies something like the
perspective of the global order’s managers of diversity. What seems like
‘diversity’ from the point of view of global and national institutional
orders – struggles over identities and recognition, for example – may
instead be localized struggles over the governance of daily life. As Joel
Migdal writes, ‘The major struggles in many societies, especially those
with fairly new states, are struggles over who has the right and ability to
make the countless rules that guide people’s social behavior.’59 In such
situations, local elites and many of those they govern are not making
claims for recognition or asking for a place in a diversity regime. Rather,
they are trying to retain forms of local governance that secure their claims
in persons and property. If such communal institutions and the forms of
personal security they represent are seen simply as kinds of ‘diversity,’ we
will misunderstand many contemporary forms of resistance both to the
nation-state and to the global polity.
Diversity of locally embedded governance institutions is related to
what James C. Scott has described as ‘the art of not being governed.’60
But, pace Scott, struggles to protect this sort of diversity are not
‘anarchy,’ but instead the defence of rule by local notables, from chiefs
and elders to warlords and caciques. As Migdal observes:
During the last century … colonial divide-and-rule policies injected vast new
resources—most notably, wealth and force—into the hands of local and regional
leaders, enabling them to strengthen the strategies of survival they could offer
clients and followers … In turn, their ability to make and enforce binding rules of
behavior also increased … Challenging these leaders and their organizations,
then, threatens social stability unless viable strategies of survival offered by state
agencies or organizations allied with the state, such as a political party, are at
hand, ready to be substituted.61
As I have argued, globalizing institutions promote the radically hom-
ogenizing ideal of universal human rights. International organizations,
through their rhetoric and their programmatic interventions, try to make
such homogenized personhood institutionally real. They draw on and
enact a universalized concept of the rights-bearing, autonomous individ-
ual as the core constituent of the global polity. Thus far, the global polity
has mainly sought to expand individual rights, especially for women and
children, while increasing human welfare – reducing poverty, improving
health, expanding education, and managing natural resources. It does
58 59 60
For the classic statement, see Taylor 1994. Migdal 2001, 64. Scott 2009.
61
Migdal 2001, 67.
204 Ann Swidler
not, however, provide the other crucial element of governance: effective

political and legal authority that sets and enforces the rules that govern
everyday life. Instead, the nation-state, and in places with weak states,
many alternative institutions – clans, tribal rulers, religious authorities,
and so forth – provide basic order and security and local versions of
economic opportunity and justice. These varied institutions are not
reducible to different forms of difference. They are not primarily about
the quest for identity and recognition, but about effective authority that
can enforce claims, set rules, and structure local social cooperation.62
If the global polity moves in the direction of soft empire, with a diffuse
centre that can provide basic order and security by tolerating or
absorbing varied forms of local association, it may succeed in reducing
competing forms of social organization to varied forms of ‘difference.’
Then we would think of dynastic chieftaincies in Africa, tribal elders in
Afghanistan, indigenous communities in Latin America, and national,
linguistic, skin-colour, or ethnic and religious differences as essentially
similar – markers of identity worthy of recognition, similar to the way that
cultural, religious, and ethnic ‘difference’ were made manageable under
earlier empire-type systems.63 New global institutional forms will also
make new identities salient, as ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’ are now
becoming. Perhaps, as the nation-state model comes under increasing
strain – with the political systems of the liberal democracies becoming
increasingly paralysed and unstable, and with nations roiled by issues of
immigration, exclusion, and inclusion – precisely this notion of diversity
as malleable difference will become hegemonic.
A focus on forms of governance can reshape the ways we think not only
about the international order as an emerging global polity, but about the
forms of diversity in that emergent order. The most obvious stance of the
global polity to issues of diversity of personhood is, at a basic level, to try
to reduce it. But many other forms of difference will thrive.
62 63
See Swidler 2013. See Barkey 2008; Zarakol, this volume, Chapter 3.
Part IV
Constitution and Contestation
10 Universal and European
Cultural Diversity in International Law
Arnulf Becker Lorca
In April 2017, the Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in Inter-

national Affairs at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International
Affairs, advertised a fellowship exclusively directed to lawyers from five
African countries. A short description of the research topic on ‘African
perspectives on international law’ accompanied the announcement,
including this: ‘African governments may differ from those in the West
and elsewhere in their perceptions and approaches to various aspects of
international law.’1
The idea that non-Western peoples understand international law dif-
ferently is an old idea dating back at least to the nineteenth-century
expansion of the international society, when lawyers argued that admis-
sion of non-Western states into the ‘family of nations’ depended in part
on knowing well what it meant to be bound by international legal obliga-
tions – ‘not knowing well’ being a reason to deny admission. Pointing at
divergences in understanding also rests on a claim that correct interpret-
ations of international law are Western. For many international lawyers
this has been an uncontroversial idea, for the close links assumed to exist
between international law and Western civilization. ‘Having European
civilization,’ affirmed renowned nineteenth-century English inter-
national lawyer and Cambridge University professor John Westlake, the
‘international society, is the most comprehensive form of society among
men.’2 As a ‘society of states,’ the international order is constituted on
the basis of shared habits and beliefs, above all religious attitudes and
values: ‘International Law … is a product of Christian civilization’ – so
confirmed Oppenheim’s International Law, a canonical textbook, not
only in the first edition of 1905, but well into the seventh edition of
1 2
Chatham House 2017. Also see, note 32. Westlake 1894, 78.
207
208 Arnulf Becker Lorca
1948, edited by a renowned internationalist like Hersh Lauterpacht.3

And this is an idea that subsists until today.4
There is another old idea linked to these claims that slips into the
present. Non-Western divergences are unwelcome. Thus, the Chatham
House announcement warns applicants that their research proposals
should not focus ‘on the academic discourse stemming from “third world
approaches to international law” [TWAIL] but on solutions which
encourage the universality of international law.’5
Universality, on the one hand, means simply that there is one set of
rules governing interstate relations; Western particularity is merely an
assertion about historical origins, and a reprimand against those verging
into apocryphal interpretations is just a call to preserve scientific rigour.
On the other hand, examples like the Chatham House announcement
suggest that when in routine legal argumentation universalism and par-
ticularism is invoked and departures from the canon are reproached,
lawyers are doing something more than just policing professional per-
formance. They are, this chapter argues, containing and managing cul-
tural diversity within international law.
Every international order, as this book shows, has been culturally
diverse. Moreover, the stability and legitimacy of every international
order depends, among other things, on the organization of diversity. In
a culturally diverse world, sanctioning what counts for legitimate political
authority, an international order distinguishes the cultural forms
regarded as acceptable from those regarded as unacceptable. Inter-
national law is the central social institution formally organizing cultural
difference in the contemporary international order. In the analysis pro-
posed by Chris Reus-Smit, international law functions as a diversity
regime.6
Discriminating between alternative cultural forms, when for example,
determining the conditions under which international legal subjectivity is
recognized to some human groupings but not to others, international law
structures cultural diversity. In this structuring, the project of interstate
governance through law is infused and entails commitments to cultural –
moral, religious and political – substance. But at the same time, as a
governance project between entities that remain sovereign, international
law is not more than a procedural tool that preserves pluralism, leaving to
3
Oppenheim 1905, 45; Oppenheim and Lauterpacht 1948, 68.
4
A recent history of international law, for example, identifies natural law as the tradition
making it possible to transcend the diversity of human societies and conceive a law for the
entire world. ‘[O]nly Western European civilization devised such a body of thought,’ Neff
2014, 59.
5 6
See note 32. Reus-Smit 2018a, 65–89.
Cultural Diversity in International Law 209
states the power to resist the lifting of substantive commitments to the

international plane.
Thus, international law not only structures cultural diversity, deter-
mining the conditions of international legal subjectivity and the basic
commitments required to participate in interstate legal relations, but also
shapes cultural diversity. International law legitimizes some cultural
meanings and practices, when allowing some to remain within the scope
of states’ sovereign domain (let’s say the death penalty). Other cultural
forms are legitimized when internationalized, as internationally protected
cultural meanings and practices (let’s say the protection of other states’
intellectual property rights and geographic appellations). And in a more
familiar scenario, international law shapes diversity when setting limits to
sovereigns’ domestic behaviour, when human rights restrict cultural
particularism (let’s say when it prohibits early and forced marriage).
Structuring and shaping cultural diversity in the international order,
international law, however, does not operate as a neutral and procedural
tool. It does not operate in a cultural vacuum. International law is not
only subject to and reflects material and ideological power, but also is
structured and shaped by its own culture. This chapter, in consequence,
examines how international law works as a diversity regime at two levels.
As an institution of international society, structuring and shaping cul-
tural diversity, international law organizes global cultural difference. At
the level of international legal practice, international law’s social insti-
tutions contain diversity within international law, they organize culture.
The practice of international legal argumentation dwells around sym-
bolic meanings, images and practices forming an international legal
culture. Legal culture, as we will see, structures and shapes international
law from within. Ideas and images about law taming sovereignty, about
law instilling values like peace and justice into interstate relations, gives
international law coherence and a purpose. But as we should know from
this book, legal culture, as any culture, is not only homogeneous and
cohesive, but is also, as it includes a multiplicity of conflicting meanings,
heterogeneous and fragmented.7 International legal culture, as any cul-
tural formation, is inherently diverse, expressing and reflecting contra-
dictory, loosely bounded, heterogeneous and contested meanings and
practices; international law is hybrid.
Hybridity results not only from the plurality of underlying values
conflicting and coexisting in a single project or commitment to law
governing international relations – what for one state is a matter of peace,
7
Swidler 1986, 277.
for another is a matter of security. Hybridity results also from fragmented

communities of practice, divided along styles of practice and legal argu-
mentation. Diverse legal cultures coalesce around ideological and meth-
odological commitments, around schools of thought and in general
around how international law has been experienced and inherited across
the globe. International law, for example, may appear to practitioners
sharing the historical experience of European expansion overseas, from
Westlake to Chatham, as a civilizing project. It appears differently to
those inhabiting the experiences of global expansion from the outside, to
those that have been subject to unequal treaties or colonial rule, as we
will show to Japanese and Chinese practitioners attending professional
meetings at the end of the nineteenth century, or today, to Africans in a
London sojourn because of a Chatham fellowship.
To practitioners across the world, international legal ideas, arguments,
images and practices resonate in consequence with similar but also
different meanings. Although there is one international law, it can be
experienced as Western or non-Western particularism, and it can be seen
from the core and the peripheries, the developed and the Third World,
the ‘civilized and uncivilized’. If differences are pushed too far, the
project of law governing interstate relations will be too fragmented. If
pushed too little, international law will not speak to the specificities of a
deeply diverse world. In foreign offices, universities and courts across the
world, international legal culture is channelled to produce an inter-
national law that is both universal and particular.
The practice of legal argumentation will have an impact on the degree
of cultural homogeneity and divergence that international law, as a diver-
sity regime, will accept. That is, the two levels at which international law
works as a diversity regime are connected. In order to grasp how inter-
national law functions structuring and shaping global cultural diversity,
one should look at the discipline’s social institutions where professional
contestation and battles occur, where diversity within international law is
managed, some legal cultures acquiring more social capital than others.
Thus, from within we see practitioners using legal argumentation to
advance highly particular standpoints and interests while preserving
international law’s cohesiveness and coherence. In this sense, channel-
ling international legal culture, practitioners keep to themselves the fact
that international law has been mostly particular, as white, European and
sometimes peripheral. Invoking the universal or the Western legal trad-
ition is an attempt to keep together something that otherwise may fall
apart.
International Legal Culture: Keeping It Together

International lawyers routinely parse out rules, principles and doctrines,
determining their legal status as interpreted by courts and states, their
lawyers and diplomats. It is not infrequent that when passing judgement
over legal interpretations, practitioners characterize what they regard as
acceptable arguments as part of universal international law, and charac-
terize wrong interpretations as the mistake of a particularistic –Third
World, socialist, African, Asian or Latin American – approach.
Pointing at particularism stands for criticism of peripheral states’
demands for specific international legal principles, like non-intervention
and self-determination, or for specific rules of international law, like the
formal inclusion of national liberation fighters in the 1977 Additional
Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, to give two examples of early and
late twentieth-century international law.8 In the case of the Chatham
House announcement, the description of African divergence in ‘attitudes
to international criminal institutions’ is probably the euphemism that
stands for a critique of the refusal of member states of the African Union
to fulfil arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC)
against incumbent state officials because of their refusal to withdraw
immunity of a head of state that is not party to the ICC.9
Invoking the universality of international law, international lawyers
have typically contested attempts from the peripheries to articulate legal
principles and rules in contravention to Western interests – from the late
nineteenth-century challenge of unequal treaties, to the twentieth-
century challenge of colonialism, up to today’s challenge of international
criminal law courts. Invoking universality, international lawyers at the
core may circumvent explicit reference to the divergence of interests
between core and peripheral states. Rather, appealing to the immanent
goals or principles of international law, practitioners from the core iden-
tify a cultural gap between universal goals and principles and those
pursued by international lawyers from the peripheries. Questioning the
pedigree and place that peripheral lawyers occupy in the international
legal tradition, or questioning in general non-Western peoples’ civiliza-
tional status, the Western international lawyer opens this gap in values
and attitudes. In 1878, for example, David Field, an American lawyer,
8
On non-intervention and self-determination, see Becker Lorca 2014. On the inclusion of
national liberation movements in the Geneva Protocol against the position of Western
states, see Mantilla 2017.
9
For example, in the case of the UN Security Council’s referral to the ICC of crimes,
including genocide, committed in Darfur by Sudan’s president Al-Bashir (in
Resolution 1593).
politician and reformer, invoked civilizational differences between the

East and the West to oppose the renegotiation of unequal treaties sought
after by diplomats from Asian nations.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Western states forcefully opened
non-Western states to international trade. From the Ottoman Empire to
Japan and China, Western states signed unequal treaties, opening ports
to Western merchants and merchandise. Unequal treaties protected the
latter by prohibiting quotas and limiting tariffs and protected the former
by excluding foreign residents from territorial jurisdiction, placing them
under the jurisdiction of Western consuls. In 1878, for the first time, a
Japanese and a Chinese delegate, Ueno Kagenori and Guo Songtao,
attended a meeting of an international law society, predecessor of today’s
International Law Association. Ueno noted that it is right for a cosmo-
politan association to choose its members from among all the nations of
the world, including Japan. Then, he pointed out that consular jurisdic-
tion should be applied fairly, since it is contrary to the sovereign rights of
Japan: ‘Justice to Europeans in Asia must be obtained without injustice to
Asiatics by Europeans.’10 Similarly, Guo welcomed the association’s
objectives: ‘improve the law for the benefit of all governments and
peoples,’ which will hopefully contribute to improving the relations of
China with other countries.11 Field responded to Ueno and Guo by
declaring that ‘it was necessary to uphold the capitulations, owing to
the procedure and modes of punishment used by the native tribunals
being intolerable to citizens of the West. … So long as there was not
something like a parity of civilization in the East and West, the consular
courts, or some analogous institution, must be maintained.’12
We may hear echoes of Field in the announcement by Chatham
House. Field invoked civilizational differences between ‘Eastern’ and
‘Western’ states, not only to defend the rules in unequal treaties, but
also to undercut Guo and Ueno as being capable of producing authori-
tative legal arguments against consular jurisdictional and unequal treat-
ies. When African scholars are invited to London to reaffirm the
universality of international law, Chatham House is arguably inviting
Africans not only to reaffirm their commitment to the rules in the Treaty
of Rome, the statute of the ICC, but also to set the limits of what
authoritative African legal arguments should be. Africans are invited to
think about themselves as universal, not as practitioners articulating
arguments from the Third World, or Africa. Discouraged from TWAIL,
10
Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations 1878, 38–41, 39.
11
Ibid., 40–41.
12
Ibid., 38. For a more extended analysis of this episode, see Becker Lorca 2014, 1–5.
Africans are discouraged to interpret the Rome statute provisions in

conjunction with the customary international law governing the immun-
ity of heads of state. And surely applicants would be discouraged from
considering a collective African withdrawal from the ICC.
Behind both David Field and the Chatham House announcement, as
well as behind Guo and Ueno and African diplomats refusing to fulfil an
ICC prosecutor’s arrest warrant, there is a practice of legal argumenta-
tion relying on an image of international law as more than a set of rules
governing interstate conduct, more than rules found in treaties like
capitulations or the Treaty of Rome. In both examples, what counts as
a valid rule – consular jurisdiction and the removal of head-of-state
immunity – depends on broader notions and images about the nature
and function of law and the nature and scope of an international com-
munity governed by law: the law of nations applying exclusively between
civilized states, international law promoting justice over impunity.
The ideas and assumptions, values and attitudes that actors in a social
context have in relation to the law and the legal order, including the
influence from society into the legal order and out of the legal order into
society, has been described by ‘law and society’ scholarship as consti-
tutive of a legal culture.13 In this view, an international society that is
understood to have been born in Europe, with the rise of the Westphalian
interstate order, and then to have attained global geographical reach
through European colonial expansion, has infused international law with
Western political concepts, from sovereignty to nation. For many, the
very idea of law, and thus the idea of an international legal order, is itself
a Western invention.14
Western notions of legitimate political authority become constitutive
when they are used to recognize or withdraw international legal subject-
ivity. When sovereignty depends on a legal standard of civilization, as it
did during the nineteenth century; or when it depends on a standard of
formal statehood as the conjunction of people, territory and government,
as today; or when formal statehood requires also respect of human rights,
then the Western legal and political tradition is not merely an influence
on states with different cultural, political and historical backgrounds – it
is also constitutive. Polities across the globe have to fit within the
13
Friedman 1994. But see Silbey 2005, note 84, using the term ‘legal culture’ to capture
not only the circulation of legal imagery, but also law’s hegemonic dimension, preserving
an idea of law as neutral and legitimate ordering, even in the face of suffering and
injustice.
14
See, for example, Schiavone 2012.
conditions delineated by international law in order to become inter-

national legal subjects.
Then, an outsider like Japan, meeting the terms of membership
defined by European states, would reinforce the Western character of
both international law and the international order. Field, the American
delegate, explicitly invoked images of uncivilized behaviour to support
consular jurisdiction, the proceedings of the 1878 recording: ‘He
instanced that … until recently, crucifixion downwards had ben common
in Japan. In China … he had himself seen the torture applied.’15 When
Ueno answered Field, stating that ‘crucifixion was now happily abolished
in Japan, and that that country was quickly mastering the enlightened
notions of the West,’ we see the Japanese delegate replacing affiliation for
exclusion.16 Many commentators believe that since the terms of exclu-
sion and inclusion were dictated by a Western standard of civilization,
when Japan was at the turn of the twentieth century finally admitted into
the international community, the Western character of international law
was reasserted rather than challenged.17
If modern law is rooted in Western legal culture, if the international
society is rooted in the Westphalian system, how can international law
not be Western? But then, how can international law be also universal?
Only its origins are Western; its content is not. Natural law, at the origin
of international law, ‘was a radically cosmopolitan, universalist corpus of
thought,’ affirms a historian of international law.18 Then, becoming a
liberal international order, procedural and formal enough to contain
cultural, religious and ideological difference, and after decolonization
to contain racial difference, how can international law not be universal?
These claims, as flimsy as they are from a historical and conceptual
angle, should rather be read as claims in legal argumentation. Practition-
ers produce law using not only rules, but also symbolic references and
images of international law as a neutral, non-partisan and thus univer-
sally legitimate ordering mechanism, as intimately tied to Western civil-
ization, and at times also as tied to distinctively regional, particularistic
approaches, like a ‘Third World’ approach to international law.
During the nineteenth century, civilization, white race and European
international society were some of the symbolic references used in legal
argumentation to produce law and delineate the realm within which the
law of nations governed relations between sovereigns under equality,
from the realm outside sovereign equality, where the law governed
15
Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations 1878, 15.
16 17
Ibid. Among many others, Yasuaki 1990, 25; Mazower 2006.
18
Neff 2014, 59.
relations under inequality. During the course of the twentieth century,

with the rise of formal statehood and self-determination, the inter-
national legal order experienced a massive transformation: it was no
longer formally divided between a regime of equality and inequality.
After this transformation, the practice of legal argumentation, and thus
legal culture, changed. Some images and meanings of the old nineteenth-
century international legal culture subsisted, like civilization; other new
terms and images, like humanity, emerged as part of a new international
legal culture.
Keeping It Civilized: White and Universal

During the nineteenth century, to be considered civilized, semi-civilized
or uncivilized carried vital consequences for peoples who would accord-
ingly become lawfully subject to colonial rule or unequal treaties. Japan-
ese Tsurutaro Senga complained that lawyers draw such distinctions
using neither legal nor scientific expressions, like ‘civilization’ and ‘cul-
ture.’ Rather, when European international lawyers ‘speak about “civil-
ization”,’ Senga contends, ‘they do so from the subjective standpoint of
their own Weltanschauung.’19
As Senga pointed out, oscillating between cultural values and formal
institutions as proxies for civilization, distinctions were not based on legal
norms, but on ideas and images channelled in legal argumentation.
Thus, nineteenth-century Japanese international lawyers sought to
change patterns of argumentation showing Japan’s belonging in the
international society by appropriating Western modes of legal argumen-
tation.20 These were legal claims against a Western lawyer’s definition of
membership. For the English lawyer Westlake, the ideas and values
behind European civilization constituted ‘the international society to
which we belong.’21 The line between those included and excluded was
not just civilizational, but also racial.22 The international society is the
‘society of the white race,’ the ‘fully sovereign state of the white society
whose rules are the law.’23
The ‘white race cannot be stopped’ from advancing into the uncivil-
ized regions of the globe, Westlake affirmed.24 These are uncivilized
regions neither because of the ‘mental or moral characters’ that ‘distin-
guish the civilized from the uncivilized individual,’ nor because of
19
Tsurutaro 1897, 135.
20
For a discussion of these strategies, see Becker Lorca 2014, chapter 2.
21 22 23
Westlake 1894, 81; see chapters on the principles. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 191.
24
Ibid., 141–143.
‘domestic or social habits,’ but rather – Westlake believes – because of

the absence of a ‘native government capable of controlling white men or
under which white civilization can exist.’25
But then, the presence of a government was not enough. When white
people encountered non-white civilizations, the line between the legal
equality of states ‘in civilization’ and states that, although with political
institutions, like ‘governments after the manner of the Asiatic empires,’
enjoyed only ‘semi-sovereignty,’ depended on values and customs. Wes-
tlake argued that in matters of ‘family relations, and criminal law and its
administration,’ Western residents in ‘Turkey and Persia, China, Japan,
Siam and some other countries’ that have a ‘civilization differing from the
European’ would ‘not feel safe under the local administration of justice.’
Unequal treaties and consular jurisdiction were thus necessary to give
‘adequate protection to the unfamiliar interests arising out of a foreign
civilization.’26
Senga was correct. The difference between the regime of equality and
inequality was not based on legal science finding formal law, but on
European and American lawyers channelling symbolic meaning to draw
a line that shifted from race to government, from civilization to culture.
That legal argumentation like this looked coherent to Europeans was the
work of a legal culture that foregrounded international law’s civilizational
mission and international lawyers as the mission’s acolytes.27 To Japan-
ese and other non-Europeans, the drawing of the lines between inter-
national law’s regime of equality and inequality looked arbitrary, though
not international law’s civilizing mission. When some practitioners from
the peripheries appropriated Western professional identity and legal
thought, redrawing these lines, inserting themselves and their polities
on the side of civilization, formal rules did not immediately change.
But a new and divergent legal culture emerged, where the interactions
like the one between Ueno, Guo and Field begun to unfold differently,
where Westlake changed his mind on Japan after meeting Sakuyei
Takahashi, a Japanese legal scholar visiting Cambridge,28 where it
became possible not to be white and European and make international
legal arguments about law and civilization. In this new professional
scenario, it was welcomed to have works by Western international
lawyers translated and used in places like China, just as it was welcomed
25
Ibid., 137, 141–143.
26
Ibid., 101–102. And the line between familiar and unfamiliar is here cultural, including:
‘family life, and social life … based on monogamous marriage and respect for women …
arts and sciences … liberal education,’ Ibid.
27 28
See Koskenniemi 2001. See Becker Lorca 2014, 112–114.
to see non-Western international lawyers participating in professional

congregations, for global circulation became tokens of the universality
of European international law.29
Turning Formally Universal, Becoming European

The road towards formal universality, recognizing that international law
applies to all peoples under the same regime of formal equality, was long.
The nineteenth-century inclusion in the international community of
Asian states like Japan, and African states like Ethiopia, culminated only
after 1960s decolonization. With the recognition of peoples’ right to self-
determination, international law became formally universal. However,
symbolic meanings and images linked to civilization, to the Western
origin and to the universality of international law continued to be used
in legal argumentation. For example, characterizing oneself as part of
civilized humanity and one’s enemies as uncivilized, especially in matters
of war and peace, continues to be a very common strategy.
As recent as April 2017, justifying the launching of cruise missiles into
Syria, the US representative at the UN Security Council, Nikki Haley,
accused Syria not only of breaking international law and violating numer-
ous UN resolutions, but also of committing criminal acts that have
shocked the ‘conscience of all humanity.’30 There is no need to invoke
humanity to cast Syria as an offender; pointing at the ban on the use of
chemical weapons depends simply on a black letter rule in the Chemical
Weapons Convention and its customary law status. Rather, the distinc-
tion between civilized and uncivilized humanity is invoked to bestow
legal legitimacy on US action in Syria beyond the strictures of the rules
governing the resort to military force according to the UN Charter.
When the international community fails to act collectively, Haley warns,
there are times when states should act unilaterally. ‘The moral stain of
the Assad regime can no longer go unanswered. His crimes against
humanity can no longer be met with empty words … It is time for all
civilized nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria.’31
We may see the opposite argumentative move in the announcement by
Chatham House, warning applicants not to veer from universality, and in
the criticism levelled against it. Rather than pointing at a distinction
drawn along civilizational lines, we see an affirmation of international
law’s universality that censures perspectives foregrounding difference,
like TWAIL. Invoking universality, as we will see, however, legitimizes
29 30 31
Ibid., chapter 4. Haley 2018. Ibid.
legal arguments carving out a special place for Western historical or

cultural particularism.
Once the announcement reached the blogosphere, criticism was
swift.32 Chatham House quickly dropped the reference to universality,33
and when the deadline passed, the description of the fellowship’s topic
was removed altogether. What remained was the fellowship’s affiliation
to the Chatham House’s public international law programme, and in
particular to the project examining ‘rising powers and the future of
international law.’34 Among many other themes, the programme has
focused on ‘China and the Future of the International Legal Order,’
exploring the implications of the rise of China on the content and direc-
tion of international law and for global governance in general.35
In this research programme, as well as in international lawyers’ com-
mentary on the impact that the rise of a more assertive China and Russia
could signify for the international legal order, explicit declarations about
the Western nature of international law being challenged by non-
Western states, based on cultural and civilizational differences, are hard
to find.36 It seems that the mistake of the drafters of the Chatham House
announcement was to explicitly use universality to exclude a non-
Western perspective. What remained after the appeal to universality
was renounced was a subtler differentiation reserving a special place for
the West within the universal, as the moral and political force behind the
foundation of a rule-based international order. Take, for example, the
international law programmes at Chatham House to which the fellowship
was affiliated. In a 2015 background paper on the ‘Challenges to the
Rules-Based International Order,’ Western as well as non-Western states
are deemed responsible for the weakening of the international order.37
When international rules are no longer seen as rules that are respected
by powerful states, then states ‘pursue a “might is right” approach’ that
undermines the international order’s legitimacy.38 The background
paper paints a picture where the West is in part responsible for the
challenges that ‘rising or revanchist states’ – that is, China and Russia,
32
Sundhya Pahuja, a postcolonial legal scholar and professor at Melbourne Law School,
noted that if international law is already universal, why ‘does it need to be
“encouraged?”.’ Because, Pahuja answers, ‘the universality referred to is a claim, not a
fact. … [T]he “universal” applies everywhere and to everyone, not because it does in fact
apply, but because it should apply,’ Pahuja 2017.
33
The wording quoted in the accompanying text to note 1 was changed for: ‘This project*
would complement the International Law Programme’s existing work on rising powers
and international law.’ And the asterisk clarifies: ‘*Misleading references in a previous
version of this advertisement to the preferred focus of the project have been dropped.’
34 35
Chatham House 2018a. Chatham House 2018b.
36 37 38
For an exception, see Petersmann 2018. Chatham House 2018c. Ibid., 2.
in the South China Sea and Crimea, for instance – pose to the inter-
national order. The erosion of US leadership – from the invasion of Iraq
to the failure to close Guantanamo and the continuous resort to drone
strikes and global surveillance – and Western states’ failure to tackle the
instabilities created by globalization contributed to the order’s global
challenges and challengers.39
However, when challenges and challengers are described as defying
not just the international system but the ‘liberal Western values it
embodies,’ the paper reminds the West of the special place it has occu-
pied in the past and reaffirms the place it should have in the international
order’s future. Western states have grown complacent because they have
forgotten the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the international order they
created. Seen from the West, the international order seems to have
spread the benefits of modernity – the paper including as examples the
promotion of ‘global free trade,’ ‘UN Security Council-sanctioned inter-
ventionism’ and ‘human rights activism,’ from ‘gay rights’ to ‘anti-cen-
sorship campaigns.’ However, the paper points out that ‘elsewhere’ the
same order sparks fears of Western dominance and Western ‘materialism
and secularism.’40 These fears, the paper warns, should neither make the
West change its approach nor accept ‘cultural relativism.’41 Rather, the
‘West has the opportunity to take the initiative, to decide now what sort
of revised rules it would like to establish, and how far it is willing to take
into account the interests of its rivals or alternatively to fight over its
priorities.’42
Turning to History: Western or Hybrid Legal Cultures?

The vision of an international legal order that, while formally universal,
reserves a special place for the West, is achieved and reinforced by legal
argumentation that turns to narratives about the origin and development
of international law. Renouncing explicit invocations of universality and
reinstating a special place for the West in the internationalist tradition
was not exclusive to Chatham House, but is a general trend in inter-
national law. For example, the 1990s ‘Asian Values‘ debate followed a
similar pattern. The controversy, pitting, in the words of a famous
human rights scholar, the ‘ontological’ or ‘anthropological’ universality
of human rights against ‘absolutist cultural relativism,’ morphed into a
defence of ‘relative universality.’43 Today, the universality of human
rights means only the universality of signed treaties, ‘international legal
39 40 41 42 43
Ibid. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3. Donnelly 2013, 287.
universality,’ and only ‘functional universality’ as ‘the most effective

response yet devised to … threats to human dignity that market econ-
omies and bureaucratic states have made.’44 What follows then is a
notion of human rights as relatively universal, a notion that because of
history and tradition has the West at its centre.
In a legal order where formal discrimination is no longer accepted, it is
unsurprising to see informal differentiations drawn in the writing of
international law and human rights histories. In these histories, the
centrality of European states, and since the twentieth century of the
United States, and of the European and American legal traditions and
their thinkers, are reaffirmed. In the past decades, the centrality of the
West has also been contested with the rise of critical histories. Most
supporters as well critics share narratives whereby international law and
the Westphalian system originates in Europe. Only the description of the
global expansion of the Western legal order is subject to significant
contestation, as either a history of progress or as a history of colonialism
and imperialism.
These historical narratives, as part of legal culture, serve to produce
legal arguments. For example, in 2010 at the American Society of Inter-
national law (ASIL), Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser
during the Obama administration, noting that ‘everyone here at this
meeting is committed to international law,’ reminded everyone – quoting
Obama – that ‘not just treaties … brought stability to a post-World War
II world … the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the
peace.’ ‘Let there be no doubt,’ Koh reassured the audience, ‘the Obama
Administration is firmly committed to complying with all applicable law
in … armed conflicts.’ What is needed, Koh argues, is a ‘translation’ of
traditional laws of war in light of the contemporary conflict ‘against a
diffuse, difficult-to-identify terrorist enemy.’45 Recalling ‘global leader-
ship’ and involvement in World War II foregrounds America’s ‘stature
and moral authority’ in the post-war UN order, thus bestowing legal
legitimacy on US military action. Here, arguably, international legal
culture is channelled to affirm a universal international law with the
United States at its centre, and to produce legal arguments in a ‘transla-
tion’ that legally justifies, among others, detention of ‘enemy belligerents’
and ‘lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial
vehicles.’46
On the other hand, in 2016 a joint declaration by Russia and China on
‘The Promotion of International Law’, similarly offered legal justification
44 45 46
Ibid., 287. Koh 2010. Ibid.
of Russian and Chinese foreign policy, foregrounding the principles of

sovereign equality and non-intervention against unilateral sanctions and
unilateral military interventions. Moreover, a ‘universal treaty,’ the UN
Convention on the Law of the Sea is mentioned as crucial in maintaining
the ‘rule of law’ in the oceans. There is also here a narrative about the
development of international law joined with formal law in support of
legal argumentation. In this case, the images summoned are the Five
Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the United Nations General
Assembly Declaration on Friendly Relations, both milestones in a non-
Western history of international law.47
International legal culture was channelled in these examples by the
United States, Russia and China using symbolic images associated with
similar as well as diverging historical narratives, rendering international
law, respectively, as a tool for legitimate violence in the name of peace
and stability, and a tool for protecting statehood from intervention, and
thus legitimizing violence occurring within states. These examples sug-
gest that some intersubjective legal meanings have evolved around the
practice of international lawyers from the West or the core of the inter-
national system; others have emerged around practices of non-Western
or peripheral lawyers. These examples suggest that international legal
culture is not monolithic, that it is at least divided in two. In the forma-
tion of international legal culture, the core/periphery dynamic has been
important, for more powerful states have used legal arguments to gain
stability and legitimacy, and less powerful states have resisted using law.
However, many other legal practices constitutive of symbolic meanings
do not fit in the core/periphery distinction, as practices motivated by
political ideology, religion and other regional or nationally circumscribed
particularities. As a hegemonic and a counter-hegemonic legal culture
evolved in the core and in the peripheries, the hybridity of international
law and legal culture can be grasped in at least five characteristics.
International legal culture is fundamentally contradictory, not tightly
bounded, heterogeneous, patterned and contested.
First, international legal culture is contradictory. The ideal of subject-
ing interstate relations to law includes images about curbing national
self-interest in front of values like justice and the intrinsic dignity of all
human beings. However, accounting only for the symbolic images
related to international justice misses the other side of the series of
constitutive oppositions on which the project of creating order between
states that retain their sovereign prerogatives is based.
47
The Declaration of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the
Promotion of International Law, 26 June 2016.
International law is both and at the same time about preserving sover-
eignty and protecting the interests of the international community. It is
about both national self-interest and justice. It both enables and limits
war, creates and contains climate change, recognizes and disavows
human rights, makes possible free trade and protectionism. International
legal culture is also contradictory because images like universality can be
put to opposite uses. For example, in the hands of Chatham House, it
was meant to exclude African approaches. In the aftermath of decolon-
ization, in the hands of T. O. Elias, a Nigerian international lawyer and
then president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), universality
was meant to give African states equal standing in the international
community.48
Second, international legal culture is not tightly bounded, since it is
different and circumscribed communities of practice that emerged
around different lived and inherited historical experiences that make
some symbolic ideas and images about international law more relevant
than others. We can now describe the invocation of universality, like the
one we saw in the announcement by Chatham House, not as a claim
about international law’s universal values threatened by particularism,
but as a distinctive trait of the European tradition of international law. It
is precisely this trait that critical legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi used at
the Inaugural Conference of the European Society of International Law
(ESIL) to characterize the European tradition: ‘like many other Euro-
pean traditions, it imagines itself as universal.’49
Not everyone defines international legal culture around universality.
For Africans, Asians or Latin Americans it is the particularity of their
engagements with international law that defines legal culture. The real-
ities of decolonization, underdevelopment and solidarity among peoples
that experienced Western imperialism constitute regional traditions
claiming participation in universal international law not as mere com-
panions to the European tradition, but as overcoming old European law
by founding a new international law.50 The idea of continental solidarity,
for example, was used in Latin America to push for the recognition of
non-intervention.51 Moreover, the idea that decolonization changed the
nature of the international society and called for a new international law
adapted to the new social conditions was used by the Third World
48 49
Elias 1972, 84. Koskenniemi 2005.
50
The paradigmatic argument about the new world replacing old European individualistic
law with a law of interdependence and solidarity was advanced by Alejandro Alvarez
1910; for a similar argument in relation to Africa, see Bipoun-Woum 1970, 47, 57 and
132ff. On Alvarez, see Becker Lorca 2006a.
51
See Becker Lorca 2014, chapter 9.
movement to support the UN declarations establishing a new inter-

national economic order and a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties
of States, including the recognition of developing states’ sovereignty over
natural resources.52 Anxiety over Europe as the paradigm of universality
has also constituted non-European legal traditions. For example, as
Lauri Mälksoo has shown, the Russian international legal tradition has
been defined by its relation to Europe, swinging between nativism and
Westernizing modernization.53
Third, international legal culture is heterogeneous, for international
lawyers have used both universality and particularity to imagine them-
selves as part of an international community governed by law. Not every
European understands universality the same way as non-Europeans dis-
agree over the usefulness of regional particularity.54 Replying to Kosken-
niemi’s inaugural lecture, French international lawyer Pierre-Marie
Dupuy, for example, defended a substantive notion of universality: ‘We
should not … be afraid of demanding the promotion of universal values
that have already been integrated into the norms of positive law. They are
not (or not only) our part of our European heritage, but the common
heritage of mankind.’55
Koskenniemi, in contrast, had proposed an empty definition of uni-
versality as a style or practice: ‘a European tradition in the same sense
that wearing a tie at formal meetings is. Everyone can do it.’ The problem
is therefore not the claim of universality, but the criteria to determine
why and which claims should be universalized. And here Koskenniemi
observes that there is ‘context and history’ to this practice.56 It is a
problem that criteria have been historically set by Europeans, but at the
same time things have changed. Reminding us that the international legal
profession since its beginning has defined itself in universal terms, as the
‘juridical conscience of the civilized world,’ Koskenniemi points out that
they, the founders of the profession, those like Field and Westlake, ‘were
different from us’ – they were ‘universalists sans peur et sans reproche.’57
Times have changed, Koskenniemi notes: ‘Europe no longer speaks
from such a position. But it still speaks the language of universal inter-
national law, perhaps uncertain about who will listen.’58 Was it under
this uncertainty that Chatham House recanted in embarrassment? ‘Our
voice is less confident,’ explains Koskenniemi, ‘our defenses stronger,
harder to penetrate.’59 Are defences today stronger when there are no
longer formal legal terms to discriminate between polities?
52 53
See, for example, Bedjaoui 1979. Mälksoo 2016.
54 55
For a Latin American example, see Becker Lorca 2006b, 283. Dupuy 2005, 135.
56 57 58 59
Koskenniemi 2005, 114. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 121.
Channelling legal culture becomes a way to produce informal differ-

entiation within a formally universal international law. Dupuy is worried
about Koskenniemi glossing over the ‘universal strategy of human rights
and respect for the human person within humanity … that provides the
basis for the judicial prosecution of “crimes against humanity” … [and
the] promotion of international penal tribunals, of a genuine inter-
national justice.’60 If it is easier for Dupuy or for Chatham House to
invoke universality supporting international criminal law than it is for
Africans invoking universality supporting sovereign immunity or
pointing at ICC bias, then we may see international legal culture also
as patterned.
Forth, the distribution of symbolic meaning in legal culture is pat-
terned. In the main social institutions of international law, in law firms
and law schools, at ASIL and ESIL, in international tribunals and
organizations, symbolic meanings and images that resonate in the core
are more familiar than elements of international legal culture that reson-
ate in peripheral locations. For example, it is easier for someone like Koh
to argue about the legality of American conduct in Afghanistan than for
the Russian or Chinese lawyer to argue about the legality of Russian and
Chinese conduct in Crimea and the South China Sea. The distribution
of symbolic material within legal culture is patterned.
Unequal distribution of symbolic meaning and images may leave
Europeans ahead. But we do not know in advance if Western lawyers
will always have a ‘cultural’ advantage. For each time someone like
Dupuy, Field or Westlake channels legal culture to produce persuasive
legal arguments, there is someone advancing a persuasive counter-claim.
We saw Ueno and Guo answering Field, showing the internalization of
the standard of civilization. A second generation of international lawyers
from the peripheries, since at least the turn of the twentieth century, has
contested and appropriated terms like ‘humanity,’ ‘universality’ and
‘civilization.’ Remember Tsurutaro Senga at the turn of the century,
arguing that the standard of civilization was not based on legal criteria
but on prejudice. During the interwar years, Abd-el-Krim, rebel leader of
the Riff, accused Spanish forces of ‘barbarism,’ as Shakib Arslan, repre-
sentative of the Syro-Palestinian Congress, and Marcus Garvey, leader of
the Pan-African movement, as well as non-Western diplomats from Iran
to Haiti, denounced the ‘barbarian outrages’ committed by the Western
colonial powers, from the French bombardment of Damascus to the
South African aerial bombardment of the Bondelswarts.61 Legal
60 61
Dupuy 2005, 137. Becker Lorca 2014, chapter 7.
arguments by Ueno, Guo, Senga, Abd-el-Krim, Arslan or Garvey show

that international legal culture, fifth and finally, is also contested.
If cultural diversity in the international order is in part organized
through international law, how does a heterogeneous and contested legal
culture shape international law’s function as a diversity regime? Inter-
national law, with an unequal distribution of symbolic meanings and
images, does not mechanically organize cultural difference in the inter-
national order. Let me conclude with a brief example, an ICJ case on
whaling, suggesting that a patterned international legal culture tilts inter-
national law’s shaping of cultural difference in favour of those for whom
it is easier to access familiar symbolic meanings and images. The practice
of whaling carries heavy symbolic meaning, but also very different mean-
ing in places like Australia, where it tends to carry moral stigma, and
Japan, where it tends to be identified with traditional values. In this
example, international law shapes cultural diversity, excluding, for Japan,
whaling as a legitimate international practice, not because of inter-
national lawyers’ underlying conservationist or environmentalist norma-
tive commitments, which one could moreover identify with Western
values, but rather because it was in this particular case easier for Australia
to access familiar legal meanings and images within a diverse but pat-
terned international legal culture.
Patterns within a Hybrid Legal Culture

During the months of June and July of 2013, the ICJ heard oral argu-
ments in the case between Australia and Japan concerning whaling in the
Antarctic.62 At stake was the legality of Japan’s whaling program. In
1946, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling
(ICRW) was signed and an organization called the International Whaling
Commission (IWC) was created to issue regulations necessary to carry
out the objectives and purposes of the convention. According to Article
III of the ICRW, a schedule of regulations lists the species to be covered
by the treaty, which can be subject to amendments and is binding on all
parties to the treaty. In 1982, the IWC voted to amend the schedule,
phasing out commercial whaling, leading to a complete moratorium in
1986, with the exception, in accordance to Article VIII of the ICRW, of
whaling for scientific purposes. Article VIII determines that parties ‘may
grant to any of its nationals a special permit authorizing that national to
kill, take and treat whales for purposes of scientific research.’63 In 2010,
62 63
International Court of Justice 2014. ICRW 1946, Article VIII.
Australia instituted proceedings against Japan concerning Japan’s issuing

of whaling permits for scientific purposes, under JARPA II.64
While Japan regards its programme to be justified under the ICRW
exception, Australia regards Japan’s programme as unlawfully misusing
the scientific exception in order to continue with commercial whaling. It
was therefore not surprising to see, during oral proceedings, Australian
and Japanese authorities, as well as their lawyers and their appointed
science experts, clashing around different interpretations of what whaling
for scientific as opposed to commercial purposes actually means. But it
was surprising, though not unexpected, to see how this discussion
quickly escalated beyond the verges of cetology into wider issues of
international law and politics.
It wasn’t just controversy in relation to the scope and nature of the
obligations adopted under the ICRW, which in turn depends on an
interpretation of the convention’s object and purpose – conserving the
stock versus protecting whales from whaling – that surfaced between
Australia and Japan, but also controversy about the nature and purpose
of international law in the context of the tension between national and
global interest, between cultural pluralism and cultural imperialism.
‘The basic objective of a multilateral convention is to bring States of
widely differing social, economic and political systems with diverse inter-
ests to co-operate for agreed global interests under an agreed frame-
work’ – these were the words of Koji Tsuruoka, the Deputy Minister
for Foreign Affairs, opening Japan’s first round of oral argument.65 We
saw in the Russian-Chinese declaration the same style of legal argumen-
tation, channelling images of international law as regulating relations
between formally autonomous and equal states, enabling the advance-
ment of common interests without sacrificing inclusiveness. Adopting
international obligations that respect the sovereign autonomy and equal-
ity of states – within this legal culture – secures both the advancement of
common interests and a pluralistic international order.
Australia has ‘the sovereign right to decide its position,’ its policy to
adopt or not a total ban on whaling. But, Tsuruoka warns, Australia
‘cannot impose its will on other nations nor change the IWC into an
organization opposed to whaling.’66 ‘[A]re all cetaceans sacred and
endangered?’ Tsuruoka asks, highlighting the Australian position as
contradictory to his image of international law: ‘I can understand the
64
JARPA II is the Second Phase of the Japanese Whale Research Program under Special
Permit in the Antarctic.
65
International Court of Justice 2014, CR 2013/12, para 11.
66
Ibid., CR 2013/12, para 10.
emotional background to this position,’ the Japanese diplomat notes, but

‘[I] fail to understand how it can be translated to a legal or scientific
position.’67
William Campbell, the Australian agent, on the other hand, affirmed
in the first round of oral argument that Japan’s whaling programme
violates the ICRW in the ‘proper application’ of the exception authoriz-
ing whaling for purposes of scientific research.68 The Australian claim is
then bolstered by Campbell’s underscoring of the structural changes that
have led to the development of contemporary international law. Camp-
bell points out that there is ‘broad recognition’ that ‘matters of common
environmental concern’ are now subject to a ‘system of collective regula-
tion.’ Collective regulation, Campbell affirms, ‘replaced self-interested
and unilateral determinations’ by states, determinations that have been
followed by ‘environmental degradation.’69 ‘Japan’s continued conduct
of a program of commercial whaling under the guise of science is a
blatant example of such unilateral action.’70
Whereas Japan’s style of argumentation articulates images of a legal
culture wherein sovereign coexistence determines the content of inter-
national cooperation, thus preserving differences in social and political
organization between states, Australia’s style of argumentation reflects an
image where international law makes cooperation possible regarding
interests deemed to be the international community’s common interests.
Like Koh, the American legal adviser evoking familiar images about
the evolution of the post-World War II international legal order, Austra-
lia could access familiar ideas about environmental conservation as part
of a general trend towards the expansion of international law domesti-
cating sovereignty. Where Japan sees whaling for scientific purposes as an
exercise of sovereignty under the convention, Australia sees Japan abus-
ing sovereignty, while failing to fulfil its treaty obligations in good faith.
Campbell concludes: Japan ‘sought to cloak its ongoing commercial
whaling in the lab-coat of science.’71
Japan’s response, questioning the universality of Australia’s claim,
came from Payam Akhavan, a Canadian-Iranian member of Japan’s
counsel. Australia’s anti-whaling position, Akhavan explains: ‘reflects
Australian public opinion that, unlike other inferior members of the
animal kingdom, whales are unique, sacred, charismatic mammals that
should never be killed.’72 Australia, Akhavan asserts, not only seeks to
‘impose Australian values on Japan, in disregard of international law,’
67 68
Ibid., CR 2013/12, para 11. Ibid., CR 2013/7, para 4.
69 70
71 72
but also seeks – paraphrasing Campbell – ‘to cloak its political and
cultural preferences “in the lab-coat of science”.’73 ‘The days of civilizing
missions and moral crusaders are over. In a world of diverse civilization
and traditions, international law cannot become an instrument for
imposing the cultural preference of some at the expense of others,’
Akhavan concludes.74
Mark Dreyfus, the Attorney-General of Australia, responded to
Japan’s allegations: ‘This case is not about civilizing missions or whether
the Australian Government or the Australian public like or dislike the
consumption of whale meat. Nor is this case about Australia’s strongly-
held policy position of opposing commercial whaling. This case is about
the failure of one country to comply with its international legal obliga-
tions not to conduct commercial whaling.’75
Conclusion: A Diversity Regime Shaped by

Conflicting International Legal Cultures
The ICJ, unsurprisingly, mentioned differences between Australian and
Japanese attitudes regarding whaling only to evade explicit consideration
of policies and values.76 The court claimed that subjecting Japanese
permits to judicial review neither entails a decision on policy – the court
‘is not called upon to resolve matters of scientific or whaling policy’77 –
nor entails a decision on values: ‘The Court is aware that members of the
international community hold divergent views about the appropriate
policy towards whales and whaling, but it is not for the Court to settle
these differences.’78 Rather, the ICJ stresses that its role was limited to
the interpretation of the treaty: Japan’s framing of JARPA II within the
exception of Article VIII.79
The court accepted that it is Japan that determines the conditions
under which permits are issued. However, the court observes that
whether the permit is for purposes of scientific research cannot depend
on the ‘State’s perception’ and should thus be subject to judicial
review.80 Since the convention does not define ‘scientific purpose,’ the
court created a standard of review. Described as an objective standard, it
considered both formal aspects of JARPA II and its ‘design and imple-
mentation.’81 The court concluded that, although JARPA II involves
73 74
Ibid., responding to Campbell. Ibid., CR 2013/12, para 82.
75
Ibid., CR 2013/18, para 8.
76
International Court of Justice 2014, judgement of, para 88, 127 and 172.
77 78 79 80
Ibid., para 69. Ibid., para 69. Ibid., para 69. Ibid., para 61.
81
Ibid., para 67.
scientific research, the ‘evidence does not establish’ that ‘design and
implementation are reasonable in relation to achieving its stated object-
ives.’ Thus, ‘the special permits granted by Japan for the killing, taking
and treating of whales are not “for purposes of scientific research”.’82
The whaling case confirms that international law only exceptionally
manages cultural diversity directly, by explicitly banning certain prac-
tices, as in the case of international crimes like torture or genocide. On
the flip side, controversies where cultural diversity is explicitly invoked to
push back against international legal obligations are rare. International
law today is understood to embrace rather than limit cultural diversity.83
It is therefore telling that, on the one hand, minority rights protecting
diversity are human rights, and on the other hand, the treaty on diversity
explicitly prevents states from invoking its provisions to infringe ‘univer-
sally recognized human rights.’84
This makes sense, for as we have seen, unlike in the nineteenth
century, international law no longer formally discriminates on the basis
of substance, like race or civilization. The whaling case decision shows
that it is more common for international law to sidestep explicit norma-
tive preferences when oscillating between limiting and preserving diver-
sity, deciding indirectly on formal and procedural grounds.
But then how does international law function as a diversity regime?
Though indirectly, international law structures diversity when defining
international subjectivity. Only Australia and Japan, the ICJ and the
IWC – states and interstate organizations – and neither the Sea Shepherd
nor Japanese whalers, could participate in the whaling case.85 Moreover,
participation in international law is itself of symbolic significance. Japan’s
being a party to the ICRW and accepting the schedule could be part of its
post-war internationalist identity, just as African states joining the ICC
represented commitment to good governance. And we see today this
post-war internationalist identity shifting: African states have misgivings
about their membership, Burundi withdrew from the ICC, and Japan
withdrew from the IWC in 2019 after the unfavourable ruling by the
ICJ.86
Both through sovereign autonomy and limiting its exercise with rules,
international law shapes cultural diversity. When the ICJ declared
82 83
Ibid., para 227. See, for example, von Bogdandy 2008.
84
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 2005c,
Article 2.1.
85
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an international marine conservation NGO,
known for its anti-whaling campaign, including the interception of Japanese whaling
vessels.
86
IWC 2019.
whaling to be illegal in relation to Japan, while remaining legal in relation

to Norway and Iceland (state members of the ICRW that objected to the
schedule), international law shaped diversity. With a myriad of inter-
national obligations, the organization of cultural diversity is unstable and
fluid. Not only are obligations subject to interpretation and states left
with a wide margin of appreciation to enforce obligations – even after an
unfavourable ruling, Japan, for example, continued with its whaling
programme, adapting it to the post-judgement conditions – but also, in
interpretation and in legal argumentation in general, international law is
shaped from within by different, competing and contradicting inter-
national legal cultures.
Here we see international law as the international order’s diversity
regime shaped from within by diverse styles of legal argumentation. It
wasn’t only Australia and Japan that channelled legal culture to produce
legal arguments. The ICJ, assessing the permit according to a standard of
scientific practice as part of a neutral legal interpretation, evaded any
explicit hierarchical differentiation between whaling and a ban on
whaling, between cultural diversity (the continuation of non-indigenous
whaling) and cultural imperialism (the formation of a global animal
law).87 One could say, following in the steps of Japan and Australia’s
legal counsel, that the court sought to cloak its own political and cultural
preferences in the lab coat of legal science.
Australia, Japan and the ICJ, within a vast reservoir of meanings and
images, selected the symbolic meanings that best suited their objectives.
But this was not only a strategic choice. As styles of legal argumentation
coalescing from past experiences with international law, the different
symbolic meanings used expressed different international legal cultures.
This chapter has argued that the different historical trajectories of core
and peripheral states explain that there are at least two conflicting inter-
national legal cultures, even if in many respects the core/periphery dis-
tinction is inaccurate today regarding Australia and Japan, or the United
States and China and Russia.
Although the reasons behind cultural hybridity are based in historical
trajectories rather than in normative commitments, and although the
effects are seen in diverging patterns of legal argumentation rather than
in diverging values, we may see the distinction between international
legal cultures as reflecting substantive differences because symbolic
meanings and images are hierarchically organized and reproduced as
substantive, cultural values. The social institutions of international law
87
See Fitzmaurice 2015.
manage the diversity of legal cultures and therefore shape international

law’s work as a diversity regime.
Most of the social institutions commanding academic, intellectual and
professional prestige are in the core. In these professional organizations,
in universities and university presses, in the specialized law firms repre-
senting states in front of international tribunals, the symbolic meanings
and ideas reflecting the historical trajectories of the core are reflected and
reproduced as universal legal culture. As hegemonic, they give legitimacy
not only to legal arguments beyond formal law, but also to universal
international law itself.88
The patterned organization of symbolic material that emerges is more
consequential than producing professional advantages to those socialized
in geographic and cultural proximity to the core, and disadvantages to
those socialized in non-Western languages and universities. It is not just
that those in the peripheries must flock to places like Chatham House. It
is that pilgrimage to acquire social capital at the core comes at a cost.
What is required is to be acculturated in the legal culture of the core as
universal legal culture. The heavy price comes with what is foreclosed.
Inhabiting the core, international lawyers from the peripheries forget
the historical trajectories behind peripheral legal cultures and thus
become less savvy at expressing the interests or ideological preferences
of the peripheries, while the internationalist remaining in the peripheries
remains peripheral. If international law is to function as a diversity
regime, it should organize cultural difference in ways perceived to be
legitimate across core and periphery. The problem is that legitimacy is
undermined when international lawyers from the core have become too
parochial in their universalism, and those from the peripheries have
forgotten how to inhabit the universal while remaining peripheral.
88
Silbey 2005.
11 The Jewish Problem in International Society
Michael Barnett
This chapter considers the ‘Jewish Problem’ in international society from

1815 to the early post-World War period. Historically, the gentiles have
had a problem with the Jews, for many reasons. They killed Christ, are a
clannish and stiff-necked people, are a distinct race, are parasitic on
society, and on and on. As a stigmatized, persecuted, and despised
minority, nearly all aspects of their lives were tightly regulated to ensure
that they had as little contact as possible with Christian society; author-
ities imposed restrictions on where Jews could live, who they could
marry, where they could travel, and what occupations they could have,
and engaged in commonplace acts of humiliation. But keeping the Jews
in their place also included various forms of violence, including riots,
pogroms, mass murder, and forced displacement.
Although Christians have had a centuries-long problem with the Jews,
they did not have a ‘Jewish Problem.’ The Jewish Problem, as it came to
be known, began with the emergence of the Enlightenment and the
conceivability that Jews might become recognized as a people (almost
like any other) and integrated into society. The Problem had two layers.
The first was domestic, and here there was a notable distinction between
Western Europe, and Eastern Europe and Russia. In Western Europe a
civic nationalism was taking root and the challenge was to entice the Jews
to discard their clannish ways and become a member of the civic nation.
In response, the Jews adopted a strategy of acceptance and began redefin-
ing themselves as a religious community. In those countries where ethnic
nationalism was taking root, which was just about everywhere else, Jewish
life worsened as they were increasingly defined as a permanent threat to
the nation. Eastern Jews began to turn in various directions, though the
most famous and long-lasting was Jewish nationalism. Western Jews and
the European society of states also began attempting to protect the
Eastern Jews: the former began delivering assistance and lobbying
their governments to take action, and the latter began considering new
forms of protection and prevention that emerged around the language
of rights.
232
The Jewish Problem in International Society 233
The Jewish Problem highlights several critical features of the European

society of states’ diversity regime. The first is that the European society of
states, as Ikenberry observes, pushed diversity down from the inter-
national to the domestic level (Chapter 7). Another way of thinking about
this is that diversity was swept under the rug of sovereignty, and states
were granted considerable discretion regarding how they were going to
manage it. Second, the powerful define the terms of acceptable and
unacceptable diversity. They decide, in Birnbaum’s terms, the condi-
tions of recognizability (Chapter 12). For the Jews of the West, this
meant becoming ‘civic’ and removing those parts of their Jewish way of
life that the Christian majority found unsettling. Because the Eastern
states were undergoing nationalism of an ethnic variety, with strong hints
of biological racism, there was little chance of Jews becoming recogniz-
able. Third, and related, political elites had choices regarding how to
manage diversity, including: a zero-tolerance policy that includes geno-
cide and forced expulsion; social, political, cultural, economic, and civic
separation and other forms of exclusion; and variants of liberalism,
including secularism, that recognize individual but not group rights.
The Jews have experienced them all. Fourth, diversity regimes have
interpellative or constitutive effects as they shape how minority actors
will define themselves. Minorities are not passive players – they are
strategic actors that can pursue strategies that facilitate their physical
and existential security. Such strategies can include not only changing
behaviour but also fundamental features of the culture, leading minority
populations to become more culturally proximate to the dominant
majority. The contrast between Western and Eastern Jewry is particularly
instructive in this regard. Lastly, sovereignty did not grant states a
completely free hand regarding their diversity regime. An emergent
feature of the European society of states in the nineteenth century was
its growing involvement in how states treated their minorities. This was
not a compassion-driven concern. Instead, it was tied to international
order in two related ways: international order was most likely when
founded on civilized states, that is, states that adopted quasi-liberal
norms of humanity; and states that mistreated their minorities were more
susceptible to instability, which, in turn, could undermine international
order. In other words, the European society of states developed broad
rules regarding how states could handle diversity.
This chapter interweaves these points through three historical periods:
section one introduces the broad historical backdrop that generated the
Jewish Problem; section two examines the pre-World War I period; and
section three explores the post-World War II shift from minority to
human rights, and the creation of a Jewish national-state. In the
234 Michael Barnett
conclusion I return to the significance of the Jewish Problem for under-

standing international order and cultural diversity.
International Order and the Emergence

of the Jewish Problem
The European society of states had a Christian personality, which had
several elements germane to this discussion. Religion was not an inci-
dental feature of this society, but – depending on who was doing the
judging – central. Although Westphalia is often celebrated for offering a
way to manage religious diversity, it was intended to handle not religious
diversity but rather Christian diversity. The makers of the European
international order were white, male, and Christian, generating a unity
within diversity that produced a sense of community.1
This community simultaneously created cultural connections between
European states and a hierarchy in international order organized around
the concept of standards of civilization. Christian peoples were more
civilized than non-Christian peoples, and the latter posed a potential
threat to the former. This hierarchy and threat construction was evident
not only in how European societies treated the colonized, but also how
they treated those non-Christian communities that were on their border
or in their midst. European states had a Christian ‘self,’ which meant that
non-Christian peoples often became the ‘other.’ In fact, there were two
‘others’ of immediate concern. One was the Muslim world and its global
representative, the Ottoman Empire. Because this ‘other’ largely resided
outside the borders of the Christian West, it could be managed through
military, diplomatic, and territorial measures that maintained clear
boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them.’
The other ‘other’ was the Jews. Anti-Semitism had various sources and
took many forms and expressions, but the common result was the Jews’
pariah status. Prior to the eighteenth century, European principalities,
monarchies, and states controlled this pariah people through severe
segregation. In the best of times Jews were ‘tolerated,’ but the worst of
times happened with an unpredictable regularity. European governments
began to reconsider their relations with the Jews because of the Enlight-
enment, liberalism, and secularism. Discourses of humanity, reason, and
rationality meant that religion was in retreat and, theoretically, all
humans could be free and equal members of society. Consequently,
1
O’Hagan 2002, 117.
these modernizing societies began to think of doing the unthinkable:

allowing Jews to venture beyond their ghetto walls.2
Nationalism was the other grand transformation of the nineteenth
century. A nation, generically speaking, is a political community bound
by a common history, language, religion, spirit, or sense of fate. What
gives the nation a special status in modern politics is the project of
nationalism and the goal of statehood. And as self-defined nations went
about their business of nation and state building, some had open and
others restricted admission. The classic distinction is between civic and
ethnic nationalism. In ethnic nationalism, membership is determined by
blood, lineage, kinship, and tribe. In this brand of nationalism, ‘an
individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen.’3 States that
subscribe to this form of nationalism favour one group over another. In
civic nationalism, membership is based not on blood or heritage but
rather on a shared civic character: ‘This nationalism is called civic
because it envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing
citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political prac-
tices and values.’4 This sort of nationalism allows Jews to be citizens in
public and Jews at home, enables hyphenated identities, and accelerates
assimilation.
These transformations forced Christian societies to rethink how to
govern diversity and manage the Jews. This became known as the Jewish
Problem. How to answer the Jewish Problem depended in part on how the
Jews are defined by non-Jews and on how the Jews defined themselves.
They were a minority, but what kind of minority? As observed by the great
twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber, gentiles have never known
what to make of the Jews because they have a spectral quality that defies all
existing ‘historical categories and general concepts.’5 Liberalism and civic
nationalism, however, pointed to the terms of integration: Jews had to
abandon any thoughts of being a separate nation and instead become a
religious community – and a religious community as defined by the
Christians and in the terms of secularism. In other words, Jews were
expected to limit their religion to the private and transfer their political
loyalties to the secular (but often still Christian) state. In this spirit, in the
debate over the Jewish emancipation in France in 1789, Count Stanislas
de Clermont-Tonnerre famously declared: ‘We must refuse everything to
the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.’6 If the
Jews wanted to be a nation then they could not be French, and if they
wanted to be French then they could not be a nation.
2 3 4
Katznelson and Birnbaum 1995. Ignatieff 1995, 7. Ibid., 6.
5 6
Buber 1997, 167. Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1995, 114–116.
236 Michael Barnett
Western Jews responded in various ways to this unprecedented invita-

tion, but perhaps most striking was their readiness to rid themselves of
the ‘disaster’ of being Jewish, as Horace Kallen indelicately put it.7 After
centuries of being banished from public life and restricted in their resi-
dency, dress, occupation, movement, and education, many Jews were
ecstatic to be just like everyone else. There were three broad responses.
One was those who refused what they perceived to be a ‘kiss of death.’
Acceptance was nothing short of extinction. A second group was pre-
pared to rid themselves of their Jewish identity. Some converted from
Judaism to Christianity. Others joined ecumenical and interfaith move-
ments with like-minded Christians who imagined a fusion between the
Judaic and Christian religions. There were Jews that joined cosmopolitan
movements, such as socialism, that shed their particularism for
universalism.8 Rationalists like the Viennese Jew Karl Popper believed
that an ‘open society’ would create a world in which universal values
would dissolve parochial identities.9
A third response by Western Jews was to reform, to create a Judaism
and Jewish identity that could coexist with Christianity and modern
society. If the Christians were telling the Jews that they needed to join
the civic nation and reduce their Jewish identity to a religion, then so be
it. But how much of themselves were they prepared to sacrifice? If they
went too far, they would lose their way of life and their religion as
practised for centuries. If they did not go far enough, then Christians
would continue to view them with suspicion and withhold acceptance.
The ‘reform’ movement of the nineteenth century represented the
attempt to find a middle way. It smoothed the edges of Judaism and
Jewish customs, giving it a corporeality and appearance that was congru-
ent with secularism and Christian culture. They began to rid themselves
of venerable but embarrassing assertions, such as the Jews as a chosen
people. They adopted new religious codes, desacralized the Sabbath, and
reshaped their services and temples in ways that would be recognizable to
their Christian neighbours. Not all Jews, though, saw this development as
a sacrifice or selling out; instead, liberalism was consistent with trad-
itional Jewish values of tolerance, equality, and humanity. Indeed, many
Jews dug deep into Jewish history and theology and made the case that
Jews had always been liberals and the latter owed a debt to the former.10
In this view, Jews were helping to produce a diversity regime that was not
only consistent with their physical security but also their values.
7 8 9
Kallen 1954, 48. Miller and Ury 2010. Naraneicki 2012.
10
Wistrich 1998, 59–111; Batnitzky 2013; Meyer 1990, 61; Crane 2007, 559–589; and
Katz 1979, 294.
Eastern Jews did not pursue a strategy of acceptance because accept-

ance was not an option. These countries were undergoing a nationalism
that mixed Christianity, ethnicity, and folk customs, disqualifying the
Jews from membership and reinforcing the belief that this pariah people
was a threat to the nation. With little possibility of being accepted and
integrated into the intensifying nationalism, they had to adapt to their
outsider status. Many fled westwards. Some built walls around their
communities to protect their way of life. Eastern Jews were more likely
than Western Jews to view nationalism as the problem, and, in response,
many joined communist and cosmopolitan movements, in numbers
disproportionate to their population.11 More famously, some Jews saw
nationalism as the answer – Jewish nationalism. Jewish nationalism could
take various forms. There were versions that advocated: cultural and
regional autonomy, allowing them to retain their language, education,
customs, and ways of life; and forms of diaspora nationalism, in which
Jews would strengthen their transnational bonds without necessarily
demanding comparable political rights.12
And then there was the mother of all Jewish nationalisms – Zionism.
Zionism’s popularity was directly related to the Jews’ wretchedness,
which was why it had much greater appeal in the East than in the West.13
There were many kinds of Zionism, from religious to socialist, cultural to
political. Each of these versions could combine in various ways, creating
a cacophony of positions. Eventually these debates converged on Zion-
ism as territorialism in the form or a homeland or state. Jews were a
nation and needed to start acting like one. Creating their own homeland
would not only advance the cause of national self-determination, but by
acting rather than reacting they would finally deserve the respect they
sought from Christians. And, unlike some forms of Jewish nationalism
that would have forced states to accommodate a transnational people in
their states, Zionism and a Jewish homeland or state was consistent with
the international diversity regime because Jews would now be housed in a
separate, sovereign state.14
These strategies of survival were inextricably bound up with identity
and self-categorization. In the same passage that Martin Buber observes
that Christians find the Jews to be enigmatic, he also notes that Jews have
contributed to this confusion because they have defined themselves in
various ways: religious community, people, tribe, ethnicity, nation, and
on and on. But the changing times and their strategies for survival meant
11
Slezkine 2006; Traverso 2016, 32.
12 13
Ha’am 1897; Pianko 2010; Baji 2016, 623; Kohn, 1951. Kallen 1954, 10, 132.
14
Arendt 1946, 7.
238 Michael Barnett
that they had to make a choice. In the West, Jews, who wanted to be part
of the civic nation, defined themselves as a religious community.15 In the
East, however, in many ways there was no optimal choice, because they
were the permanent other. In response to these more threatening and
intolerant conditions, Eastern Jews began to imagine themselves as a
nation.
Although the Jewish communities were adopting strategies that made
sense given their domestic and international context, as a transnational
people, how one Jewish community defined itself could either reinforce
or undermine the self-categorization and presentation of another Jewish
community. This was particularly pronounced when religious commu-
nity met nation. Western Jews adopted a strategy of acceptance that
implied they were a religious community and not a nation. If the Jews
were a separate, exclusive nation then they could not be citizens and
members of the civic nation. And here were Eastern Jewish nationalists
making this very claim. In fact, Western Jews feared that these assertions
by Eastern Jews were feeding anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites had been
warning that this clannish people’s primary loyalty was to their fellow
Jews. At best they would develop dual loyalties. Either way, they could
not be trusted. The Jewish Problem was exactly this – a Jewish prob-
lem.16 In response, Western Jewish intellectuals, community leaders,
and religious authorities began condemning Zionism in the most strident
terms, deserving the reputation for being anti-Zionists.17 Lucien Wolf, a
leading member of the British Jewish community, argued that Zionism
would do much harm and little good for the Jews.18 French Jews had
similar fears, dedicating as much time to fighting Zionism as they did to
good, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. American Jewish leaders had similar
concerns, and only began softening their stance beginning around World
War I, and only when venerated American Jewish leaders such as US
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis reassured the Jewish community
that it was possible to be a Zionist and an American.
This interdependence between Jewish communities manifested itself
in another way: the mobilization of Western Jews to aid Eastern Jews.
This development was both a cause and a consequence of a developing
Jewish internationalism.19 Like other internationalisms of the period, it
was produced by evolving communication and transportation technolo-
gies that allowed Jewish communities to connect with Jews in distant
lands. Whereas once they lived in isolation from each other, unaware of
15 16
Batnitzky 2013. Peters 1921.
17 18
Rischin 1959/60; Cohen 1975; Urofsky 1975, 96. Wolf 1919.
19
Green 2012; Dekel-Chen 2012.
their circumstances, these new connections provided a new-found

awareness of the daily lives and difficulties of other Jewish communities.
Transnational processes were transforming a transnational religious
identity into a transnational political identity.20 One of the first expres-
sions of such a transnational identity was the growing sense of mutual
obligation among Jewish communities. But because the Western Jews
were increasingly secure, whereas the Eastern Jews were insecure, assist-
ance largely flowed from West to East. When word reached the Western
Jews of violence and persecution of Jews in places such as Romania,
Damascus, or the Pale of Settlement, they often rallied to their defence
and raised money to help them through hard times. At first, Jewish relief
efforts were uncoordinated, but by the mid-nineteenth century they were
becoming increasingly organized and institutionalized.
The desire to protect Jews in need helped to spur Jewish international-
ism, but that very development inadvertently unleashed a new basis for
anti-Semitism: a fear of ‘Jewish power.’ Jews were a clannish people that
were engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to advance their interests at the
expense of Christians. And now they were doing so in the open. Begin-
ning in the 1880s in France, anti-Semites began arguing that this coord-
inated effort by different Jewish communities was the product of a
separatist campaign, the quest for world domination, and the appropri-
ation of liberalism and republicanism for malevolent goals. Soon there-
after, attacks on the Jews were accompanied by charges that a Jewish
cabal was exaggerating and exploiting anti-Semitism for its own devious
purposes. Such sentiments would soon become part of anti-Semitic
screeds such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the United States,
the auto magnate Henry Ford funded the printing of 500,000 copies. For
anti-Semites, there was no reason to create international diversity
regimes to protect the Jews; instead, the international order needed
protection from the Jews.
Jewish mobilization could do some good, but it could only do so
much. If Western Jews were going to protect their brethren, they would
need the power of the state. Occasionally Western states intervened to
aid Christian minorities. But why would Western powers, or any Euro-
pean state for that matter, inconvenience themselves for the Jews? After
all, these governments had only just emancipated this minority, and
emancipation did not necessarily translate into fondness or a sense of
obligation to other countries’ Jews, who were probably as backward as
their home country. One possibility was to tap into the growing discourse
20
Kleiman 2008, 109.
240 Michael Barnett
of humanity, which had some appeal to liberal-minded national leaders.

For instance, Edmund Burke observed that because the Jews, unlike the
British or Dutch, had no state to protect them, then ‘humanity … must
become their protector and ally.’21 Fine sentiments, but not widely
shared and highly unlikely to prod action.
If European states were unmoved by humanity, they might be more
responsive to arguments that framed the defence of the Jews in terms of
state interests, national identity, and Christian values.22 Fortunately, the
Jews who had gained political rights and citizenship lived in powerful,
imperialist countries that justified their conquest on the grounds that it
would advance civilization; these missions included not only attempting
to civilize the colonial peoples but also protecting (Christians and) Jews
in Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Ottoman Empire.23 In mid-
nineteenth century England, ‘the question of Jewish rights in Muslim
lands became a test for British efforts to spread the values of Victorian
civilization through an imperialism of human rights.’24 The French
Alliance Israelite Universelle ‘promoted Jewish rights around the globe
by emphasizing the liberal values of tolerance, equality, and religious
freedom.’25 Later on, Herzl would use similar arguments to try and
persuade the imperial countries to support Zionism. Although Jews were
not necessarily imperialists, they were unlikely to advance Jewish inter-
ests without imperialism.26
Western Jews also imagined that such arguments and actions would
protect not only Eastern Jews but also themselves. After all, they were
looking after national and Jewish interests. By urging the protection of
foreign Jews, French Jews demonstrated their secularism and French
loyalty, strengthened their political alliance with other liberals in France,
and fought against the possibility that the prevalent anti-Semitic attitudes
of French colonial officials would work their way back home.27 The pleas
could take odd turns and build on anti-Semitic attitudes. If the Eastern
Jews were threatened, one response would be to flee to countries where
they were much more likely to be accepted, such as France, England, and
the United States. Western states and societies, however, were not
necessarily overjoyed by the idea of hordes of Eastern Jews descending
on their shores, representing a burden on the economy and polluting the
national identity. And it was not just Christians that treated Jewish
immigrants as a possible threat. So, too, did Jews in the receiving
21 22
Feinberg 1968, 490. Wistrich 1998; Leff 2006; Stein 2016.
23
Green 2014; Feinberg 1968; Greene 2006; Handlin 1964, chapter 3.
24 25 26
Greene 2006, 188. Leff 2006, 2, 181. Green 2014, 2008.
27
Leff 2006.
countries. Their new homeland might be more tolerant than their home
countries, but anti-Semitism existed, and the more (wrong kinds of )
Jews that arrived, the more likely it would stoke anti-Semitism and
undermine a strategy of acceptance. Accordingly, many Western Jewish
organizations diplomatically suggested that their governments should do
more to protect Jews abroad so that they did not wash up on their shores.
As Western Jews lobbied their governments to protect Jews under
attack, they also advocated for prevention strategies. When Jews were
under immediate threat then immediate, short-term action was needed.
But Western Jews attributed their own security to liberalism, pluralism,
civic nationalism, and other basic rights. Consequently, Western Jews
surmised that Eastern Jews would benefit from the same environment of
tolerance. Towards that end, they began advocating for the promotion
of ‘Jewish rights around the globe by emphasizing the liberal values of
tolerance, equality, and religious freedom.’28 What was good for Western
Jews would be equally good for Eastern Jews. Occasionally these Jewish
organizations used the language of rights, but it should not be mistaken
for human rights, which would come later. For the moment they were
arguing for the rights of minorities and religious communities – people-
hood, not personhood. In general, Western Jews were attempting to
export Western values to the East, foreshadowing what would later be
called ‘liberal internationalism.’
Arguably the most striking international development was that West-
ern states also began coordinating their policies through international
diplomacy and multilateral institutions to protect Eastern Jews.29 The
christening moment occurred after the Napoleonic Wars, when the
German Jews appealed to the European governments at the Congress
of Vienna to save the rights they had gained under French occupation.
After Vienna, the London Congress of 1830 recognized an independent
Greece, with the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment for minority
groups. This event became part of a broader development by Western
states to begin to force Eastern countries to officially adopt Jewish and
minority rights.30 The 1878 Treaty of Berlin then introduced the prece-
dent of religious freedom as a condition for the recognition of state-
hood.31 Although the Western states sometimes used coercive
diplomacy, they usually limited their actions to gentle prodding; in this
spirit, they referred to their actions not as ‘interventions’ but rather
‘intercessions,’ tantamount to ‘courteous appeals’ delivered in a tender
and friendly manner.32
28 29
Ibid., 2. Fink 2006, 9; Kohler 1917; Wolf 1919; Feinberg 1968.
30 31 32
Green 2014. Fink 2006, 30; Feinberg 1968, 496. Feinberg 1968, 492.
242 Michael Barnett
1914–1939: Minority Rights and Zionism

The handling of the Jewish Problem in Paris cannot be separated from
the broader questions of how the European states considered how to
define and manage diversity.33 Diversity was not a secondary but rather a
primary concern – disgruntled minorities were widely viewed as a cause
of World War I, and they continued to be a target of violence after the
war.34 Although the delegates considered various proposals, national
self-determination and minority rights got the most attention. National
self-determination had been one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and now
nations from far and wide, big and small, were descending on Paris to
make their case. What would happen to the minorities of these new
national-states? Ideally they would be granted equal rights and protec-
tions, but there was hope and then there was experience. The League of
Nations also began to entertain the possibility of a role in minority
protection.
Jewish delegations from the United States and Europe descended on
Paris to plead for a resolution to the Jewish Problem. There was little
debate among the victors that the Jewish Problem needed to be
addressed. Jews died in disproportionate numbers both during and after
the war, and there were several high-profile and violent outbursts against
the Jews at the very moment that the Paris talks began. The Jewish
delegations arrived with an abundance of creative solutions, but were
largely divided between Zionism and minority rights, mirroring the
broader discussions. The Eastern delegations insisted that the Jews were
a nation and required a national solution. But there was no agreement on
what sort of nation-based political arrangement was most desirable.
Some Jewish nationalists insisted that the Jews be granted special protec-
tions, rights, and autonomy where they lived, perhaps even carving out a
state within a state. Although the Jews were a deterritorialized nation,
they were still a nation, and, as a nation, they deserved representation at
the future League of Nations. When the Zionist organizations met in
Copenhagen prior to Paris, in addition to a homeland they also advo-
cated for equal rights including national autonomy, and the admission of
the Jewish People to the League of Nations. Jewish delegations then
debated whether one seat was enough. Each Jewish community faced
its own challenges and thus needed its own voice. But the dominant view
among the Eastern delegations was that Jewish nationalism could only be
satisfied through Zionism and a Jewish homeland (or state) in Palestine.
33 34
Baji 2016, 623–651. Riga and Kennedy 2009, 472, 476.
The Western Jewish delegations, though, were arrayed between oppos-

ition and tepid support for Zionism. Many Western delegations, espe-
cially the American, had softened their once antagonistic views. The
recent waves of Jewish immigration to the United States came from
Eastern Europe and Russia, and they were more sympathetic to the
notion that the Jews were a nation. Also, American Jews had become
increasingly reassured that supporting Zionism would not harm their
security. Widely respected leaders such as Louis Brandeis successfully
argued that Jews could be both Zionists and Americans, especially now
that American society was accepting the idea of hyphenated nations.
Nevertheless, the Western delegations kept their distance from Zionism
for reasons previously discussed. Louis Marshall, the head of the Ameri-
can delegation and a leading figure in the American Jewish community,
strove to separate American Jews (and Western Jews in general) from the
nationalist demands of the Eastern delegations. Similarly, the American
Jewish leader Cyrus Adler warned, ‘We must see to it that nothing is
done by us in America, even for the purpose of helping the Jews in
Poland, which would injure the Jews in America.’35
If Zionism was not a solution to the Jewish Problem, then what was?
The Western delegations forwarded the idea of minority rights. But the
devil was in the details. It was one thing to recognize the rights of
minorities, as they had learned during the pre-war period, and it was
quite another to set up monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. They
began to debate among themselves: what role for the international com-
munity and the League of Nations? Should it be proactive or the pro-
tector of last resort? How would minority protection coexist with
sovereignty and the principle of non-interference? What kinds of instru-
ments would minorities have at their disposal? Should minorities be
allowed to petition directly to the League of Nations, or should they
have to wait for the League to make the first move? Should the League of
Nations extend beyond protection to include prevention activities? In the
West, the problem of minority rights and security was fading because of
liberalism and secularism. Accordingly, should the new national-states
be forced to adopt comparable constitutions and inculcate a similar
culture of tolerance? Would all states be subject to these invasive intru-
sions, or just the ‘states of concern’ in the East? Recognizing that rights
required enforcement, the Jewish delegations recommended that the
League have the authority to proactively protect minorities. Although
Jewish delegations were largely motivated by the Jewish Problem to
35
Cited from Fink 2006, 73, n. 33.
244 Michael Barnett
develop a diversity regime organized around minority rights, they also

strategically and sincerely bundled their cause to the principle that all
minorities deserved protection. They were not asking for special treat-
ment but rather to be treated the same way that all other minorities
should be treated.
Influenced in part by the advocacy of the Jewish delegations, the Paris
talks led to not one but two solutions to the Jewish Problem. Neither,
though, provided much protection. The League officially endorsed the
Balfour Declaration and the idea of Palestine as a homeland for the Jews,
and it was left to the British mandatory authority to oversee it in a way
that respected the national aspirations of the Jews and the Arabs, a nearly
impossible task. Largely because of British strategic interests, it halted
Jewish immigration to a trickle. Soon after World War I, Western states
began to impose highly restrictive quotas and other restrictions that, for
all intents and purposes, barred almost all Jews from entry. The rise of
Nazism and anti-Semitism during the 1930s did not lead to a softening of
the policy. Because immigration to either Palestine or the United States
was increasingly foreclosed, the international minority treaties became
the focus of attention. The League and the minority treaties were all but
worthless. States had established minority rights but did not delegate to
the League any authority to initiate investigations of violations and no
enforcement mechanisms. It was up to the minorities to make the first
move and lodge a complaint. And how did that work out? On those few
occasions minorities did bring their concerns to the League, the League,
acting like a club of self-interested states, almost always turned the other
cheek. And what happened to the minority that raised a ruckus? More
suspicion, discrimination, and persecution from their neighbours and
governments. Jews and other minorities learned that the best (and only)
thing to do was to go along to get along. But going along was not much
help either.36 Europe had run out of solutions to the Jewish Problem or
ways to handle diversity, and then Hitler offered a final solution, which
left no room for diversity.
Post–World War II: Human Rights and a Jewish State

World War II changed almost everything and nothing, at least as far as
the international community’s approach to the Jewish Problem was
concerned. Once again it was circling the same two solutions to the
Jewish Problem; in each case, though, it offered an important
36
Halperin 1979.
amendment. Because of the Holocaust and the unwillingness of the

United States and other destination points to open their immigration
doors, there was growing pressure to turn Palestine into a genuine
homeland or state. Most Jewish leadership, in Palestine and abroad,
argued in favour of a sovereign Jewish state. And, this is what happened.
The United Nations voted to turn a Jewish homeland into a Jewish state.
The United Nations divided Palestine in two. The Jewish nation now had
a Jewish state. But, like previous solutions proposed by Western powers,
it offered no guarantees for Jewish survival.
It is interesting to note, though, that leading American Jews considered
options that fell short of exclusive Jewish sovereignty. The American
Jewish Committee sponsored a series of committees and meetings on
the topic of the post-war arrangements, how to protect the Jews of
Palestine, and how to save the survivors of the Holocaust. One proposal
was to turn Palestine into a Jewish commonwealth and part of the British
Empire. They argued it would have several advantages. It would be
consistent with the ‘prophetic ideal of world brotherhood, so deeply
ingrained in Judaism.’ There was a sense that Jews had always fared
better in larger political and economic units. In retrospect, life under in
the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had been relatively secure,
and it was their dissolution that was the beginning of the disaster for
many Jewish communities. Relatedly, Jews had fared well in ‘federal
systems’ (which they called the French and British empires), which had
a better track record of tolerating (religious) minorities. The ‘problem of
Jewish group rights would be essentially a cultural one,’ favouring cul-
tural pluralism. And, ‘Palestine could be more easily solved if it were a
unit in a federation than if it were a sovereign state.’ In fact, the ‘question
of political loyalty or the charge of “dual allegiance,” sometimes raised
against the Jews who advocate that Palestine be established as a sovereign
Jewish state would disappear.’37
The other response to the Jewish Problem was to substitute human for
minority rights. Few governments and other interested parties were
prepared to salvage the idea of minority rights. Not only had it had failed,
but it might have made things worse. The minority treaties were not
going to deter states with a vendetta against their minorities. Moreover,
the minority treaties might have helped to solidify and magnify the
conflict between majorities and minorities because they almost presumed
that states are divided between a patriotic majority and a malcontent
minority. As Morris Waldman, the head of the American Jewish
37
These quotations are taken from American Jewish Committee 1943.
246 Michael Barnett
Committee (AJC) and an opponent of Zionism, wrote in the New York

Times, ‘the well-intentioned doctrine of national self-determination did
not break down tensions between racial and cultural groups but nurtured
them.’38 Moreover, Hitler appropriated the minority treaties to justify his
invasion of neighbouring countries on the grounds that he was protecting
the German minorities. Anything that had Hitler’s seal of approval would
certainly be burned and buried.
With minority rights discredited, the Western states, Jewish intellec-
tuals, and many American Jewish organizations (European Jewish organ-
izations no longer existed), turned to human rights.39 The AJC deserves
special mention. It financed Hersch Lauterpacht’s scholarship, which
influenced how the UN and Eleanor Roosevelt conceptualized human
rights, and the form and content of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. It assisted the immensely influential Commission to Study the
Organization of Peace, led by James Shotwell, and the Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace. And the AJC established its own research
arm, the Research Institute on Peace and Postwar Problems, whose
findings informed the broader conversation. The AJC and its initiatives
provided a platform for other Jewish advocates for rights (and Zionism)
such as Isiah Berlin, Renee Cassin, and Hannah Arendt.
Based on these experiences and assessments, Jewish leaders and
organizations concluded that human rights, and not Jewish or minority
rights, were in the best interests of the Jews.40 Many Jewish advocates for
human rights demanded that they be codified in an international bill of
rights, creating a United States’ Bill of Rights for the world. But what
good was a bill of rights without an enforcement arm? The Jewish
community had already lived (and died) through that experience. In a
repeat of the debate regarding minority rights after World War I,
sovereignty-sensitive states were unwilling to allow any new international
machinery the discretion and capacity to interfere in their affairs. And it
was not just weak, illiberal states that opposed the idea; the last thing the
United States wanted was an international body investigating its ‘Negro
Problem.’ In the end, Jewish organizations like the AJC joined with other
rights-oriented advocates to reserve a place for human rights at the
United Nations.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the European society of
states became of three minds regarding how to handle diversity. One
possibility was for states to manage their diversity through a framework
of liberalism, pluralism, and minority rights. Another was to create
38 39 40
Waldman 1944. Loeffler 2018. Loeffler 2014, 274–295.
national-states, operating with the presupposition that these proto-states

reflected homogenous societies. But what would become of the minor-
ities in these ethnically oriented states? Here the international society of
states began to meander towards the idea of international institutions and
norms to provide them with some form of protection. Ultimately, the
European (international) society of states employed all three possibilities
to manage the Jewish Problem, but not very successfully. Arendt’s
famous saying that human rights are about the rights to have rights,
and that the national-state was the guarantor of rights, informed the
post-war solution to the Jewish Problem.
Cultural Diversity and International Order

What does the Jewish Problem teach us about cultural diversity in
international order? The international order largely treats diversity as a
problem that must be managed. Westphalia represented one kind of
diversity regime. It used juridical-territorial rules in response to two
different diversity problems. Westphalia emerged as a response to Chris-
tian diversity. Later it became a way to solve national diversity. In both
cases, though, the international society of states’ answer to diversity at
the global level was to establish a principle of non-interference between
states, which both gave states authority at the global level and allowed
them to handle diversity in domestic affairs as they saw fit. In this way,
Westphalia ‘pushed’ the problem of diversity from the global to the
domestic. But problems of domestic diversity could become a global
problem. As the history of the Jewish Problem suggests, the international
society of states has had four primary answers: to create a diversity regime
among the international society of states that shaped appropriate and
inappropriate ways for states to handle their minority problems; to pro-
vide some kind of security guarantees for minorities under immediate
threat; to encourage domestic societies to accommodate their minorities,
ideally through some form of liberalism; and, in those extraordinary cases
where there was no other solution, to create opportunities for the devel-
opment of a separate state. Because it was so difficult for many states to
know what to do with their Jews, Jews had the unfortunate experience of
facing all four responses.
A second lesson is that international (and domestic) society defines
what are the acceptable and unacceptable terms of diversity. Between the
Reformation and Westphalia in Europe, diversity was largely defined in
terms of religious diversity. After Westphalia, diversity slowly became
identified with national diversity. But religious diversity did not disap-
pear. Instead, in many cases, religious communities were expected to
248 Michael Barnett
shift their loyalties to a secularized state and tailor their religious practices
so that they accommodated secularism. This was the Jewish Problem.
But the Jewish Problem can apply to all different kinds of peoples – and
the problem is not really with the people under conversation but rather
the people doing the conversing. The Muslim Problem is really a Judeo-
Christian Problem (and a Buddhist and Hindi Problem). In many coun-
tries, the Jewish Problem has been replaced by the Muslim Problem –
and the same questions are being asked: can Muslims adapt to the terms
of liberalism that makes religion part of the private, and the private alone?
Will the Muslims finally go through their own reformation? Will Muslims
in Europe reduce Islam to a private belief, just as the Jews had done? The
European Court of Human Rights has had a very difficult time tiptoeing
between its belief that public order is threatened by Islam and the
principle of religious liberty and expression in various forms, including
dress.41 The European society of states has other ‘problems,’ including
with racial diversity. The ‘Negro Problem’ is a White People’s Problem.
And while international relations theorists have not spent much time
thinking about racial diversity and hierarchies in world politics, it does
not mean that they do not exist. Perhaps most provocatively, scientific
racism might not be a nineteenth-century artefact, for developments in
genetics are opening up the possibility that race might, once again,
become a ‘problem.’42
Third, how states have attempted to address their diversity problems
has had a profound impact on how different kinds of peoples understand
themselves. The Jewish Problem in the East and the West provides apt
points of comparison. In the West, the developing culture of liberalism
and the process of secularization created new opportunities for all indi-
viduals to become citizens of a national-state. To capitalize on this
occasion, Jews had to shift their loyalties from their brethren to the
national-state. In the context of a European society of states that was
experiencing secularization, the decline of religious authority, the shift of
religion from the public to the private, and was increasingly organized
around nationalism, if Jews wanted recognition and a right to have rights,
then they had to demonstrate through word and deed that they could act
the part of secularized citizens that put the nation first and their religion
second.43 The Jews could shed their pariah status, but only by changing
how they saw and understood themselves. In the East, on the other hand,
liberalism was in competition with the reactionary forces, and ethnic
nationalism was besting civic nationalism, which raised the barriers to
41 42 43
Buhta 2014. Reich 2018. Lindkvist 2013.
entry for the Jews. In other words, in the West the Jewish Problem could
be solved if Jews decided to become a little less Jewish and a lot more
French, British, or Dutch, while in the East there was no escaping their
Jewish identity and thus no easy ‘solution’ to the Jewish Problem. In the
West it was possible for Jews to be recognized as part of the nation,
whereas that was an impossibility in the East.
Fourth, Jews are a transnational people that are attempting to accom-
modate themselves in a world organized around the nation-state, and,
consequently, their own proposed solutions to the Jewish Problem
imagined a rich array of solutions to the problem of diversity. One answer
was nationalism, but nationalism could take many different forms. There
was diaspora nationalism. But if Jews were going to be a separate,
autonomous people then they probably needed both protections from
and representation at domestic and international institutions. Other
Jewish nationalists wanted a Jewish homeland or state. But not all
imagined sovereignty for the Jews. Some advocated for embedding a
Jewish homeland in a multinational empire, namely situating Palestine
in the British Empire. Another answer was to reject the very idea that the
Jews were a separate nation and insist, instead, that they were a religious
minority. Many of those who categorized themselves in this manner also
used the language of individual rights, foreshadowing the future dis-
course of human rights. And then there were Jews who wanted to be
rid of their Jewishness and become part of a cosmopolitan community.
Many Jewish communities imagined that forms of universalism and
cosmopolitanism would solve the Jewish Problem. But whether it solved
or merely added to the Jewish Problem very much depended on the time
and place. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cosmopolit-
anism could represent a threat to the nation. And the Jewish were the
posterchildren for cosmopolitanism – they were mobile, diasporic, root-
less, and nomadic, precisely the kind of people that could not be trusted
and represented a threat to the “people.” Not surprisingly, then, cosmo-
politanism often became a codeword for Jews.44 After World War Two
cosmopolitanism and universalism was no longer seen as the same kind
of threat to nations, and, in fact, began to have positive connotations.
But cosmopolitanism has no address, and Jews, like everyone else, must
be rooted somewhere. Rooted or rootless, the Jews have been a problem
for an international society that continues to see diversity as something
that must be managed.
44
Slezkine 2006; Traverso 2016, 26.
12 Recognizing Diversity
Establishing Religious Difference in Pakistan and Israel
Maria Birnbaum
Cultural diversity and international order are constituted and organized

through regimes of difference – what the editors of this volume refer to as
‘diversity regimes.’ In the following chapter I study the epistemological
politics of cultural diversity and the conditions of the possibility of its
recognition. I thereby take religious difference as a site of cultural diver-
sity and show how this form of difference became recognizable as consti-
tutive for the emerging states of Pakistan and Israel after World War II.
The chapter proceeds as follows: I begin by exploring how cultural
difference in global politics has been established, authorized and
empowered through the recognition function of the diversity regime.
I pause on the question of recognition and take a closer look at what this
kind of acknowledgement and its productive powers entail. I continue to
dig into the epistemic foundations of recognition and suggest a more
detailed investigation into the ways in which cultural difference becomes
intelligible – how it becomes recognizable – to the regimes in question,
and end by illustrating this in the cases of Pakistani and Israeli
independence.
After analysing how religious difference became internationally recog-
nizable, I look at two partition commissions in order to get a better
picture of what this referred to. As we will see, religion and its cognates
became increasingly hollowed out and emptied of concrete substance,
while simultaneously tied to the thick, essential idea of collective
belonging. Religion became detached from the idea of the minority and
attached to the nation, while continuing to carry with it the baggage of
colonial minority politics.
I make several substantive arguments. The first concerns the question
of recognition and its role as a source of empowerment and emancipa-
tion, conferring international subjects with agency that they formerly
lacked and freeing up minorities or differently silenced groups from
structures of oppression. This aspect of recognition notwithstanding,
250
Establishing Religious Difference in Pakistan and Israel 251
I want to highlight some of the costs that come with it. Drawing on the
fact that this form of power not only makes subjects in the form of agents,
but also confines them to certain forms of governance, I show how
recognition can also come to reproduce hierarchies – that is, structures
of domination and subordination. Gaining a better understanding of the
epistemic foundations of recognition will enable a better ability to calcu-
late the costs of recognizing religious and cultural difference in world
politics.
The second argument concerns the substantive issue at hand: that is,
religion. Following the previous argument regarding recognition, I want
to address recent attempts to follow a critique of the exclusion of religion
from international scholarship with the claim of its inclusion into global
political theory and practice. The critique of the exclusion of religion,
I point out, does not necessarily have to lead to, or legitimate, an
argument for its inclusion. The problems associated with a deliberate
or accidental marginalization of religion in international political theory
and practice are not solved by the recognition of its importance and
centrality to global political dynamics. The reason for this is that the
recognition of religion extends acknowledgement and empowerment to
that or those who are already recognizable as religious and thereby will
confirm powerful actors’ claims to represent religion, religious groups
and religious truths. It marginalizes those who do not play on the register
of the recognizably religious and writes out of the picture an entire range
of possibilities, as those who remain unrecognized struggle to achieve a
place on the public register of recognition. It strengthens the voices of
conventional and established religion and further grounds the boundary
between those who are included and those who are not.1 Telling the story
of the marginalization of religion does not simply describe a matter of fact
but crafts space for a particular kind of voice to be able to enter into
its place.
The last argument concerns the colonial legacy of cultural categories in
international politics, theory and history. Tracing the concept of religion
through the last decades of the British Empire and the formation of the
Pakistani and Israeli states, I show how the colonial governmental logics
that structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and
the Palestinian Jews continued to live on and shape the nations and the
nation-states that came to replace them.
1
Birnbaum 2015.
252 Maria Birnbaum
Diversity Regimes and the Recognition

of Cultural Difference
The present volume starts from the assumption that the globe is a
culturally diverse place. This internationally heterogeneous cultural ter-
rain is structured by institutionalized norms and practices, which the
editors call diversity regimes.2 A diversity regime, in other words, will
interpellate certain kinds of cultural diversity, organizing and ordering
them hierarchically. It establishes the principal axes of cultural differ-
ence – in religion, civilization, language, ethnicity, race or nation – and
ties these to particular units of political authority, such as the sovereign
state or different forms of empire.3 They are in this sense ‘institutional-
ized forms of recognition; they recognize certain cultural identities,
constituting them in the process, and allocate them rights and entitle-
ments.’4 In the section that follows I will look closer at this ‘recognition
function’ of the diversity regimes and argue that this recognition has two
faces. Apart from constituting international subjects and empowering
different forms of culture, recognition will also make these subjects
governable.5
Two Faces of Recognition

In his book Bound by Recognition, Patchen Markell illustrates the double
nature of recognition through the emancipation of European Jews in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their aspired inclusion
into the ‘civic’ nation.6 While the empowerment of minorities provided a
strength in the position of right, their recognition also made these very
minorities more vulnerable. It made them easier to move and govern as
their contours had become more easily detectable.7 In this vein, the
double-edged sword of recognition swung hard in the wake of World
War I, as it simultaneously provided internationally sanctioned protec-
tion for minorities, while also making them identifiable and movable in
order to make room for ethnically homogenous nations. Population
transfer would not only come to be seen as a legitimate ‘solution’ to the
friction that was assumed to be caused by ethno-national intermingling,
but as a ‘progressive solution for many of the crises taking place in
2 3 4
See also Reus-Smit 2017, 26–31 and 2018a, 211–215. Ibid. Ibid., 30.
5
In contrast to national discourses, the language of recognition in global politics
functioned less as a language of egalitarian politics or justice; see Taylor 1994; Honneth
1995; Fraser and Honneth 2003; Brown 2008.
6 7
Markell 2003, 131. Mufti 2007.
Europe’s post-dynastic backyard [where the] compulsory resettlement of

national minorities would be organized and regulated by international
treaties.’8 The British government’s Peel Commission, which in the
1930s would come to initiate the partition of Palestine and the establish-
ment of an Israeli state, put it in terms not uncommon for the day: to
‘clean cut out the ulcer’ of mixed populations.9 The form of power
entailed in the diversity regime and its recognition function thus both
enabled the subject and governed it at the same time; it made the subject
and subjected it – one not possible to separate from the other.10
As Markell puts it, by making the ‘distribution of resources and the
institutionalization of rights dependent upon one’s recognizability as the
bearer of an identity,’ the politics of recognition ‘risks subjecting the very
people whose agency it strived to enhance to powerful forces of normal-
ization.’11 Diversity regimes thus not only empower and organize cul-
tural differences, but they ‘enable … control and coordination under
conditions of cultural heterogeneity.’12 While the regimes give shape to
the international cultural landscape, they are also making it governable.
The conditions of empowerment are also the conditions of control.
Recognizing international cultural diversity will, in other words, sim-
ultaneously empower those who embody this particular difference and
subject them to the dominant forms of government. The British Indian
Muslims, to whom I will return later, gained political influence as colo-
nial subjects of the Empire to the degree in which they were possible to
account for through the enumeration by the census and the governmen-
tal logics that structured it. Recognizing cultural difference and the
subjectivities tied to it would empower, but only those who would be
identifiable within the logics of the census. In this sense, the recognition
of cultural difference was productive of the agents that embodied it, but it
also bound them to the system of power in place – extending rights,
legitimacy and authority – and the hierarchical structure within it.
A deeper understanding of these two sides of recognition – empower-
ing and subjecting – allows us to account for the costs that accompany
the regimes of difference. Focusing on recognition or misrecognition as a
‘fact of rightly or wrongly cognizing and respecting an already-existing
identity’ distracts from the fact that this form of acknowledgement par-
takes in the constitution and government of the identity in place.13 In
other words, the fact that diversity regimes recognize cultural difference
8 9 10
Dubnov 2019, 26. CMD. 5479 1937, 390. Foucault 1983.
11 12
Markell 2003, 175. Reus-Smit 2017, 30.
13
Markell 2003, 59–60; for a critique of recognition in relation to indigenous rights in
Canada and beyond, see Coulthard 2012.
254 Maria Birnbaum
does not only mean that these differences are found and empowered.
The regimes funnel a wide range of various aspects of social and political
life into categories of culture, and through their recognition secure them
as a domain that stands outside and above the realms of politics.14 It
‘helps to create the world that it purports to oversee,’ and in the process –
in the words of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and William Connolly –
heightens and overcodes difference.15
Recognizability
Diversity regimes order and organize cultural differences in global
politics. They establish and authorize hierarchies between and among
actors. Since recognition, however, ‘presupposes a prior identification of
the actor to be recognized,’ Jens Bartelson writes, ‘and since such iden-
tification in turn presupposes the possibility of distinguishing those
actors that are fit for recognition from those who are not, actual practices
of recognition will always depend on underlying schemes of classifica-
tion.’16 Taking a closer look at these classification schemes and the
hierarchies they serve takes us to my second point, namely the question
of who qualifies for recognition and how that qualification takes place.
How is it that some forms of difference become relevant and others not?
Barnett, in this volume, discusses a European diversity regime of the
nineteenth and twentieth century that shaped its Jewish population into
very different forms of recognizable figures. In contrast to the Jews of
Eastern Europe, who continued to be deemed unrecognizable and dis-
qualified from membership in nation-states increasingly built on ethnic
nationalism, Western European Jews were primed to become recogniz-
able in a ‘civic’ nation in which particularist identities were to be kept out
of the public realm. This meant getting rid of aspects of Jewish life that
the ‘Christian majority found unsettling,’ assimilating in terms of educa-
tion, dress or residency, converting to Christianity and/or joining cosmo-
politan movements that explicitly distanced themselves from any form of
particularist association. In Western Europe, then, most Jews would
come to define themselves as a religion, meaning a private and discrete
identity parted from and never competing with their public identity as
citizens, while the Jews of Eastern Europe, in response to their inaccess-
ible position as the permanent other, would come to see themselves as a
nation separate from and never reducible to the state within which they
lived.17
14 15
Brown 2008, 23. Shakman Hurd 2015, 111; Connolly 1995, 167.
16 17
Bartelson 2013, 121. Barnett, this volume, Chapter 11; Batnitzky 2011.
Recognizing cultural difference, then, in the words of Sara Ahmed is to

‘value those who can “be heard and act” under its name.’18 Western
European Jews clothed themselves in a religion that had been withdrawn
from the public sphere in order to signal that they were part of a ‘civic
nation,’ while Eastern European Jews pushed their identity as a nation,
distinct from and independent of the ethnically defined states where they
had no place.
This form of responding to and governing cultural difference ‘puts
pressure on nonestablished, unorthodox, nonconforming ways’ of cul-
tural life to conform to the recognizable versions thereof or risk being
rendered invisible.19 The burden of normalization is thereby laid onto
those who find themselves outside the realms of the intelligible, to shape
themselves in a manner that does not render them invisible to various
forms of recognition and empowerment. Elizabeth Povinelli writes in this
vein regarding the recognition of the Australian indigenous population
that they are ‘called on to perform an authentic difference’ and to
‘transport (their) ancient prenational meanings and practices to the
present in whatever language and moral framework prevails at the time
of enunciation.’20 In order to be recognized, in other words, one has to be
recognizable, and if this is not the case, one needs to become so.
Subjects in global politics, therefore, do not only exist by virtue of
being recognized, but do so ‘in a prior sense, by being recognizable.’21 In
what Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has called a ‘new global politics of reli-
gion,’ communities such as the Rohingya, Ahmadi, Christians, Alevi and
others are drawn to the material and socio-political rewards that follow
from identifying themselves and their interest in a recognizably ‘religious’
register and ‘emerge to take their place on the international public stage
as religious minorities, reaping the benefits of being classified by the state
or other power brokers as religions, faith communities, or (persecuted)
religionists.’22 Resonating in the work of international organization,
government foreign policy, local administration and international law,
this new global politics of religion has shaped the criteria of what it means
18
Ahmed 2012, 29.
19
Shakman Hurd 2015, 112. Escaping the gaze of recognition, however, also presents an
opportunity to get out from under the grasp of hostile political powers. If one can only be
recognized as an already recognizable subject, it opens up the chance to become invisible
to those in the position to inflict harm. This does not only refer to the possibility of
disappearing by changing contexts – as the Eastern European Jews sought to do by
leaving for Palestine – but by much more mundane ways of normalization. Assimilation
is therefore not only a way of adapting to the structures of power that one is surrounded
by, but is much more so an attempt to escape the gaze thereof – an attempt to become
invisible and therefore not subjected to harm.
20 21 22
Povinelli 2002, 6, my italics. Butler 1997, 5. Shakman Hurd 2015, 113.
256 Maria Birnbaum
to be recognizably religious and has thereby created new categories of

actors in world politics. The recognition as an actor, then, depends on a
prior establishment of the criteria of recognizability that one can fulfil or
fail to do so. The new and never conceived become ‘tied to that which is
already cognized.’23 I return to the question of recognition and
reproduction later.
If it is true, then, as Axel Honneth puts it, that ‘the struggle for
recognition represents a struggle for the social articulation of preexistent
knowledge’ – that is, an articulation of that which is, already, known – the
question emerges as to how this knowledge comes about. If cultural
difference is being recognized by the diversity regime, how does this
difference become intelligible as such? What are the processes that make
the contours of a culture identifiable and how is this differentiated from
other forms of social and political life? How does the range change in
regard to which it is possible to recognize, and what are the social and
historical forces affecting that change? By looking in detail at the epi-
stemological politics of cultural diversity and the conditions of the possi-
bility of its recognition, we get a better grasp on the costs that come with
the diversity regimes’ recognition of cultural difference and what it is, in
each particular case, that can be recognized in its name.
Becoming Recognizable: Differentiation and Epistemic Change

Before I continue to illustrate the processes that would make religious
difference recognizable in the cases of Pakistani and Israeli independ-
ence, I want to return briefly to the tensions in the framework of recog-
nition itself. I argued previously that the recognition of cultural or
religious difference had a double nature, in that it empowered those
who gained it but also subjected them to the framework of knowledge
currently in place. Tracing Jacques Rancière’s critique of Axel Honneth’s
work on the struggle for recognition, we can see how the subjecting
aspect of recognition can confine the empowered subjects to a situation
from which they will have a hard time escaping. Recognition, in this vein,
can be extended to that which is recognizable, but will miss out on those
or that which lie beyond the limits of the currently intelligible.
Honneth argues that the struggle for recognition by previously
excluded subjects will broaden the range of intelligibility – that is, it will
extend the range of what is available for recognition.24 Through the
inclusion of a new type of nation, for example, the meaning of
23 24
Grosz 2001. Honneth 1995.
nationhood itself will change. Rancière’s critique, however, argues that

the inclusion of new subjects will not change the range of the intelligible,
since only those who are recognizable as subjects to begin with can be
included in the framework.25 The common sense, or the established
framework of knowledge, will not change through the inclusion of that
or those who were previously excluded. Rancière’s ideas about the ‘dis-
tribution of the sensible’ argue, rather, for a kind of epistemological
change that stands in stark contrast to ideas of the transformative power
of recognition.26 The change in the framework of knowledge as to what
constitutes a cultural or religious difference, for example, does not come
through the acknowledgement of the previously excluded but through
the enactment of a different reality altogether.27 This differs from
struggles for recognition, which take place within a certain normative
and cognitive framework – and possibly transform the workings of them.
A changing distribution of the sensible is not a shift in the inclusion of
that or those who were previously excluded, or the self-realization of a
group becoming ‘aware’ of itself, finding its voice or imposing its weight
on society.28 It is not the acknowledgement of the grievances or the
suffering of those on the wrong side of a hierarchical order that will
change the range of the recognizable.29 ‘The wrong by which politics
occurs is not some flaw calling for reparation. It is the introduction of an
incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking bodies.’30
The change in the foundations of knowledge, so Rancière argues,
comes through the interruption of the common sense by those and that
which were invisible to it. The range of what or who can count as a
subject changes through the enactment of a different reality, acting as if
one were a subject.31 It is an intervention into the conditions of
25
Honneth et al. 2016.
26
Ibid. Rancière 1999. Rancière’s work on the distribution of the sensible draws on and
speaks to, in first hand, questions of social justice and of the invisibility of social groups
such as workers, women and migrants. The application of his work to questions of
cultural diversity, however, follows the same logic of epistemological politics.
27
Rancière 1999.
28
Ibid., 40. Rancière makes a clear distinction between a struggle for the recognition of a
sociologically or culturally defined identity, and a demand to be recognized in one’s
capacity of ‘equal intelligence,’ meaning one’s equal ability to speak, recognized as a
being with a logos. See Deranty in Honneth et al. 2016, 38f.
29
Grievances, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, do not need to accompany a hierarchical
system of power – such as colonialism or slavery – since the particular forms of
recognition working within them will become internalized by the subordinated and not
necessarily questioned. Change within a system will thus not need to come through
recognizing the rights of the suffering, since neither suffering nor rights are necessarily
available options in an oppressive political system. Fanon 2017 (1952).
30 31
Rancière 1999, 19. Ibid., chapter 2.
258 Maria Birnbaum
knowledge of what difference means and who it applies to. And while a
redistribution of the perceptible does not make the unseen seen, it makes
‘what was unseen visible.’32 It makes it intelligible. While the struggle for
recognition aims to change the range of the recognizable by convincing
or pressuring the arbiters of the boundaries of that knowledge to expand
them, the change in the recognizability is about claimed space regardless
of the arbiters or boundaries. It is the change of terms altogether.33 As
political theorist Hanna Pitkin noted in her analysis of Niccolò Machia-
velli, in order to communicate an alternative, one ‘wants not to convey
new information to [one’s audience], but rather to change the terms, the
conceptual framework through which they presently organize their infor-
mation.’34 In this vein, how does the framework change through which
cultural and religious difference is organized and understood? And what
are the consequences as to what or who can be included in the category
of that culture or religion?
In order to answer the question, I now turn to my illustrative examples
of Pakistan and Israel and show how religion and religious difference
became recognizable as constitutive of these two emerging international
subjects. In the illustrations that follow, I attend in more detail to
different aspects of how this kind of epistemic change came about
regarding what could be recognized as religion. I show how the British
colonial census set categories of religious belonging tied to different
forms of political power. I point out how political party elites claimed
and gained representational power over the religiously differentiated
group, shifting away from more traditional forms of religious authority
in the pursuit of political independence. I further illustrate the shift in the
idiom of numbers from the religious minority to the religiously defined
nation that sought to claim the state.
These shifts in the framework of knowledge enabled a recognition of
religion referring to a different set of actors, institutions and spaces –
political elites rather than clergy, colonial administrative bodies rather
than local authorities, and wartime communication lines, rivers and
military holdings rather than shrines, clergy and temples. I end by
showing what the reference to religion had come to mean once the
census, questions of representations and the cartography of military
maps had made religion recognizable. I do so by analysing the work by
the border commissions partitioning Palestine and India.
32 33 34
Ibid., 37–38, 55. Rancière 1999, 16. Pitkin 1984, 291.
Pakistan, Israel, and the Recognition

of Religious Difference
In this last part I ask what it meant to recognize religious difference in the
partition of British India and Mandate Palestine and the establishment of
the states of Pakistan and Israel in the wake of World War II. Religion
had, at this point in time, not been a prominent feature of state-building
missions for quite some time, and the Zionist and British Indian Muslim
leadership were cautious in distancing themselves from the idea that
religion alone defined them or their purpose. They displayed little inter-
est in fostering pious populations and did not push theologically
informed arguments to support their claims to independence, nor did
they have the backing of any form of unified clergy.35 In fact, both
contemporary and present-day commentators would argue that the rec-
ognition of religion had very little to do with the much more traditional
power games at play in the establishment of the Muslim homeland or
Jewish national home.36 Nonetheless, the states that emerged from the
demise of the British Empire used the terminology of religious difference
to claim and gain international recognition. If this was the case, then,
what did this reference to religion mean? And how had it become
recognizable as such?
Numbers
The census was one of the most influential ways in which religious
difference was made politically salient and intelligible in the rule of the
late British Empire. The registrar general and census commissioner
conducted one in British India every ten years beginning at the end of
the nineteenth century. It was intended to serve as a ‘scientific’ basis for
information and knowledge about Indian local society, mapping the
population according to professions, language, caste, religion and so
forth. Indian Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians thus became quan-
tifiable as communal entities.37 The census’s enumeration of the Indian
population into communities would further come to function as a point
of reference for the colonial state when it introduced representative
political institutions and, as we will see later, for the borders of the states
35
The deep disagreement over the role of religion in the Zionist movement, for example,
had led to the first schisms. Chaim Weizmann formed the Democratic faction, the
religious Zionist established Mizrachi and the anti-Zionist, ultra-orthodox created
Augdat Yisrael in the beginning of the twentieth century; see Schindler 2008; Devji
2013.
36 37
Batnitzky 2011; Schindler 2008. Talbot and Singh 2009.
260 Maria Birnbaum
to come. The ‘marked’ electorates aimed to increase minority represen-

tation in the system of elective local government.38 Once these census
categories became a point of reference for the British government, how-
ever, religious demographical numbers became directly linked with pol-
itical representation, power and patronage. While the introduction of
separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs and others in British India in
the first decades of the twentieth century were meant to ‘protect either
community from being deprived of political representation in areas
where it was a minority,’39 those who were supposed to benefit from
these protections were also ‘transformed by virtue of their subjection to
the calculus of state and geopolitical power.’40 The recognition of reli-
gious minorities had empowered and provided them with local political
power. But it had also conditioned that very influence to those identifi-
able as Muslims, Sikhs or the other categories provided for by the census.
In a more general sense, the recognition of the national minority,
which gained an international institutional form after World War I, had
not only empowered these very minorities, but the process of ‘minoriti-
zation,’ as Aamir Mufti argues, had also rendered the minoritized popu-
lations ‘movable.’41 Therefore, while governing instruments such as the
census, and forms of political representation such as the separate elect-
orates, had taken part in the constitution and the protection of the
religiously marked minorities, they had simultaneously made them vul-
nerable. Minority was therefore ‘always potentially exile, and exile is an
actualization of the threat inherent to the condition of minority.’42 The
protection of the minority would not only make it more vulnerable but
also push its members to amplify their difference in regard to the national
majority. This amplification was necessary in order to make them legible
in the terms that were internal to the international discourse of minority
right.43 The double face of recognition had both enabled and subjected
those seeking empowerment through it.
Representation
Another source of the establishment of knowledge regarding religious
difference was political representation. The leader of the main Muslim
party, the All-India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was
38 39
Ahmed 1999. Devji 2013, 59–60.
40
Mahmood 2016, 60; in the case of the role of the census as a ‘modern instrument of
domination and liberation … a mechanism for organizing and perpetuating state power,’
see Zacharia 1996; Adcock 2013.
41 42 43
Mufti 2007. Ibid., 13. Mahmood 2012, 2016.
instrumental in shifting the Muslims’ legal and political position from

that of the religious minority to the nation. With the expansion of
representative government and the prospects of parliamentary democ-
racy, the Muslim minority of British India sought to escape the looming
threat of Hindu majority dominance inherent in the law of numbers.44
According to Jinnah, the Muslims were both too large in numbers and,
since the reforms granting them a separate electoral body, too distinct in
a constitutional fashion to be reduced to a religious community. Further,
while the Muslims were smaller in numbers on the subcontinent as a
whole, they were a majority in many of its provinces and thereby a
political entity in their own right.45
Rather than constituting a national minority, then, Jinnah argued,
British Indian Muslims were a nation ’by any definition’ of the term,
and they must have their homelands, their territory and their state.46
Jinnah’s ‘Two-Nation Theory’ of separate but equal Hindu and Muslim
nations would gained unexpected traction after he and his Muslim
League claimed and became representatives of India’s Muslim popula-
tion vis-à-vis the British. Jinnah continued to claim parity between the
Indian National Congress – which had previously argued to represent all
Indian subjects, Muslim or not – and the Muslim League, between what
he called ‘Hindustan and Pakistan.’47 In the end, he succeeded in
gaining recognition as the voice of the Indian Muslims and as an equal
party in the negotiations for independence and partition alongside the
British and the Congress.48 Declaring India’s Muslims a nation meant
‘discarding a purely numeric logic: if a minority was denied by its
demographic weight, a nation is equal to others, even if it is smaller.’49
The ‘problem in India,’ Jinnah therefore pointed out ‘is not of an inter-
communal character, but manifestly of an international one, and it must
be treated as such.’50
The recognition of religious minority had in this case also been two-
faced and had protected those vulnerable to majority rule while it also
‘produc[ed] the kinds of subjects who [could] speak in its name, trans-
forming how religious differences [were] lived, recognized, and con-
tested.’51 With the shift from minority to nationhood, then, Muslims
and Jews had brought with them the subject formed by the minority
politics. The new nation was no longer dependent on sheer numbers to
legitimate its claim to political independence. While the idiom of
numbers of the minority had been rejected or, better, transcended with
44 45 46
Jaffrelot 2015., 94. Devji 2013, 83. Jinnah and Ahmad 1960, 149.
47 48 49
Jinnah and Ahmad 1960. Jaffrelot 2002. Jaffrelot 2015, 78–79.
50 51
Jinnah/Ahmad 1960, 152. Mahmood 2016, 33.
262 Maria Birnbaum
the claim to the nation, the logic of enumerated and differentiated ‘reli-
gious’ groups that had been intrinsic to the colonial episteme continued
to live on in the religiously defined nation. The religious minorities had
become nations able to claim a state.
If the census and the enumeration of minorities, and then the claim to
political representation and the transition from minority to the nation,
had shaped that which could be recognized as religion and religious
difference, the question following would be: what had the terms come
to mean? In the census and the electorates, the terminology of religion
had been abstracted from the practices and creed of the population that it
had come to represent. This took on an even more elusive character once
religion became attached to the nation. Religion was, as Faisal Devji puts
it, ‘deployed to name only the most general, disparate and shifting of
qualities … . But this is what made it so radical as a founding idea for the
nation, the informal social contract between widely different regional,
sectarian and linguistic groups.’52
In order to understand what religion and religious difference referred
to during the establishment of Pakistan and Israel, I will end with a close
reading of the commissions that drew the borders of the newly independ-
ent states. Through the international recognition of the Muslim home-
land and the Jewish national home, the epistemological politics of
religion finally ended up in international law.
Colonial Border Commissions: Radcliffe and Peel

Pakistan and Israel gained independence in the early period of the
decolonialization of the British Empire. Both Muslim and Jewish nation-
alism became state-building enterprises rather late, the former pro-
claimed in the Lahore Resolution in 1940 and the latter at the Biltmore
Conference in 1942.53 After Indian and Palestinian partition, both pro-
cesses of independence were followed by the transfer of large populations
and as yet unresolved violent conflict. However different these parallel
processes towards statehood were – with different historical dependen-
cies on the Empire and different arenas of pre-partition debate and
conflict – both sought the status of international agency in a time when
this very notion was under radical transformation and the long-standing
reign of the Empire was giving way to the pervasive form of the national-
state. Both did so with an unmistakable reference to religion. In this final
52
Devji 2013, 47; for an account of the relation between religion as a political identity, the
modern middle class, nationalism and the nation-state, see Mufti 2007, 29.
53
Devji 2013, 25.
section, I reconstruct the web of meanings of religion that had become

recognizable and defined the minority and subsequently the nation that
would come to claim statehood. I do so by analysing the work of the
border commissions that were given the task of outlining the contours of
the emerging states.54
Pakistan: The Radcliffe Boundary Commissions

On 3 June 1947, His Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom
announced the transfer of power to and the partition of British India.
Independence was to come ten weeks later, at midnight on 14 August
1947. British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe was dispatched to India on 7 July to
head a commission tasked with demarcating the boundary between the
two emergent states. It was his first visit to the subcontinent. Six weeks
in, the results of the Commission, the ‘Radcliffe Line’, became an
international border. It separated the Indian Union and Pakistan, but
also divided the northwestern region of Punjab, bordering Afghanistan,
and the northeastern region of Bengal, bordering Burma, into respective
Indian and Pakistani territories. The Radcliffe Award demarcated
‘Muslim Pakistan’ from its ‘non-Muslim’ Indian neighbour in the terms
used in the official brief from the British government. During the civil
war–like conditions that followed partition, fourteen million people
crossed the border, of which up to two million were reported to have
died.55
Radcliffe and his Punjabi and Bengali commissions had been
instructed to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of [the Prov-
inces] on the basis of ascertaining contiguous majority areas of Muslims
and non-Muslims. … For the purpose of determining the population of
the district, the 1941 census figures will be taken as authoritative. [The
commissions] will also be instructed to take into [consideration] other
factors,’ so the official brief said.56 Apart from the census, the primary
source of information upon which Radcliffe relied was the colonial maps.
No information was gathered through the Commission’s own surveys or
by consulting the local administration, police, revenue officers or bur-
eaucrats in the border districts.57
The official maps used by Radcliffe had been commissioned for two
principal reasons: the first was colonial administration and logistics, such
54
For an overview of the parallel and interlinked processes of partition, see Dubnov and
Robson 2019.
55 56
Jalal 2013: 5; Chester 2009; Khan 2007; Pandey 2001. Sadullah et al. 1983, 1–2.
57
Chatterji 1999, 224–225.
264 Maria Birnbaum
as tax collection, transportation, roads and railways. The second function

of the maps of British India had been military, especially in the northeast,
where the advancement of the Japanese forces in 1942 had highlighted
the need for precise cartographical knowledge.58 The mark of colonial
administration and military imperatives on the maps available for Rad-
cliffe’s border mission became clear in the factors that needed to be
considered alongside the census as ‘other factors’ – that is, lines of
communication, roads, railways, canals and military bases, leaving aside
questions of trade patterns and kinship, and the cultural and religious
significance of cities and regions.59
The enumerative power of the census had shaped and strengthened
the perception of clearly demarcated and distinguishable religious com-
munities without communal or individual overlaps. The colonial maps,
heavily dependent upon administrative and military knowledge, super-
imposed these religious communities onto visible territory. The census
and the map came together in the cartographic representation of a
‘religio-national’ composition, thereby ‘naturalizing a territorialized pol-
itics of … national self-determination.’60 The maps enacted ‘immanent
national units and the census populate[d] those entities’; the census ‘fill
[ed] in politically the formal topography of the map.’61 The census,
together with the colonial and wartime maps upon which Radcliffe’s
international border relied, territorialized ‘religion’ and ‘religious differ-
ence’ in separating the ‘non-Muslims’ from the ‘Muslims.’ They contrib-
uted to making those categories salient and recognizable to the
international political order that the future states became part of.
Israel: The Peel Commission of Palestine

In contrast with the hasty creation of the new South Asian borders, plans
had been available for Palestine for more than a decade before the United
Nations (UN) recommended partition in November 1947.62 The Peel
Commission was sent to Palestine by the British government in 1936 to
provide insights into a conflict-ridden Mandate Palestine. Going beyond
simply suggesting solutions to the conflict, the Commission’s report gave
a detailed account of the history of the land, its people and the conflicts
between them in order to justify a proposed partition. In the report, the
Jewish population is depicted as a people distinguishable from others by
their particular – ‘peculiar’ – religion. This religious identity was essential
and thick, but in and of itself did not carry any exclusive truth claims that
58 59 60
Khan 2007; Chester 2009. Chester 2009, 21. Campbell 1998, 79.
61 62
Ibid. Sinanoglou 2010: 120; Chester 2008, 93; Fraser 1988; Morris 2001.
would rub up against those of others. Political independence, therefore,

was not a necessity sprung out of the religion or its people, but rather it
emerged as a necessity due to the conflictual political circumstances on
the ground.63
Running to nearly four hundred pages, the Peel Commission’s report
was the work of six appointed members, who had spent eleven months
listening to the oral testimony of British officials and the Jewish and Arab
parts of the population (though the latter boycotted the Commission
until a week before its departure), reading letters, memoranda and peti-
tions, and touring Palestine and parts of neighbouring Trans-Jordan.64 It
also reflected the Commission’s experience of a Palestinian ‘reality’ that,
to a great extent, was already divided into two separated communities.
The Commission’s experience of partition on the ground was expressed
in its detailed analysis of separate Arab and Jewish economies, school
systems, lifestyles, residential areas and even health facilities.65
Beginning its narrative in the Biblical days of Abraham, the report
traced the history of the problem in Palestine and concluded that the
situation had reached a ‘deadlock,’ and ‘if the existing Mandate con-
tinued, there was little hope of lasting peace.’66 In order to lead the
reader to this conclusion, the report had to convincingly argue the case
that the conflict was indeed ‘driven by a clash of two distinct and irre-
concilable national communities (and ideologies) rather than by ethnic
hatreds, economic competition or domination, anger over immigration,
or poor government.’67 The function of the extensive historical part of
the report that went two thousand years back into Jewish history was
mainly to make the historicist argument of the deep historical, spiritual
and now ideologically national Jewish connection to the land of Pales-
tine, presenting the Jews as fundamentally different from the non-Jewish
population.68 The ‘culture of Arab Palestine,’ the report reads, ‘born as it
is of Asia, it had little kinship with that of the National Home, which,
though it is linked with ancient Jewish tradition, is predominantly a
culture of the West. Nowhere, indeed, is the gulf between the races more
obvious.’69 While the roots of the Arab ‘race’ were not further specified,
the particularity of the Jewish ‘race’ was a ‘historical fact.’ As early as
‘1100 BC the Israelites … were already distinguishable … by their
peculiar religion.’70 In Palestine, the report depicted an Israeli state
taking shape as a political effort by an essentially homogenous Jewish
63 64 65
CMD. 5479 1937. Sinanoglou 2009, 149. Klieman 1980, 289.
66 67
CMD. 5479 1937, chapter 22, 380. Sinanglou 2010, 134.
68 69
Dubnov forthcoming; Sinanglou 2010, 135. CMD. 5479 1937, 117.
70
Ibid., 2.
266 Maria Birnbaum
nation. The Jews could be measured and accounted for, referring to the
estimates made in the census of 1931 and the territory that this group had
purchased until the date of partition.
In the end, the report recommended an end to the British Mandate
and a partition of Palestine in a Jewish and an Arab state. The report’s
detailed historical discussion reaffirmed the Zionist narrative of a Jewish
historical connection to the land of Palestine, the idea of the Jewish
people ‘return[ing] to their historic homeland’ and the fundamental
difference of the Jews from their non-Jewish neighbours.71 The Commis-
sion had taken the situation they found on the ground – that of separate
education systems, economies and language – as evidence reflecting the
narrative of the two naturally separate peoples of Palestine. The recom-
mendation of the Peel Commission report insisted on an absolute halt of
Jewish immigration to Arab territory until the date of partition. The
initially limited impact of the report and its partition plan did not under-
mine its authority when it featured as the blueprint for the UN’s Palestine
Partition Plan ten year later.72
Radcliffe’s and Peel’s Religion

The Radcliffe and Peel commissions illustrate two among numerous
historical instances that shaped the meaning, lived experience and
nationalization of religious difference prior to formal international recog-
nition of the post-colonial states. In the case of Pakistan, the census of
1941 was paired with the colonial and wartime maps to designate ‘con-
tiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims,’ ignoring patterns
of trade and kinship, as well as the cultural and religious significance of
cities and regions, shrines and temples.73 By looking into the conditions
under which the maps emerged and the controversies concerning the
census, we can begin to understand what and who were recognized in the
emerging Muslim homeland – and also who was occluded and silenced.
In the Israeli case of the Peel Commission, the care with which infor-
mation was gathered, statements heard and interviews conducted was of
a very different quality. Yet also here the Commission’s work was sharply
conditioned, and its findings delimited, by the fact that it accessed the
‘non-Jewish’ part of the population only at the very end of the trip. The
report itself would further continue to present a picture of the Palestinian
Jewish population as essentially different from their non-Jewish counter-
parts and as historically deeply connected to the land. Religion, in the
71 72 73
Ibid., 3. Sinanoglou 2009, 2010. CMD. 7136 1947.
eyes of the Peel Commission report was a thick signifier of identity that,
in and of itself, was not exclusive in its truth claims. The reasons for the
conflict in the Mandate were political – a result of conflicting national-
isms – not religious. Looking at the report’s construction of Jewish
historiography – basically an adoption of the Zionist narrative – gives us
a glimpse at how this commission’s work confirmed regnant perceptions
of religion and religious difference as essential and fundamental iden-
tities intimately interwoven with ethnicity, race, territoriality and, not
least, with the nation. Religion, in this reading, could be co-opted by a
political movement such as Zionism, but was neither reducible to nor
necessarily connected to it.
Khan and the Failure of an Alternative

While Pakistan and Israel were success stories in the sense that both
became internationally recognized states, efforts to make their religious
specificity a constitutive element of their statehood did not go unchal-
lenged.74 Apart from the fact that neither claim to independence as
a religiously defined state was able to garner support from any
unified group of orthodox clerics, the challenges also came on the
international level.
Muhammad Zafrullah Khan had been part of the Indian partition
commission and would, as Pakistan’s first foreign minister, become its
first representative at the UN. An Ahmadiyya Muslim himself, he had
supported the Indian Muslims’ claim to a state of their own.75 Rather
than arguing on its behalf as an ethnic or civilizational nation, as had
been the case with the official line of the main party of the Muslim
League and its leadership, Khan’s argument rather presented the British
Indian Muslims as a population subjugated under both the British
imperial government as well as its Hindu population. A Muslim home-
land would, therefore, be a safe haven for a persecuted Muslim people,
and not the realization of an age-old quest for a nation of Muslims.76
Khan took a similar stance detaching religious national identity from
political independence at the UN in the autumn of 1947, when he
became the chairman of the opposition against Palestine partition and
74
With a handful countries still not extending full recognition to the state of Israel; see
Schindler 2008.
75
On the broader question of Ahmadis in Pakistan, see Qasmi 2014.
76
The ‘real reason’ for partition, according to Khan, was not the incompatibility of nations
or races, or civilizations for that matter, but rather the economic disparity and
exploitation of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs under British rule; see Sadullah et al.
1983, 405.
268 Maria Birnbaum
Israeli independence. Here, once again, he challenged the account pre-

sented in the Peel Partition Plan of the right to political independence by
a ‘racially distinct nation of Jews.’ According to Khan, recognizing the
legitimacy of religious nationalist claims to political independence would
‘constitute a dangerous precedent which might be adopted by dissident
elements in many states and thus become a source both of internal
conflict and international disorder.’77 While the Jewish population of
Palestine, many of whom had fled the European Holocaust, had every
right to protection in a future state, this state did not have to be their
own. The British Indian Muslims had gained Pakistan due to the fact that
they had belonged to the land for centuries, so Khan argued. The
Palestinian Jews, on the other hand, were recent immigrants with a right
to protection from prosecution as a national minority but not to national
independence. The political relevance of religion, for Khan, emerged not
from the fact that it defined particular nations striving for statehood.
Rather, religion mattered because it was the mark by which the respective
groups had come to be subjected. As groups in need of refuge, political
independence could provide precisely this, granted they belonged to the
land. Neither religion nor the nation, so Zafrullah claimed, did in and of
themselves support any claim to statehood.
As we know in hindsight, Khan’s challenges did not make it through
the thick consensus of the nations’ claims to political independence, and
these particular nations were defined by their religious difference from
their neighbours. Rather, international recognition of the nation-states
went on to sediment the recognition of religious difference as constitutive
thereof. Religious difference had become recognizable to an international
audience as constitutive of the two nation-states. Nevertheless, the chal-
lenges posed by Khan reveal an attempt to interrupt the (still) ongoing
process of sedimentation, as unsuccessful as it might have been.
Conclusion
The volume at hand argues that the culturally heterogeneous life of
global politics is constituted and organized by regimes of difference, or
diversity regimes. In this chapter I began by exploring how international
cultural difference has been established and empowered through the
recognition function of the diversity regime. I studied the epistemological
politics of cultural diversity in general and religious difference in particu-
lar, interested in the conditions of the possibility of their recognition.
77
UN doc. A/AC.14/32 1947, 47.
I argued that the recognition of cultural difference had a double nature.

While it can be empowering and grant subjects a form of agency that they
previously lacked, it can also subordinate its subject, reproducing
systems of power and hierarchical structures of domination and submis-
sion. In order to avoid falling into the trap of letting the diversity regime’s
recognition of cultural diversity become a vehicle of reproductive power,
I attended to the processes by which cultural difference – religion, in my
case – became available for recognition – that is, how it came to be
recognizable as such. In tending to the conditions of the possibility for
recognition, I asked how the range changed as to what could be recog-
nized as religiously different in the Muslim homeland of Pakistan and the
Jewish national home of Israel, which would emerge onto the global
political playing field in the wake of the demise of the British Empire
after World War II. Thereby, I looked at questions of counting and
enumeration such as the census, issues of representation and minoritiza-
tion and the shift of the British Indian Muslims and the Mandate Pales-
tinian Jews from religious minorities in the Empire to nations able to
claim political independence in the form of the state. Here, I showed how
these instances had shaped what could be understood to be recognizably
religiously different. In the course of the recognition of this religious
difference, I illustrated the workings of the double-sided nature of
recognition.
Last, I looked at what this reference to religion would come to entail by
analysing the work by the Radcliffe and Peel commissions, delimiting the
borders of the to-be-states. By reconstructing the meaning of religion in
these two cases, I provided some context as to what and whom the
reference to religion had come to encompass. Religion became increas-
ingly hollowed out and emptied of concrete substance, while simultan-
eously tied to the thick, essential idea of collective belonging. It became
detached from the idea of the minority and attached to the nation, while
it continued to carry the remnants of colonial minority politics. I show
how the recognition of religious difference built on and sedimented very
particular versions of ‘religion,’ referring to Zionist historiographical
accounts of Jewish particularity, Muslim political elites’ attempts to unify
linguistically, geographically and culturally diverse populations into a
coherent national body, essential phantasies of ethnic-national-racial
identities, or the practically separated everyday lives of the Palestinian
population. In this way, certain aspects of social, political and cultural life
in the Indian and Palestine societies were funnelled into coherent, rep-
resentable and recognizable forms of Muslim and Jewish religious differ-
ence, indefinite and changing in character.
270 Maria Birnbaum
I forwarded a few arguments. First, I pointed out that the double

nature of recognition will both constitute and empower subjects of global
politics, while also subordinating them to a certain form of governance
within which they are confined, reproducing the structures of domin-
ation and subordination within it. Gaining a better understanding of
these two sides of recognition will enable a better ability to calculate
the costs of recognizing religious and cultural difference in world politics.
Second, I showed that arguments for the recognition of religion are
productive of the meaning and scope of religion itself, and will tend to
reproduce the power of those in the position to define it, while excluding
those unable to appear on the register of the recognizably religious.
I thereby cautioned against simplistic arguments for the recognition
and inclusion of religion in international politics and theory. Last,
I traced the remnants of colonial governmental logics in the formation
of a religious minority subject that lived on in and shaped the nations and
nation-states that replaced them.
13 Gender, Nation and the Generation of
Cultural Difference across ‘The West’
Ann Towns
The past century has seen some dramatic shifts in what the editors refer
to as international diversity regimes, namely the international produc-
tion and organization of cultural formations such as ethnicities and
nations. The twentieth century included a shift from an international
cultural diversity regime emphasizing a world ideally organized into
distinctive but internally homogeneous ‘nations,’ to one also recogniz-
ing ‘multiculturalism’ within states, calling for the protection of cultural
rights of ‘indigenous people,’ ‘national minorities,’ and ‘immigrants.’
In drawing attention to international diversity regimes – which include
explicit attempts to regulate and order cultural diversity – I thus take
issue with John Ikenberry’s claim in this volume that ‘the international
political order does not try to regulate cultural diversity, but to celebrate
it, ignore it, privatize it, and exclude it.’1 As I will show later, the liberal
international order has indeed rested on deliberate attempts to regulate
the form and contents of cultural diversity. However, in a world of
flows, with ideas and people moving across all sorts of boundaries, the
creation and maintenance of cultural orders not only demands a great
deal of effort but also remains an elusive ideal. The world is still one of
cultural complexity, despite attempts to create and regulate cultural
homogeneity within groups and to differentiate between them. The
contemporary liberal cultural diversity regime remains a complex and
unstable assemblage of aims, including those of sovereign nation-
statehood, individual human rights, and the liberal multicultural man-
agement of cultural minority groups. The contemporary era is even
more complex if we take into consideration the generation of cultural
cleavages that cut across the alleged boundaries of nations and cultural
minority groups.
1
See Ikenberry, this volume, Chapter 7.
271
272 Ann Towns
The central aim of this chapter is not to disagree with Ikenberry but
rather to draw attention to the centrality of gender in liberal cultural
diversity regimes. I will show that the construction of nations and other
cultural groups centrally relies on gender, in at least three ways: by
helping to generate a sense of familiarity among national/cultural
strangers; by serving as the means by which cultural boundaries are
drawn between the national/cultural Self and foreign Others; and by
assigning women the primary role in the intergenerational transmission
of national or ethnic culture. I then linger a bit on the contemporary uses
of gender in narratives about multiculturalism and the status of women,
in which allegedly gender-equal Western and liberal national cultures are
contrasted against putatively patriarchal and ‘traditional’ non-Western
minority cultures. The final third of the paper then challenges such
narratives by drawing attention to a powerful case of what the editors
call counter-interpellation – the invocation of insurgent categories of
cultural identity – in the rise of a transnational constellation of self-
identified Western actors that mobilize against gender equality in the
name of ‘Western’ or ‘European’ civilization. This development can also
be understood as the generation of a cultural cleavage that cuts across the
nations of the West, further complicating the notion of culturally coher-
ent nations.
My analysis of gender and liberal cultural diversity regimes serves four
critical functions in this volume. First, my chapter highlights the central-
ity of gender in the constitution of international order and cultural diver-
sity regimes, an important contribution in its own right since the
scholarship on international order tends to overlook and ignore gender.
Gender, as we will see later, is central in the attempts of diversity order
builders to meet the legitimation challenges discussed by the editors in
the Introduction. Gender is also central in mobilizing actors against
liberalism. Second, the chapter illustrates the editors’ argument that
diversity regimes always create social hierarchies, in this case gender
hierarchy. Indeed, hierarchy between men and women is one of the
principal forms of inequality generated by the successive diversity
regimes. Ideas of sexual hierarchy are often indispensable to set out
and legitimate national and cultural difference.
Third, contrary to prevalent assumptions, I will show that cultural
differences on gender equality do not align neatly along ethnic, national
or civilizational lines. Instead, support for or opposition to gender equal-
ity cuts across presumed national and civilizational boundaries. My
chapter thus challenges the common perception that ‘Western’ nations
and culture promotes gender equality whereas non-Western cultures do
not – that is, that ‘multiculturalism is bad for women,’ to paraphrase
Gender, Nation and the Generation of Cultural Difference 273
from Susan Okin’s widely read essay.2 This point could be made by
looking at many regions in the world. For the purposes of this chapter,
I will focus on the growing polarization within what is often referred to as
‘the West’ – understood here as Europe and North America – showing
that a cleavage has developed around gender equality that cuts right to
the core of putatively ‘Western values.’ Much like how Ellen Berrey
analyses ‘cultural transformations taking place in America’s liberal heart-
land’ in this volume,3 my chapter focuses on cultural cleavages emerging
in the heart of the so-called West. Fourth, this chapter shows that shared
meanings can generate patterns of differentiation that are conducive to
division and conflict. Representations of the status of women as indica-
tive of cultural identity are widely circulating, and gender equality is used
to draw boundaries between Western and non-Western and liberal and
illiberal cultures and traditions. The fact that shared meanings enable
debate and differentiation is a point too often overlooked in scholarship
on international order.
The rest of the chapter consists of five main sections. The first (section
two), briefly describes the twentieth-century partial shift between two
liberal orders, from a mononational to a (more) multicultural liberal
international diversity regime. Section three consists of an examination
of the ways in which gender permeates the constitution of nations, with
the following section moving to an analysis of gender and multicultural-
ism. The fifth section then takes a turn, to look at the recent emergence
of a transnational cultural cleavage on gender equality within the so-
called West. This cleavage does not align along national or cultural group
lines. It nonetheless produces cultural differentiation, in the sense that
actors are lining up for or against gender equality, which they often use as
a proxy for supporting or opposing liberal values and institutions. Under-
standing cultural difference not only or primarily as difference between
national or cultural groups, but also as discursive or value differenti-
ations, helps bring to the fore the more fluid and contested nature of
cultural difference. Since there is still very little scholarship on the
emerging transnational anti-gender movement, the section will identify
and describe the central cogs in the transnational anti-gender current,
discuss the character of their transnational connections and the ways in
which this movement contests the liberal international diversity regime.
The final concluding discussion will draw out the implications of the
analysis for the study of international order, culture and diversity
regimes.
2 3
Okin 1999. Berrey, in this volume, Chapter 8.
274 Ann Towns
The Shifting Liberal Cultural Diversity

Regimes of the Twentieth Century
The twentieth century saw a shift among global governance organiza-
tions, international law and a number of states from an international
cultural diversity regime emphasizing a world ideally organized into
distinctive but internally homogeneous ‘nations,’ to one also recognizing
‘multiculturalism.’ Both of these regimes might well be characterized as
liberal, but they constitute different manifestations of liberal ordering.
And both certainly involve deliberate regulations of cultural diversity.
The nation understood in cultural and racial terms came into being in
Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century and really
bloomed during the first half of the twentieth. In simple gloss, during
this period, the nation came to be conceived of as ‘a people,’ a culturally
homogeneous group whose physical presence ought to align with state
boundaries. Nations have of course been imagined in many ways, as is
often pointed out – national identity and difference can variably be
determined based on language, dress, physical features, behaviour,
values, customs and so on. Regardless of their precise form, transnation-
ally circulating ideas about nationhood took hold during this period and
were increasingly recognized by international organizations and institu-
tionalized in international law. The regulative project of this national
diversity regime was massive; to organize linguistically, culturally and/
or phenotypically diverse populations into homogenous nations was no
small undertaking. Doing so took considerable work, including stand-
ardizing language use through mass education and law (in some cases
including prohibition of the use of certain languages), standardizing
historical narratives about the nation (which by necessity silenced certain
histories and perspectives while highlighting others), repressing minor-
ities, organizing mass population exchanges and – most dramatically –
arranging national consolidation through genocide and war. State policy
and regulations, resting on international law in support of sovereignty
and national self-determination, was clearly central in these efforts. This
was a project much more extensive and transformational than merely
pushing existing cultural differences into the realm of civil society.4 The
late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries was indeed a
period of profound transformations, consisting of deliberate attempts to
reorganize cultural diversity into multiple distinctive but internally
4
See Ikenberry, this volume, Chapter 7.
homogeneous nation-states. In practice, the intensity and effects of these

efforts of course varied across the world.
By the late 1960s, new models for organizing cultural diversity
emerged among Western democracies.5 This new model took the form
of liberal ‘multiculturalism’ and was part of the human rights revolution
that developed after 1945 and in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Although racial and ethnic hierarchies still remain, explicit, legal, state-
sponsored racism and repression of religious, ethnic and racial minorities
had largely ceased among Western democracies by the early 1970s.6
Explicit public recognition of ‘cultural difference’ within state boundar-
ies developed, not only among states in Europe, North America and
Australasia, but also in Latin America and elsewhere. Indeed, ‘multicul-
turalism’ has now come to be a predominant diversity regime among
global governance institutions and a range of states across the world,
entailing a ‘political project that attempts to redefine the relationship
between ethno-cultural minorities and the state through the adoption
of new laws, policies or institutions.’7
According to Kymlicka (2007), the multicultural regime consists of
three broad patterns in the reregulation of cultural diversity. First, new
forms of recognition and rights for people defined as ‘indigenous
peoples’ emerged, including varying degrees of land rights, partial self-
governance, language and cultural rights, representation in national
assemblies and more. Second, there has been increased recognition of
partial autonomy of and power sharing with people defined as substate
national groups, or recognized ‘national minorities,’ such as the Scots
and Welsh in Britain, the Quebecois in Canada, or the Swedish Finns or
Roma in Sweden. This recognition often includes official language
status, public funding of minority languages, some form of territorial
autonomy, legal affirmation of multinationalism and more. Third, multi-
cultural rights for so-called immigrant groups have also developed,
including public affirmation of multiculturalism (in public policy, school
curricula and public media), funding of bilingual education, affirmative
action, rights of dual citizenship, adjustments of dress codes and more.
These three sets of developments have come to challenge and in some
cases replace the prior mononational and assimilationist diversity regime.
Since the 1990s, international organizations (IOs) – including the United
Nations (UN) and some of its specialized agencies, the Council of
Europe, the European Union and the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe – have become major conduits for the
5 6 7
Kymlicka 2010. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 99.
276 Ann Towns
promotion of multiculturalism.8 To be sure, few states have fully

embraced multiculturalism. Some do so rhetorically while not in prac-
tice. Some reject ‘multiculturalism’ as a project altogether, continuing
the quest to erase diversity and create national homogeneity. In
particular, the multicultural organization of immigration has met chal-
lenges in recent years, as I will discuss further later. But as Kymlicka
underscores, the organization of ‘indigenous people’ and ‘national
minorities’ in terms of multiculturalism has, if anything, become more
deeply entrenched, having not been affected by the contestation sur-
rounding immigration.9
It is important to note that this multicultural project, like the mono-
national one, is deeply transformative. With new principles of differenti-
ation, this regime reorders and alters what and who counts as a cultural
group (in terms of national majorities, indigenous people, national
minorities or immigrants) and how these should relate to one another
and the state. Public institutions and policies are no longer to be exclu-
sively organized in the service of the ideal of one culturally homogeneous
nation, even if tensions remain between mononational and multicultural
models. Importantly, in its ideal liberal form, cultural practices and rights
allegedly cannot take precedence over individual human rights, a set of
values that are to be homogeneously inculcated in all citizens. This is
thus a constrained form of multiculturalism, subsumed under funda-
mental liberal principles of individual citizenship. There are nonetheless
frequent charges that multiculturalism is pursued at the expense of
women’s rights, that multiculturalism is ‘bad for women,’10 a point
I will return to later.
What we have today, then, is a liberal cultural diversity regime that
consists of a complex, contradictory and unstable assemblage of sover-
eign nation-states, individual human rights and liberal multicultural
models for how states should manage ethno-cultural groups. Indeed, as
Ikenberry argues in his chapter on liberal internationalism in this volume,
the global cultural order is neither simple nor singular, consisting of
multiple and often competing social purposes. Later, I will draw atten-
tion to the centrality of gender in the twentieth-century organization of
cultural diversity – both in the mononational and multicultural models –
a dimension that despite its centrality is too often overlooked. The next
section discusses gender in the production of nations, with the following
turning to gender in multiculturalism.
8 9 10
Kymlicka 2007 Kymlicka 2010, 104. Okin 1999.
Gender and the Cultural (Re)Production of Nations

Given the complexity of culture and the transnational movement of
people, values and identities, it obviously has taken a great deal of work
to try to create and maintain clearly bounded national units. The many
agents of mononationalism have thus necessarily had to engage with
issues of how, concretely, the cultural (and/or biological) creation and
reproduction of the nation is best ensured. Gender has been intimately
implicated in the project of constructing, reproducing and legitimating
nations, in at least three ways: by helping to generate a sense of familiarity
among national strangers; by serving as a means by which boundaries are
drawn between the national Self and foreign Others; and by assigning
women the primary role in the intergenerational transmission of national
culture. Models for how certain gender relations and rhetoric can be put
into the service of the nation are transnationally circulating, and as such
they have come to shape and be implicated in international diversity
regimes. I will discuss each of the three ways in turn.
The first set of ways in which gender has been and continues to be
crucial in nationalist projects is by helping to generate familiarity among
certain (national) strangers rather than Others (‘foreign’ strangers),
serving as a symbolic glue that enables national bonding and cultural
differentiation against Others. As is often noted among scholars of
nationalism, widespread indoctrination efforts have been necessary to
create national identification among strangers, among individuals within
the ‘imagined community’ who have mostly had no personal inter-
actions.11 Haas aptly notes that ‘all nationalisms imply a principle of
identity based on impersonal ties, remote ties, vicarious ties – all of which
are mediated by a set of common symbols embedded in a certain pattern
of communication.’12 The unity of these strangers, made familiar
through the language of nationalism, has been of primary importance
in the organization of nations and has had to be thoroughly institutional-
ized into the very fabric of nation-states.
Gender symbolism is central in the production of national familiarity
among strangers. For one, virtually all nations seem to have relied on
family metaphors and the iconography of domestic space, with represen-
tations of members of a nation as members of one large family, headed by
a father and nurtured by a mother. Nations are spoken of as ‘fatherlands’,
‘motherlands’ and ‘homelands’, and male citizens in national militaries
refer to each other as ‘brothers-in-arms.’ The very term ‘nation’ derives
11 12
Anderson 1991. Haas 1986, 709.
278 Ann Towns
from natio – to be born. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

the nation was probably most often metaphorically conceived of as a
woman, a mother, spoken of as Mother India, Mother Russia, Mother
Ireland or Mother Sweden. At times of war, through gendered discourses
of combat and violence, the mother nation was to be protected both by
her sons and by the institutions of the masculinized state. Indeed, the
gendered language of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, differenti-
ated but nonetheless sharing a national home, proposes a strong bond
among individuals who may not know each other in any other regard.
These bonds, forged in part through gendered discourses, have served as
a powerful pull on men and women to identify and organize nationally,
not least in times of war. These bonds have helped legitimate monona-
tional projects of the past and present.
A second and related way in which gender has helped generate famil-
iarity among strangers is through the symbolic use of women to differen-
tiate the national cultural Self against different and threatening Others.
In addition to being represented as a mother, the nation has often been
symbolically represented by women’s bodies and women’s sexuality.
Representations of threat against the nation can take the form of narra-
tives about foreigners seeking to seize, steal away or rape national
women. US efforts to draw distinctions between an ‘American’ Self
and ‘Germans’ as a foreign Other during World War I, when many
Americans understood themselves also as German, are a case in point.
One notorious propaganda poster encouraging Americans to enlist in the
military depicts Germany as an aggressive gorilla, carrying the limp and
milky white body of a young, bare-breasted American woman. The
German threat was depicted as a barbaric and racialized danger to the
homeland, symbolized by the maiden in distress, a depiction intended
first to neatly separate ‘Americans’ from ‘Germans,’ and then to stir up
gendered nationalist sentiments that would encourage American men to
enlist and women to cheer them on. Similar representations are still in
circulation, not least among contemporary nationalist movements.
Representations of immigrants as rapists, and particularly of immigrants
culturally driven to gang rape national women, are in wide use and cause
a lot of anger among nationalists who otherwise seem rather indifferent to
sexual violence. With female bodies the symbolic place of the national
home, the protection of female bodies from foreign enemies with dan-
gerous cultural values becomes a central nationalist concern.
A third central way in which gender figures into the organization of
cultural diversity involves the transmission of national culture from one
generation to the next. Defining and maintaining national culture does
not simply entail differentiation against Others and homogenization
within, it also involves the transmission of culture from one generation to

the next. Not surprisingly, how this cultural labour is organized is funda-
mentally gendered. In most understandings of how national culture is
transmitted, the celebration of national holidays, the maintenance of
particular family relations, sustaining cooking and eating traditions,
and play and bedtime stories are central for the smooth transition of
national beliefs and ways of being from one generation to the next. These
tasks are prevalently and primarily assigned to women. Men, in turn, are
to provide the material safety and physical security of the family and
nation. Although norms are changing, most national militaries still exclu-
sively enlist men as active soldiers. In conventional national practice,
men and women thus serve different functions in reproducing national
culture, an order often attributed to alleged biological differences. Ideas
of sexual hierarchy are also often indispensable, as men are often repre-
sented as more apt at rational decision making, as well as at the use of
violence. Men are thus naturalized as better equipped for positions of
power and decision making, whether in the home, the private sector or
public life.
During the late nineteenth and into well over the first half of the
twentieth century, the international cultural diversity regime was one
attempting to create and manage culture into mononational units. As
we have seen earlier, gender was intricate to this project. In the shift
towards the contemporary regime, with its tensions between monona-
tionalism and multiculturalism, gender continued to remain central.
Whether the aim is mononationalism or multiculturalism, gender is still
an important dimension in generating a sense of familiarity among
strangers, in distinguishing between national or cultural groups, and in
how traditions and values are transmitted from one generation to the
next. Whereas the mononationalist regime of the first half of the twenti-
eth century rested on male superiority, however, the contemporary
regime is also characterized by competing claims about culture and
gender equality. Next, the chapter turns to the role of gender in the
contemporary regime, with its new and competing narratives about
gender and cultural difference.
Gender and the Organization of

Difference as Multiculturalism
‘Multiculturalism,’ while stemming from human rights developments
after World War II, emerged as a new model for organizing cultural
difference in the late 1960s. By the 1990s, a range of international
organizations became conduits for the promotion of this model.
280 Ann Towns
Recognition of ‘cultural difference’ within state boundaries has thus

become commonplace, accompanied with public policies that grant
some combination of official language status, public funding of minority
language initiatives, legal affirmation of multinationalism, affirmative
action, partial self-governance and more. Importantly, the shift towards
multiculturalism took place roughly at the same time as women’s rights
gained increasing prominence. Indeed, throughout the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, but intensifying since the 1970s, the world has
seen massive women’s movements in favour of women’s rights and
gender equality.13 These mobilizations have resulted in an international,
regional and national legal infrastructure reconstituting women, like
men, as individuals with rights. In addition to the general human rights
covenants of the 1960s, a range of international treaties and resolutions
have passed in the UN as well as in regional governance contexts such as
the European Union (EU) or the Organization of American States. More
recently, resolutions and laws on sexual orientation and gender identity
(SOGI) rights have also emerged.14 As I will elaborate on shortly, this
vision of individuals with rights has come up against competing gender
visions entailed in the national and/or multicultural projects.
Gender and the status of women have remained central in the attempts
to reimagine and reorganize cultural difference along ‘multicultural’
lines. Indeed, the multicultural project has inherited the focus on the
status of women as indicative of cultural difference, as discussed earlier.
How women dress, their sexuality and their autonomy from men have
remained central markers and a shared language for setting out cultural
boundaries, both for actors speaking on behalf of majority national
cultures and for those speaking on behalf of cultural minorities. The
intense European debates about the practice of veiling is but one of many
illustrations of how cultural boundaries are represented and negotiated
with the status of women as the shared arena.
The breakthrough of women’s rights has thrown a wrench in national-
ist and multicultural projects, however, forcing defenders of monona-
tionalism and multiculturalism alike to adjust their visions. Although
public policies that produce heterosexual divisions of labour between
women and men for national ends are still in existence, with women
assigned the tasks of reproducing national culture and men with physic-
ally protecting it, such public policies are presently much less pervasive
than they used to be. Indeed, the individual rights framework has led to
policies that aim to individualize and break up gender divisions of labour,
13 14
See, for example, Towns 2010. Symons and Altman 2015, 76.
for example by encouraging men to take on more child-rearing responsi-

bilities and women to enter masculinized institutions such as the military.
Competing narratives about gender, the nation and cultural difference
have simultaneously emerged.
Primary among the new narratives about gender and cultural differ-
ence are ones that link individualized gender equality with nations or
cultural groups sharing ‘liberal’ and ‘Western’ values. Equality between
men and women as similar individuals with similar needs and capabilities
has become interpreted as distinguishing traits of particular nations and
cultural groups, with individualism understood as a set of values that are
anchored in ‘liberal’ and ‘Western’ national culture and customs. Des-
pite the patriarchal history of Europe and the fact that a number of
societies around the world organized gender in more egalitarian way than
did Europe historically,15 the subordination of women to men and the
relegation of men and women to different spheres and tasks are now
deemed to be ‘non-Western’ and ‘traditional’ practices in such represen-
tations. In short, gender equality becomes one shared constitutive stand-
ard of cultural difference and a shared measuring rod of cultural
superiority and inferiority, allegedly setting aside ‘liberal’ and ‘Western’
culture from ‘traditional’ and ‘non-Western’ culture.
Binary representations of the gender-equal liberal West versus the
patriarchal and traditional non-West are now very prevalent, if not hege-
monic. In many contemporary contexts around the world, gender equal-
ity is represented as a Western phenomenon, with allegedly strong
European roots dating back to the European Enlightenment. For
instance, a wide range of political leaders in Europe, particularly among
the populist right, use gender equality arguments to slow or halt non-
Western immigration and to legitimize mononationalist assimilation pol-
icies. In Sweden, for instance, gender equality is widely represented as
‘Swedish values,’ a part of ‘Swedish national culture,’ contrasted against
‘foreign’ and particularly ‘non-Western’ patriarchal cultures.16 The surge
in immigration to Europe in 2015 has been followed by claims that these
immigrant men bring patriarchal cultural baggage that lead them to
grope and rape European women, with adjacent calls to stop immigration
for the sake of protecting Western national cultures and the women that
presumably benefit from these cultures. Farris recently coined the utiliza-
tion of gender equality for nationalist and xenophobic ends ‘femonation-
alism,’ pointing to the collection of right-wing populists, neoliberals and
15 16
See, for example, Towns 2017. Towns et al. 2014.
282 Ann Towns
liberal feminists who use arguments about the protection or emancipa-

tion of women to serve nationalist policies.17
Those speaking on behalf of ‘Western nations’ are of course not alone
in using the status of women to construct and draw cultural boundaries
between the West and non-West. To use one obvious example among
many, some of those claiming to represent ‘Islam’ identify proper
‘Muslim’ gender relations as key to countering ‘Westernization.’ Various
representatives of Islam rely heavily on the veiled bodies of women not
only as a religious practice but also as a symbol of women’s active
acceptance of female obedience to men, to mark out difference from
‘the West.’ Göle has argued, in a study of the Turkish veiling movement
of the past decades, that ‘difference from the West is among the primary
concerns of Islamist movements in contemporary societies.’18 This is of
course but one (if prevalent) set of narratives about the relation between
gender equality, Islam and the West – others highlight gender equality as
a central pillar of Islam and contest ideas that Islam and the West differ
fundamentally on gender issues. Nonetheless, femonationalists and some
Islamist movements in Europe are engaged in a shared dynamic of using
the status of women for cultural boundary-production. Although these
movements may seem not to share much terrain on gender equality, they
do share the notion that the status of women helps define the boundaries
and contents of cultural groups. Shared ideas about the centrality of the
status of women thus help generate cultural differentiation. Indeed, as
Swidler has argued, ‘without a context that makes “which side are you
on?” the critical question, the ideas lose force.’19 Debates and represen-
tations of the status of women provide a context that makes sides appear
clear.
Predominant contemporary discourse about gender and multicultural-
ism, which helps shape public policy, often presents ‘cultures’ as neat
packages, as if distinguished and distinguishable by the status of women.
Allegedly non-Western minority cultures are represented as a threat to
the status of women in liberal societies, but also to liberal, Western
nations as such, as Western nations are presumably held together in part
by gender equality values. I have written elsewhere both about the false
premises of such representations and the challenges they pose for those
striving for gender equality.20 In the remainder of this chapter, I will
instead turn to another analysis that challenges the narrative about a
homogeneous Western culture supportive of gender equality. The analy-
sis shows a second way in which shared ideas about the status of women
17 18 19
Farris 2017. Göle 1996. Swidler 2001, 173.
20
See, for example, Towns 2014.
generates cultural differentiation, though this time differentiating

between liberal and anti-liberal actors within the West. I will draw atten-
tion to the rise and increasingly well-organized transnational formation
of ‘Western’ actors that struggle against gender equality (and often
multiculturalism) in the name of the nation and/or in opposition to
liberal values and institutions. These are actors that promote monona-
tional societies and what they consider to be traditional national values of
male superiority, much like the mononationalists of the first half of the
twentieth century and in some ways in line with the Islamist movements
that these actors generally scorn. The Western anti-gender movements
are not immune to narratives about the egalitarianism of Western
nations, however – in fact, they draw on such narratives frequently to
define and stigmatize ‘immigrants,’ Muslims and minority cultures.
However, they simultaneously organize around and advocate for a return
to gender relations of male superiority.
Although the anti-gender equality movement manifests differently in
different contexts, I want to draw attention to the fact that the movement
is transnational in character and not limited to particular national envir-
onments. The cleavage is now clear enough that it is possible to speak of
cultural differentiation into forces in favour of and opposed to gender
equality. The next section will begin by identifying and describing the
central hubs in the anti-gender movement and the connections between
them, assuming that the pro-gender equality actors are more or less
familiar to the reader. The section ends by showing that some of the
central arguments about male superiority and national culture are made
against liberalism but in favour of ‘Western tradition’ and ‘Western
nations.’ Indeed, because so many actors agree that the status of women
is a trait of liberalism, they use the status of women to differentiate
between liberal and conservative forces and even nations.
Gender and the Generation of Cultural

Difference Across ‘The West’
As discussed in the prior section, representations that link women’s
rights to the West are pervasive. And yet, with the successes of the
women’s rights and SOGI movements accumulating in the first decade
of the 2000s, mobilization in defence of traditional gender roles and
limitations on reproductive rights have mounted across Europe and
North America. This transnational mobilization works on two fronts
simultaneously. On the one hand, it works as a backlash against both
multiculturalism and gender equality within Western nation-states. On
the other, and at the same time, this mobilization targets global
284 Ann Towns
multilateral settings. On both fronts, participants in the movement

invoke both nationalism and ‘Western civilization’ to advocate for a
return to the ‘natural family’ and gender inequality. Indeed, intensifying
during the past decade, particularly since 2012, a multitude of local,
transnational and international initiatives by an odd medley of actors
has emerged across Europe and North America in order to resist gender
and sexual equalities, generally in the name of the nation and Western
cultural tradition and often to oppose liberalism. Some such resistance
takes a grass-roots expression, with large public manifestations. For
instance, the French Manif pour Tous movement has, since 2012, drawn
out and unified millions of people in street demonstrations and other
actions against gay marriage, gay parenthood and the teaching of gender
equality in schools.21 A series of legislative bills has been introduced to
limit gender equality in a range of European countries, many unsuccess-
ful but some being passed into law. Organizations working against repro-
ductive and sexual rights are on the rise in Europe, with 490 such
organizations active in thirty-two European countries in 2013.22 An
avalanche of online and print publications railing against gender equality
has emerged and gained popularity, translated and circulated across
borders. In 2017, US president Trump became the first sitting president
to address the ultra-conservative Value Voters Summit, receiving mul-
tiple standing ovations from a packed room for his vow to protect
Christian values and be an anti-abortion champion for the world.23
Perhaps most dramatically, Russia decriminalized domestic violence in
2017, with the exception of repeat violence or violence causing serious
medical damage to the victim.24 Clearly, while still not generally enjoying
the support of majorities, the anti-equality agenda is a call to arms for
large swathes of Europeans and North Americans. These are not fringe
elements but major movements that are still gaining momentum.
Hubs in a Transnational Movement that Targets

Both Domestic and International Institutions
There are at least four major hubs in the transnational anti-gender
movement. The US Christian right, dominated by evangelicals and other
conservative Protestants, mobilized early for this agenda, starting in the
late 1970s in response to the gains of the women’s rights movement.
A range of US organizations, representing millions of Americans, has
since emerged to focus on maintaining traditional gender roles and the
21 22
Stambolis-Ruhstorfer and Tricou, 2017. As referenced in Korolczuk 2015, 46.
23
Easley and Kamisar 2017. 24
The Economist 2017.
traditional family, interpreted in ways that include staunch opposition to

reproductive rights, gender equality curricula in schools, sex outside of
heterosexual marriage and SOGI rights. Many of them also list the
defence of national sovereignty and opposition to the UN and other
international organizations as core concerns, much like the movement
opposing Agenda 21 that Berrey discusses in Chapter 8.
The conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church, with the Vati-
can at its centre, is clearly another hub in the mobilization against
equality. Kuhar and Paternotte place this part of the church as the central
actor in contemporary anti-gender movements in Europe and Latin
America.25 Much like the US Christian right, the Vatican started
directing its attention to the UN in the early to mid-1990s, particularly
at the UN Cairo Conference on population in 1994.26 There is also
considerable mobilization of conservative Catholics in a number of
national contexts, which has led to grass-roots as well as legislative resist-
ance against initiatives to enhance women’s and SOGI rights.
A constellation of Russian actors constitutes a third important hub. In
Russia, the assault on gender equality and SOGI rights is openly
embraced by the government, the Russian Orthodox Church and even
by parts of academia such as the Russian Academy of Sciences and the
Sociology Faculty at Moscow State University.27 As the church, the state
and the academy are more closely interwoven than in most of Europe, it
is difficult to approach these as entirely distinctive actors. Russian mobil-
ization against gender equality and SOGI rights has intensified in the past
years, both domestically and internationally.
The fourth and final major hub in the transnational anti-gender move-
ment consists of right-wing ethno-nationalist movements and parties,
which have had an upswing in the past decade. When not railing against
immigrants, most radical right populist (RRP) parties share conservative
commitments to traditional gender roles and family values, promoting
the family as a core institution of the nation, a role for women closely tied
to the family and household, opposition to public childcare, opposition
to abortion and opposition to SOGI rights.28 The French National
Front, Austrian Freedom Party, Polish Law and Justice Party, Hungarian
Fidesz and Russian United Russia are some of the more conservative
among RRP parties on gender and sexuality issues.
Importantly, these hubs connect into one another as elements in a
larger transnational resistance to gender equality and liberal order, a
resistance that works on two fronts, domestic and international, in the
25 26
Kuhar and Paternotte 2017. Buss and Herman 2003, 103–104.
27 28
Moss 2017. See, for example, Towns et al. 2014; Akkerman 2015.
286 Ann Towns
name of the nation and the West. The UN has been one important arena
where some of the anti-gender equality actors converge and interact.
Given the UN’s central role in the promulgation of women’s rights, this
is not surprising. EU institutions and the G8 are other international
institutions that have been targeted by these actors to promote the anti-
equality agenda. In addition to institutional activities, anti-gender equal-
ity ideas and repertoires of action move across borders via news, books
and online materials, resulting in the spread or circulation of goals and
strategies. There are also transnational interactions among civil society
actors, sometimes regular, other times more sporadic.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an exhaustive dissec-
tion of how people and ideas meet and circulate, but I will provide
enough illustrations to support the claim. First, and most obviously,
heaps of books, articles, speeches, sermons and other anti-gender mater-
ials are circulating across borders, sometimes translated into several
languages. Pope Francis, an avid traveller whose statements reach mil-
lions of devotees all over the world, regularly denounces ‘gender theory’
as part of a ‘global war’ on marriage and the family. Anti-gender ideas
also travel between churches. For instance, in December 2013, the
Slovak bishop’s pastoral letter on ‘gender ideology’ was translated and
read out in Hungarian Catholic churches.29 Laypeople are also central in
the transnational anti-equality mobilization, which is well illustrated by
German Catholic sociologist Gabriele Kuby’s bestselling The Global
Sexual Revolution, having been translated from its original German into
at least half a dozen European languages. The book and her anti-gender
equality ideas have received very wide coverage, endorsed by Pope
Benedict XVI, Austin Ruse of C-Fam and other prominent Catholic
anti-gender protagonists.
Austin Ruse, in turn, is also a writer for Breitbart News, the primary
US alt-right news source. Ruse uses this platform to write incendiary
pieces against gender, feminism and SOGI rights, calling gender studies
‘fake science,’ decrying the alleged imposition of ‘transgender ideology’
on five-year-olds in school and defending President Trump’s decision to
expel transgender people from military service. In the beginning of 2017,
Breitbart News had tens of millions of unique monthly visitors,30 and it
has recently expanded into Britain (in 2013), Germany and France.
Indeed, many in the European populist right are avid Breitbart readers.
However, it is far from clear who is importing what from whom, as many
analysts consider Breitbart to be importing much of its rightist populism
29 30
Juhász 2015, 31. Nguyen 2017.
from Europe.31 Populist right sites reference and reinforce one another,
often functioning as a transnational echo chamber. Local news about
rapes or sexual assaults committed by immigrants thus grow, are trans-
lated, distorted and circulate transnationally (such as the stories about
Sweden as the rape capital of the world), as do mocking tirades against
feminism and the concept of gender.
The circulation of books and texts also leads to personal interactions,
and even to meetings or regular conventions. A case in point is the
establishment of the World Congress of Families, hosted by the US
International Organization for the Family since 2016. The first World
Congress of Families was held in Prague in 1997, drawing more than 700
participants. Since then, ten additional congresses have been held
around the world, and the conferences have been annual since 2012.
Funding has come from some of the most powerful organizations and
individuals in the US Christian right and among the Russian Orthodox.
Thousands of anti-equality activists have attended from all over the
world. In these gatherings, Christian conservative interest and radical
right interests do not simply align – they actively interact.
Counter-interpellation in Defence of ‘True Western Values’

The various European and North American actors that align against
gender equality do not share an overall agenda. Far from it. But there
are two commonalities that are important to highlight for the purposes of
this chapter. First, much like pro-equality forces, these actors connect
gender equality and women’s rights with liberalism and/or the West. And
second, they all target putatively ‘liberal’ and ‘Western’ ideas, policies
and institutions in their anti-equality activism, with many blaming the
UN, EU or international non-governmental organizations for the liberal
feminist ‘demoralization’ of the nation.32 Indeed, the anti-gender move-
ment is well conceived of as a case of what the editors call counter-
interpellation, of invoking insurgent categories of cultural identity against
the existing cultural diversity regimes. Ideas about gender equality as
liberal/Western provides a shared language through which differentiation
between those in favour of and those opposed to gender equality can take
place, domestically and internationally. The anti-gender equality claims
can thus also be approached as part of a transnationally moving ‘ideos-
cape’ that enables actors in different contexts to translate and make
locally palatable the anti-equality agenda as anti-liberalism.33
31
See, for example, Marcotte 2017; and Mast 2017
32 33
See, for example, Korolczuk 2015, 48. Appadurai 1996.
288 Ann Towns
The US Christian right is emphatically anti-feminist, though few

openly argue that women are worth less than men. Their anti-feminism
has targeted what they contend to be a secular ‘new world order’ of
liberalism, feminism and environmentalism.34 In contrast with the Vati-
can and some populist far-right actors, the US Christian right is not
critical of economic liberalization or markets, however. International
organizations are instead depicted as dangerous because they reconfigure
the nation-state, the ‘natural family’ and traditional sex roles.35
The UN system, and particularly the UN Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Health Organization,
is described as having an aggressive liberal and feminist agenda. In 2016,
Brian Jones of the National Organization for Marriage introduced the
International Organization for the Family (IOF) as a focal point for a
global movement against gender and sexual equalities. Since then, the
IOF has functioned as the parent organization for the World Congress of
Families. According to Jones, the organization was created to reflect the
reality that ‘key family policy battles now occur more frequently at the
transnational level in bodies such as the U.N., the Organization of
American States and the European Union.’36 Its first public project was
a new global manifesto, a Universal Declaration on the Family and
Marriage (or the Cape Town Declaration). Declaration signers pledge
‘to resist the rising cultural imperialism of Western powers whose gov-
ernments seek nothing less than the ideological colonization of the
family.’37
It is no coincidence that the declaration talks about ‘ideological colon-
ization.’ The colonialism frame has been prevalent in the US Christian
right since the early 1990s, with organizations such as Concerned
Women of America arguing that promoting an ‘imperialist’ and ‘West-
ern’ policy of family planning and gender equality through development
assistance is a new form of ‘colonization,’ with the West imposing ‘their
own misguided worldview on developing nations by denigrating mar-
riage and families, and encouraging promiscuous sexual behavior.’38
Gender equality as ideological colonialism is also a phrase and idea used
frequently by the Vatican, and not least by Pope Francis in his critiques
of liberal individuality. In contrast with the US Christian right, the
Vatican expresses strong support for the UN. What is more, since the
mid-1990s, the Vatican has promoted a vision in which the well-being of
34 35
See, for example, Buss and Herman 2003, 20. Buss and Herman 2003, 37.
36
Quoted in Southern Poverty Law Center 2016.
37
International Organization for the Family 2016.
38
As quoted in Buss and Herman 2003, 75.
women demands addressing larger problems of poverty and global

inequality, a vision that includes frequent critiques of global capitalism.
The Vatican strongly resists the idea of men and women as individuals
with rights, however – ‘it is only through the duality of the “masculine”
and the “feminine” that the “human” finds full realization,’ as Pope John
Paul II contended.39
Challenging this duality, or promoting sexual and reproductive rights
and freedoms, is seen as ‘anti-family’ as such a vision doesn’t recognize a
unique role for women within the family. Thus, whereas the US Chris-
tian right and the Vatican differ fundamentally in their view of the value
of international organization and global capitalism, they share a disdain
for turning men and women into individuals with rights, and both frame
women’s individual rights as a liberal and anti-family cultural imperialist
project. In the lead-up to the 1995 UN Conference on Women in
Beijing, the director of the Holy See’s press office asserted that women’s
rights activists imposed ‘a Western product, a socially reductive philoso-
phy, which does not even represent the hopes and needs of the majority
of Western women.’40 The present pope, Francis, has intensified these
claims, portraying ‘gender ideology’ as Western and liberal ‘ideological
colonization’ of the rest of the world, in a range of speeches made around
the world.41
Similar frames are used by many other anti-gender equality actors.
When Polish and Hungarian actors advocate for family values, they do so
expressly to distance Poland and Hungary from ‘liberalism.’ Claims are
furthermore often made that the West is not only undermining the non-
Western world by promoting gender equality, but that it is also destroy-
ing itself from within. Distinctions are increasingly made between the
distorted and decadent liberal West and the dignified and true Western
tradition where the ‘natural family’ is respected. Gender equality as
liberalism is at the centre of such differentiations.
In the past few years, along with the governments of Poland and
Hungary, Russia has come to be represented as a defender of ‘true’
European values. As Moss contends, ‘the anti-gender position is at the
heart of Russia’s self-identification in opposition to the decadent West as
well as the heart of Russia’s geopolitical strategy to unite like-minded
traditionalist forces behind Russia (thereby both gaining international
status as a world leader and destabilizing the EU by supporting right-
wing dissenting factions in Europe).’42 Whether Russia is European is a
question that has been debated in Russia and elsewhere for centuries,
39 40
Quoted in Buss and Herman 2003, 109. Ibid.,115.
41 42
See, for example, Traina 2016. Moss 2017, 195.
290 Ann Towns
demonstrating a fraught and uneasy relationship to the idea of Europe

and the broader category of the West.43 Gender equality and SOGI rights
are one set of contemporary issues through which Russia negotiates its
relation to Europe and the West. Indeed, a number of scholars have
examined the recent centrality of gender equality and sexuality to
Russia’s identity representations and geopolitical ambitions.44 A 2013
speech by Russian president Vladimir Putin to the Valdai Discussion
Club (a Russian think tank on international relations) effectively illus-
trates this point:
Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in
the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how
many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including
the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are
denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious
and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with
same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.
The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are
seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote
paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to
talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called
something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation.
And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am
convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting
in a profound demographic and moral crisis.
What else but the loss of the ability to self-reproduce could act as the greatest
testimony of the moral crisis facing a human society? Today almost all developed
nations are no longer able to reproduce themselves, even with the help of
migration. Without the values embedded in Christianity and other world
religions, without the standards of morality that have taken shape over
millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. We consider it
natural and right to defend these values. One must respect every minority’s
right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be put into question.
At the same time we see attempts to somehow revive a standardised model of a
unipolar world and to blur the institutions of international law and national
sovereignty. Such a unipolar, standardised world does not require sovereign
states; it requires vassals. In a historical sense this amounts to a rejection of
one’s own identity, of the God-given diversity of the world.45
Here, liberal forces and institutions of the West are represented as
imposing a gender equality model that undermines the family, the ability
of nations to reproduce and survive, and thus the very cultural diversity
43
See, for example, Neumann 1996.
44
See, for example, Wilkinson 2014; Stella and Nartova 2015; Stroop 2016; and Moss
2017.
45
Valdai International Discussion Group 2013.
of the world. Russia is in turn held forth as the champion of traditional

families and cultural diversity. Iterations of this theme emerge time and
again in speeches and texts produced by Russian actors. Alexey Komov,
the Russian representative of the World Congress of Families, has stated
multiple times that
as Russians, we want to warn people in the West of the dangers of this new
totalitarianism … There are influential lobbies that want to promote an aggressive
social transformation campaign using LGBT activists as the means. We see it as
the continuation of the same radical revolutionary agenda that cost so many lives
in the Soviet Union, when they destroyed churches. This political correctness is
used and will be further used to oppress religious freedoms and to destroy the
family.46
In a more recent speech on ‘The Family in Europe’ in Utah, Komov
again touted Russia’s leading role in the global ‘pro-family’ and anti-
gender equality movement. Having experienced totalitarianism, he
argued, Russia and ‘Eastern Europe can really help our brothers in the
West’ to resist this ‘new totalitarianism.’47 Importantly, gender equality
is rarely represented as a danger to Russia. Instead, the threat of gender
equality is fully externalized as an indication of the decline of Europe and
the United States under liberalism.48
Catholic and US Christian right actors are voicing similar claims about
Russia and gender equality. Larry Jacobs, vice president of the World
Congress of Families, argues that ‘the Russians might be the Christian
saviors of the world.’49 Kuby, author of the bestselling The Global Sexual
Revolution, similarly contends that ‘Russia is today the only country
where there may be the possibility for church and state to rebuild the
foundations of the family.’50
Not surprisingly, such sentiments are also echoed among the Euro-
pean and US far right. Many populist radical right (PRR) parties and
other far-right actors connect their nationalist pro-birth concerns with an
opposition to feminism and gender equality linked to a broader oppos-
ition to liberal ideas and international institutions. As illustration, Ellen
Kositza, part of the German extremist New Right currents, writes angry
polemics against ‘hyper-feminism,’ which she connects with ‘American
liberalism’ and an emphasis on ‘individual rights and profit-seeking self-
interest.’51 And a number of PRR actors look to Russia for ideas, support
and leadership. Marine Le Pen, president of the French National Front,
46 47 48 49
Levintova 2014. Stroop 2016, 4. Moss 2017, 200. Levintova 2014.
50 51
Kuby 2014a, 1. See, for example, Angelos 2017.
292 Ann Towns
has even called President Putin the defender of ‘the Christian Heritage of
European Civilization.’.52
In sum, there is ample evidence that transnational mobilizing against
gender equality is cutting across the imagined nations of Europe and
North America. Like many pro-equality actors, opponents to gender
equality connect feminism and women’s rights with liberalism and inter-
national institutions, and generally rail against both. Shared ideas that
gender equality is a liberal set of ideas and practices thus helps differen-
tiate between actors that in other narratives are made to appear as
coherent nations. What is more, a range of actors connect women’s rights
with ‘Western culture.’ This idea is more contested among anti-equality
actors, however, as many claim that a return to, for example, the ‘trad-
itional’ patriarchal family, restricted reproduction options and well-
defined ‘sex roles’ are part and parcel of a return to true Western values.
Conclusion
Producing and managing cultural difference is a difficult project fraught
with challenges and contradictions. In contemporary Europe and North
America, narratives tying Western national values to gender equality are
pervasive, used by actors across the political spectrum to differentiate, for
example, ‘Swedes’ or ‘Germans’ as gender equal from non-European
immigrants. In these narratives, ‘Swedes’ and ‘Germans’ appear as uni-
fied national collectives characterized by equality between men and
women, contrasted against non-Europeans with allegedly patriarchal
values. Such narratives form the foundation for initiatives that pit gender
equality against multiculturalism, as if there were a clear choice between
the gender-equal national majority culture and patriarchal immigrant
minority groups.
Taking the widespread mobilization against gender equality seriously
challenges us to interrogate such narratives. Large groups of Europeans
and North Americans are rallying in favour of the ‘traditional family,’
against gender pedagogy and against women’s reproductive health and
integrity, in the name of the nation. Gender equality, which many argue
is a ‘Western’ set of values and practices, clearly creates division and
discord among Europeans and among North Americans. One thus
cannot take at face value claims about coherent gender-equal Western
nations. What nations and cultural minorities are made to be, how the
boundaries are drawn and around what values and behaviours, are fluid
52
Quoted in Polyakova 2014. See also Akkerman 2015.
and contested practices. This is so also when it comes to the status of

women and gender equality. The relation between gender and the con-
temporary international cultural diversity regime is indeed a
complex one.
To make matters more complex, as this chapter has shown, narratives
and people move across borders, making up transnational networks and
circuits for the flow of ideas on gender equality. This makes it difficult to
establish to whom or what ideology ideas and narratives belong. Male
superiority can and has been made to fit quite comfortably with liberal-
ism – there is nothing given about the contemporary ties made between
liberal ideas and institutions and gender equality. Anti-equality actors are
furthermore often framing their claims in human rights language, even as
they are criticizing liberalism. In Russia, in turn, anti-liberal activism is
often fuelled by anti-Western sentiments. And yet Russia ‘recycles anti-
gender discourse from the West and deploys it to promote Russia’s role
as a defender of “true” European values.’53 With so much circulation,
borrowing and adaptation across borders, creating a coherent
cultural diversity regime with clear cultural boundaries seems virtually
impossible.
As this chapter has shown, cultural differences on gender equality do
not align neatly along ethnic, national or civilizational lines. Instead,
support for or opposition to gender equality cuts across presumed
national and civilizational boundaries. This chapter has also shown that
gender is nonetheless central to attempts to narrate nations and cultural
groups, attempts to draw the boundaries necessary for cultural diversity
regimes. It is no overstatement to point out that the relations between
cultural diversity regimes and gender hierarchies are multifaceted and
contradictory. To highlight yet another point made by the editors, my
analysis of gender, liberal order and the generation of cultural difference
provides an important corrective to overly essentialist and bounded
conceptions of culture. In discourses on gender equality, values are often
attributed to specific nations or ‘Western civilization’ as if these were
actually existing and cohesive cultural entities. The transnational flow of
people, ideas, practices and funding that inform such claims, as well as
their contested and changing nature, call static and bounded accounts of
culture into question.
53
Moss 2017: 196. See also Korolczuk 2015, 49; and Levintova 2014.
14 Governing Culture ‘Credibly’
Contestation in the World Heritage Regime
Elif Kalaycioglu
UNESCO’s world heritage regime was founded in 1972 with the adage
that ‘parts of the cultural and natural heritage [of the world] are of
outstanding interest and therefore need to be preserved as part of the
world heritage of mankind as a whole.’1 The regime not only aimed to
preserve these sites through international cooperation, but it has also
been a mechanism for the identification of world heritage sites and their
curation through the World Heritage List to interpellate a common
humanity and foster identification with this humanity and its cultural
history. Such identification, it was hoped, would contribute to peaceful
global relations. The world heritage regime, then, is a diversity regime
that is intricately connected to world order making. It is a diversity
regime because it focuses on particular parts of the world’s cultural
diversity to craft a narrative of shared and appropriate identification with
these sites. These identifications, claimed as universal, are intended to
turn states – and the international community more broadly – away from
nationalist narratives of culture and towards a global one. More specific-
ally, the regime is part of the liberal international order’s efforts at world
making in a few key ways. Ideationally, this is the belief in the govern-
ability of culture as apolitical and universal, through the identification of
mutual interests. Institutionally, this is manifested in the reliance on an
international organization and scientific-technical expertise. Thus, it is
the governance of culture as the impartial pursuit of a social good.
Since its establishment in 1972, neither the regime nor the world order
have remained unchanged. Significantly, in the aftermath of the Cold
War, culture has become an axis of world order that has grown in
salience, as firmly attached to inclusion and recognition demands from
this order, and fractured between alternative conceptions of cultural
value.2 This has resulted in challenges to the regime’s curation of
1
See UNESCO 1972.
2
Askew 2010, 24; Buzan and Lawson 2015, 273–304; Meskell and Brumann 2015, 23;
O’Hagan 2017; Kim 2017.
294
Contestation in the World Heritage Regime 295
diversity, which I trace through the competing conceptions of credibility

at work. The regime’s original set-up grounded credibility in scientific-
technical evaluations, based on and promoting ‘universal’ – and ‘apolit-
ical’ – cultural value and undergirded by a conception of culture that was
universalizable through expert knowledge and manifested in monumen-
tal artefacts. A partial paradigm shift in 1994 linked the regime’s cred-
ibility additionally to representativity. Despite attempts to contain this
paradigm shift within the (changing) limits of expert knowledge, the
political push for representation, as inclusion and recognition, has
demanded representativity on the basis of a conception of culture that
is plural in its sources of value and in its concrete manifestations. The
regime’s continued implementation through these competing concep-
tions of credibility, and the challenges posed by a pluralizing concept of
culture to a centralized governance of culture through a purported uni-
versal, come into stark relief in increased opposition to international
experts and expertise as the authoritative arbiters of cultural value. What
is at stake in this increased resistance is the broader question of how
cultural diversity might be ‘credibly governed’ in the current global
political context.
This chapter aims to make three contributions to the edited volume.
First, the case of the world heritage regime – and that of UNESCO
(the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) more
broadly – points to the ambitions of the post–World War II order that
exceeded collective security, a global free market and trade system or a
procedural container for the domestic flourishing of liberal democra-
cies. Rather, it brings to view the order-building efforts towards the
recuperation of faith in humanity, centred on a Western-civilizational
narrative, in the aftermath of two world wars. Importantly, such efforts
were intricately connected to questions of how peaceful relations within
the world order could be achieved through the creation not only of
common interests, but also of shared identifications. Second, this chap-
ter contends that while cultural diversity is a perennial condition of the
world, on which projects of international order are hoisted, what con-
stitutes a legitimate governance of this diversity is a historico-political
question. While the purported universal values of the world heritage
regime were always limited, the particular shape that demands for the
expansion or dispensation of such value take is inseparable from the
global political stakes of cultural recognition and inclusion. Third, and
related, the contemporary global politics of culture, which include
demands for the recognition of a plurality of cultural values and the
acknowledgement of histories of cultural exclusion, raise fundamental
questions for the credible curation of cultural diversity. These questions
296 Elif Kalaycioglu
point to the need to rethink the sources of knowledge, actors and

mechanisms of such curation.
This chapter proceeds as follows: first, I posit world heritage as a
diversity regime, connecting it to world order making. Second, I turn
to the role of experts within this regime, and more broadly in liberal
global governance, as translators of the local into the universal/global.
Third, I analyse the original set-up of the world heritage regime through
its conception of culture, the role of experts and the emergent curation of
diversity. Fourth, I trace the emergence of the regime’s paradigm shift
through its curatorial difficulties and within the context of broader polit-
ical shifts. Fifth, I analyse the ways in which current demands for recog-
nition within the regime exceed the regime’s attempts to hold on to both
conceptions of credibility. I conclude with implications for the world
heritage regime, for the curation of diversity in the contemporary global
political context and for further research.
World Heritage as a Diversity Regime

Key to the conceptual apparatus of this volume are ‘diversity regimes,’
which are multiscalar and coherent bundles of institutional practices for
the organization of cultural diversity that selectively curate forms of
cultural identification, tether these to legitimate forms of authority and
in doing so create hierarchies of cultural identification and counter-
mobilizations. These regimes are key to the international order, in so
far as socio-cultural diversity is the existential condition on which orders
are built. This diversity needs to be managed in order-sustaining ways, by
fostering identification with the international order and marginalizing
forms of identification that might present a challenge to the order’s
maintenance. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the lack of
consensus on how the post–World War II liberal international order has
curated diversity. While Ikenberry argues that liberal internationalism
has acted as a loosely rule-based, procedural container to protect liberal
democracies, Swidler points to the international (institutional) cultures
that exist within this order, with universal moral purposes that contradict
sovereignty as the order’s unit of authority.3 I agree with Swidler that the
international system is substantively thicker than a procedural container,
but I contend that these moral purposes do not simply work in contra-
distinction to the sovereignty-based international order. Rather, the
myriad international organizations, regimes and transnational civil
3
See also Towns in this volume, Chapter 13.
society organizations work to mould actors and foster desired behaviour

in accordance with social goals that are ideationally congruent with or
integral to the liberal international order. Put differently, while such
universal moral purposes might challenge sovereignty as non-
intervention, they can work towards the promotion of liberal sovereigns,
as the proper form of authority.
The progenitor of the world heritage regime was the League of
Nations’ International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC).4
This interwar intellectual cooperation aimed to promote transnational
understanding in the face of rising nationalist sentiments. In post-war
Europe, ‘the valorizing of collective cultural achievements’ became an
important part of rebuilding efforts.5 UNESCO was founded in 1945,
with the aim to foster a shared humanity, by emphasizing its accomplish-
ments over its divisive histories,6 and generating cooperation around
these accomplishments, including culture. UNESCO-led conversations
on an international fund for protecting cultural heritage of ‘world inter-
est’ began as early as 1948; however, the proposals were found unrealistic
in the post-war economic climate.7 The concrete catalyst for the regime’s
establishment came in the form of the Nubian campaign, which began in
the early 1960s with requests from Egypt and Sudan to prevent the
inundation of the Nubian temples by a new dam. The success of the
campaign, which included the participation of Soviet and American
research teams, alongside aligned and non-aligned nations,8 seemed to
point to cultural cooperation as an area that could transcend the fractures
of the world political moment. The renewed discussions culminated in
the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and
Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention), signed in 1972.
The resulting regime aimed at the physical conservation of the world’s
most valuable cultural and natural heritage sites and also, importantly, in
the case of cultural heritage, and to foster international identification and
cooperation around these sites through a universal aesthetics and pro-
gressive civilizational history. The conventions of universal aesthetics and
progressive civilizational history were based on and reproduced a con-
ception of culture as discrete and internally homogenous, for which the
concrete manifestations were universally recognizable grand monuments
of prominent past civilizations. Put differently, to promote such identifi-
cation, the regime relied on a conception of culture that was amenable to
universalization and to scientific-technical adjudication. The narrative of
humanity and its cultural history that emerged from these sites, in turn,
4
Titchen unpublished thesis, 12–34; Cameron and Rössler 2016, 1–2.
5 6 7 8
Meskell 2018, 11. Betts 2015. Titchen, 40–52. Meskell 2018, 28–59.
was one of grand accomplishments, rather than the divided and divisive
cultural histories of the same humanity. The world heritage regime, then,
is a diversity regime in its aim to govern the world’s cultural diversity by
fostering specific narratives around a selection of sites to curate proper
universal identifications. The identification with these sites, it was hoped,
would contribute to the maintenance of the world order by fostering
world peace through prioritizing this shared humanity over destructive
nationalist identifications, which had resulted in the two world wars and
which had utilized culture parochially.
How does the world heritage regime’s curation of diversity fit within
the broader projects of post–World War II world order making? The
regime shares key ideational and institutional characteristics with liberal
international order-making projects that unfold through international
institutions and global governance regimes. The first is its belief in the
ability of cooperation to foster peaceful relations, by pointing away from
political conflicts and towards a possible harmony of interests – or
‘mutual gains.’ Second, and related, is the articulation of the regime’s
social purpose in universal and universalizing terms based on and pro-
moting this harmony of interests. This is buttressed by the regime’s
conventions of value, such as a civilizational human history, that operate
within similar liberal notions of the possibility of universal progress and
achievement. Third, like many regimes and institutions of liberal global
governance, the heritage regime relies on international civil servants and
experts as the grounds of its scientific-technical and apolitical pursuit of
this social good.9 Lastly, states are a key part of the regime as both the
objects and subjects of governance. Put differently, while states’ sover-
eign authority over these sites was recognized, their inclusion into the
regime entails the moulding of these actors towards proper practices of
heritage valuation and protection.
If the regime’s founding is demonstrative of the curation of cultural
diversity as part of order making, at a world political moment when the
governance of culture as universal found support in the relevant epi-
stemic communities and was not objected to by the political actors, its
subsequent paradigm shift and continued challenges to expertise point to
how changes in the world order strain against the previously established
ideational and procedural mechanisms of cultural governance, not least
by putting forth demands for cultural recognition and inclusion that
extend beyond the conventions of relevant international expert know-
ledge. I trace this change through the adoption of the Global Strategy for
9
Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 162; Zürn 2018, 63.
a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List (the

Global Strategy) in 1994. One interpretation of this paradigm shift has
been to trace it to the epistemic communities, namely the cosmopolitan
European and American experts’ desire for inclusion.10 However, what is
striking is that while a plurality of approaches to cultural heritage has
always existed in different parts of the world,11 it is only more recently,
and including in the aftermath of this paradigm shift, that this plurality of
approaches to culture and its proper valuation have made inclusion and
recognition demands from the regime. These contestations are demon-
strative of the changing world order in which the stakes of cultural
recognition are higher and where such recognition is demanded in par-
ticular rather than universal terms. Put differently, while cultural recog-
nition is demanded from and at the stage of the world order, it is not
necessarily demanded in its terms. The continued challenges to expert
authority within the regime thus demonstrate how the changing stakes of
cultural diversity raise foundational questions of its adjudication and
governance that push beyond the limits of this paradigm shift.
Experts as Translators of Liberal

Governance and Curators of Diversity
If world heritage acts as a diversity regime that fosters particular forms
of cultural identification, experts are trusted with a key curation role in
evaluating which sites fulfil the requirements of world heritage status
and on what basis. As the next section explores in more detail, one of
the key ways in which experts curate diversity within the world heritage
regime is through the evaluation of site nominations submitted by
States Parties. These evaluations concern both the site itself and the
framing of its value, which need to manifest universal and not local,
national or regional value. In addition, experts produce benchmarks,
guidelines and surveys that operationalize the regime’s values. The
experts, then, are key to how the world heritage regime produces
credibility and produces itself as credible through the impartial pursuit
of its social goals, grounded in proper scientific-technical procedures
and sources of knowledge.
In what follows, I conceptualize the main task of experts in the cur-
ation of diversity as one of translation. While the extant literature has not
traditionally defined experts as ‘translators,’ recent work by Bentley Allan
10 11
Brumann 2014. Meskell 2018.
explores the translation role played by experts in constituting global

governance objects as portable and global, based on their fluency in
abstract and/or scientific languages.12 Consequently, the emergent gov-
ernance objects are ‘abstract and formal enough to be understood all over
the world, flexible enough to be meaningful in a variety of cultural
contexts and groups.’13 Allan’s focus is on the translation work pertinent
to the genesis of a governance object. However, once a governance
regime is established, its implementation requires further acts of transla-
tion between the multitude of local contexts and the global/universal.
Thus, experts translate their fields of knowledge into codes and norms,
and translate a variety of local contexts into these codes to adjudicate
their standing. These acts of translation result in the evaluation and
ranking of a plurality of local contexts and meanings in terms of ‘univer-
sal’ codes of behaviour, norms of conduct and ultimately axes of inclu-
sion. In the case of world heritage, the main task of translation concerns
whether sites, constructed in a particular time, for a particular population
and demonstrative of a certain set of values, have universal value for
humanity across time and space.
While I conceive of the role of experts as undertaking translations of
the local into the universal, which are increasingly resisted as inadequate,
exclusionary or biased, this volume offers interpellation as a key concept
that points to the ways in which diversity regimes not only organize
existing forms of cultural difference but also bring into being new differ-
ences and identifications. This alerts us to the productive power of
diversity regimes at work.14 In fact, power is key in Althusser’s famous
example of interpellation, where an individual is hailed by the police.
When the police call out, ‘Hey, you there!’ and we respond to it by
turning around, we are interpellated as subjects within a broader ideo-
logical structure. The world heritage regime interpellates the inter-
national community as part of a shared humanity and States Parties as
responsible actors if they undertake their duties in heritage conservation.
While the translation work of experts is key to this interpellation, it also
marshals other actors and the institutional-bureaucratic apparatus of the
regime. Thus, for the role of the experts, I continue to use the term
‘translation,’ while recognizing its role as part of this interpellative
process.
12
This scholarship rather focuses on epistemic communities (Haas 1992; Adler and Haas
1992), the relation between politics and expertise (Bueger 2014, 45–48), the politics of
expertise (Sending 2015; Allan 2017a, 2017b) and the strategic uses of expert knowledge
(Boswell 2009, 2017; Littoz-Monnet 2017a, 2017b, 2017c).
13 14
Allan 2017b, 137. Barnett and Duvall 2005, 20–22.
Credibility as Scientific Translation of Diversity

The world heritage regime came into being in 1972. It was, and remains,
an explicit attempt at governing culture to foster international cooper-
ation and a common humanity around shared heritage. The first section
has traced the regime’s emergence to a longer-standing interest in cul-
tural cooperation to foster peaceful relations, linked its ideational and
institutional grounding in the scientific-technical pursuit of a universal
social good to shared contours of liberal order-making projects, and
posited that this universal-singular approach to cultural value and its
governance took hold at a time when it found epistemic support and
was not met by political resistance. This section turns to the regime’s
founding understanding of culture, its scope for diversity and its credible
governance as grounded in the scientific-technical translations of the
local into the universal by experts.
The series of expert meetings and UNESCO General Assemblies
between 1968 and 1971 that led to a draft convention grappled with
the key question: should there be an international authority for the
safeguarding of cultural heritage? The question was answered affirma-
tively on a few grounds. First, as evidenced by existing international
mechanisms for cultural heritage protection, the international interest
in the Nubian campaign and the regional protection efforts undertaken
in Europe and by the Organization of American States (OAS), there was
a growing awareness among the nations of the world that cultural heri-
tage is of common interest to humanity, along with a willingness to
cooperate around it.15 Second, these exercises in cooperation demon-
strated that heritage protection might be beyond the capacities of indi-
vidual states and require international efforts, which could be effectively
facilitated by an international authority.16 Third, contemporary dangers,
specifically urbanization and large-scale development projects, pointed
to the need to protect culture – indispensable for the full flourishing of
mankind – individually and collectively.17 Fourth and last, the improved
technical-scientific knowledge and capabilities would allow for more
extensive conservation measures.18
Affirming that there should be an international authority, however,
does not answer the question of how this authority is to govern culture,
nor does it define the substance of the culture to be governed. If the
aforementioned third and fourth responses begin to explore these ques-
tions, they also raise a core tension: how can culture, as deeply formative
15 16
UNESCO 1968, 9; UNESCO 1969, 10–11. UNESCO 1969, 15.
17 18
UNESCO 1968, 10–11; UNESCO 1969, 8. UNESCO 1968, 1 and 12.
of humans, be amenable to scientific-technical governance? The

response lay at the intersection of a limited role foreseen for the inter-
national authority, a particular understanding of culture and trust in
experts’ capacity to adjudicate cultural value. The conception of culture
at work in these preparatory meetings focuses on monumentality as
central to recognized and recognizable cultural value. These monumen-
tal structures are identified through civilizational-historical epochs and
art historical typologies. The 1968 meeting mentions ‘unique archaeo-
logical remains of past civilizations, the best specimens of a country’s
architecture, grandiose groups that represent a decisive moment or
period in art or style’ as items of universal importance.19 The 1969 report
reiterates this definition. Despite this limited definition, the experts at the
1968 meeting recognized the difficulty of defining what sites constitute
such ‘brilliant expression,’20 and noted that drawing up a permanent list
might create tensions between the international authority and national
ones. They proposed that instead of keeping a permanent register, the
international authority should extend conservation aid to sites, based on
applications by states and evaluated on a case-by-case basis by an advis-
ory committee of six to eight highly experienced experts.21 This reso-
lution was reproduced at the 1969 meeting, with the added emphasis that
the use of international funds would be based on objective criteria
applied by experts to adjudicate the site’s value, and on the urgency of
the situation.22
This resolution came to an end with the entry of the United States into
the frame. A full overview of this involvement, which grows out of a
parallel history of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, is
beyond the scope of this chapter.23 Significantly, however, worries about
these parallel efforts prompted UNESCO officials to undertake diplo-
matic negotiations so that an emergent convention on cultural and
natural heritage would take into account its work to date and be placed
under UNESCO’s auspices.24 Consequently, the American delegation
presented its draft convention to the 1971 UNESCO General Assembly.
Modelled after the US National Register of Historic Places, this draft
proposed a permanent list of world cultural and natural heritage sites to
be compiled by international experts.25
The world heritage regime that emerged from these negotiations is a
compromise between the two draft conventions. It establishes a perman-
ent list of world heritage sites. However, the list is not compiled by
19 20 21
UNESCO 1968, 19. Ibid. UNESCO 1968, 20.
22 23
UNESCO 1969, 15, 17, 18. Titchen, 68–70; Cameron and Rössler 2016, 17–26.
24 25
Cameron and Rössler 2016, 20–24. Titchen, 69.
experts. Rather, the sites are nominated by States Parties on whose

territory they are located. These nominations are evaluated by inter-
national experts of the three designated Advisory Bodies. The Advisory
Body tasked with evaluating cultural heritage site nominations is the
International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).26 In this
set-up, the expert evaluation no longer determines whether a site will
receive international aid, but rather if it constitutes a part of humanity’s
common heritage. For a site to be inscribed on the World Heritage List,
the expert evaluation needs to be approved by the rotating intergovern-
mental committee, comprising twenty-one dues-paying States Parties
delegations, including ambassadors and experts.
What about the conception of culture at work? With the adoption of
the Convention, ‘outstanding universal value’ (OUV) became the
regime’s founding fiction,27 which determines whether a site constitutes
common human heritage. It was operationalized through six criteria:
i) representing a unique artistic or aesthetic achievement, a masterpiece of
the creative genius, ii) having exerted considerable influence, over a span of time
or within a cultural area of the world, on subsequent developments in
architecture, monumental sculpture, garden and landscape design, related
arts, or human settlements, iii) be unique, extremely rare, or of great antiquity,
iv) be among the most characteristic examples of a type of structure,
representing an important cultural, social, artistic, scientific, technological or
industrial development, v) be a characteristic example of a significant,
traditional style of architecture, method of construction, or human
settlement, vi) be most importantly associated with ideas or beliefs, with events
or with persons, of outstanding historical importance or significance. [emphases
mine]28
These criteria present a conception of culture that can be parsed into
discrete civilizations and historical periods. Cultural artefacts are broken
down to their component parts, such as types of structures and construc-
tion methods, as reflective of particular styles and periods. It is these
structures that would be judged through the expert knowledge produced
in the disciplines of archaeology, art history and architecture. The con-
cept of influence is congruent with this understanding. Rather than a
multidirectional interaction productive of heterogeneous or hybrid
26
The evaluations are coordinated by the ICOMOS international secretariat and
undertaken by the ICOMOS world heritage panel.
27
OUV was left undefined until 2005 and its definition remains vague: ‘Outstanding
universal value means cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to
transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future
generations of all humanity,’ UNESCO 2005c, 24.
28
UNESCO 1977, 3. Shortly after, the use of criterion vi was restricted to be in
conjunction with other criteria, with exceptions, see UNESCO 1980, 6.
cultures, it is a unidirectional influence of a dominant culture that is

adopted by others and materially manifested. The evaluation entrusted
to experts, therefore, requires the translation of these structures into the
typologies and periods of the universal languages of knowledge, where
OUV is located, based on their competence in these fields. Thus, the
attempt to govern culture rests on and reproduces a conception of
culture as governable.
What can cultural diversity mean in this curation? Meskell narrates the
regime’s reliance on cultural value as universal and universalizable to
interpellate a singular humanity through its cultural history as a process
where ‘the deep past [is] appropriated from distant shores to serve the
construction of a common humanity rather than a world of difference.’29
The narrative arc of this cultural history passes through the emergence of
civilization in the Middle East, the ancient civilizations and the empires
that left their mark on ‘world history.’ The early years of the World
Heritage List are demonstrative of the world that fits into and is pro-
duced by this curation. In addition to the parks and palaces of Versailles
(France, 1979) and the historic centre of Florence (Italy, 1982), early
inscriptions include the amphitheatre of El Jem and Carthage in Tunisia
(1979), Abu Mena, Thebes and the Nubian monuments from Abu
Simbel to Philae in Egypt (1979) and the Phoenician cities of Baalbek
and Byblos in Lebanon (1984).30 The interpellation of this humanity,
therefore, relies on and reproduces a limited conception of cultural
diversity in terms of its manifestations and sources of value. It allows
for geographical diversity in so far as the sites fit within a monumental arc
of civilizations that had reached the world stage, with its centre in the
West, often through imperial connections. In technical-practical terms, it
entails the diversity that fit within the realm of the categories of artistic
styles and historical epochs as the axes of evaluation operating in the
fields of expert knowledge.
This curation was posited as credible through its grounding in expert
evaluations, acting as translations. The process of translation begins with
the submission of a nomination by the State Party, which includes a
justification for the site’s universal value. Experts evaluate the dossier to
make one of three possible decisions. If the site does not possess OUV,
the experts recommend non-inscription. If the site has potential OUV,
which is not yet demonstrated in the nomination, the State Party is asked
to revise its submission. And if the dossier demonstrates the site’s OUV,
the site is recommended for inscription. The inscription evaluations offer
29 30
Meskell 2018, 24. See UNESCO 2018a.
a language for why the site fulfils the OUV criteria, adopted as part of the
site’s statement of outstanding universal value. The translation is suc-
cessfully completed and the site is inserted into a universal language of
value. Together, the inscribed sites curate a shared cultural heritage.
This is a translation with consequences. Experts evaluate whether a
site located in a particular area of the world, constructed with a particular
group of people in mind and possibly still perceived as belonging to
them, can be translated to and recognized in the terms of a universal
value, rooted in conventions of expert knowledge and analysis. Positive
evaluations stamp sites as universally, objectively and apolitically valu-
able. For States Parties whose properties are included, recognition is
extended as contributors to a common heritage in exchange for the
renarration of the(ir) site’s value as universal. Unless the sources of the
two values are deeply contradictory, it enables a universally recognized
celebration of a national-civilizational genius. In the cases of non-
inscription, while the nominating State Party is still interpellated within
the shared humanity, in so far as existing world heritage sites already
constitute a universal inheritance, they are not included as contributors
to this heritage. A gap opens up between their particular culture or
cultural history and the stage of international recognition.31 This gap
can be bridged through insistence on recognition within the terms and
sources of universal value, or through counter-interpellations, such as
sources of cultural value beyond the realm of expert knowledge. The path
that political actors might choose in bridging this gap, in turn, is insepar-
able from the broader political dynamics of cultural inclusion.
As a first cut, then, the global political stakes of inclusion in the regime
are international acknowledgement, on the world stage, as having con-
tributed to a repertoire of humanity’s most valuable and valued cultural
heritage. Exclusion, conversely, removes states from this map, in the past
and the present. These stakes are especially relevant to the regime’s early
implementation, with countries in the Middle East, North Africa and
Latin America showing a willingness to be represented through OUV
and on the world stage of cultural heritage that it curates. However, the
political stakes of inclusion shift with the role of culture in world politics
becoming fractured and salient, as manifested in the recent nominations
of sites that foreground local sources of cultural value, such as indigen-
ous knowledge, and others, such as the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site or
the pending nominations of African liberation heritage sites, that put
31
The reasoning for non-inscriptions from 1984 points to this gap. They note that despite
their great importance for national heritage, the sites do not ‘fulfill the criteria of
“outstanding universal value”.’ See UNESCO 1984.
forth for recognition painful histories of civilizational-cultural hierarch-

ies. These counter-interpellations are demands for being recognized
otherwise, as diverse equals in a world cultural order and for histories
when such equality was denied. Thus, as the curation of culture through
the world heritage regime provides a stage for demands for cultural
inclusion in the international order, the stakes of this inclusion – and
emergent recognition demands – shift with broader global political
dynamics.32
Credibility as Inclusion: Towards a

Representative Universal?
The implementation of the regime brought with it curatorial difficulties,
based on the varied national interpretations of universality, integrity and
authenticity and exacerbated by the increasing rate of nominations.
Overwhelmed with the number of nominations and lacking a compara-
tive context of evaluation, the committee tasked ICOMOS with the
preparation of a Global Study in 1987. Herb Stovel, Secretary General
of ICOMOS from 1990–1993, defines the Global Study as an ‘effort to
find a comprehensive matrix within which you could plant all civiliza-
tions and all forms of expressions of those civilizations.’33 While Stovel
remarks critically that all one needs, then, is a matrix big enough to fit all
potential sites, the attempts, between 1987 and 1993, to come up with
the axes of the Global Study attest rather to the impossibility of a single
matrix. The analysis of already inscribed sites, carried out as part of the
Global Study, could speedily produce three lists of sites for Greco-
Hellene, Roman and Byzantine civilizations and correlated cultures,
categorized by the type of site, period and location,34 demonstrative of
the contemporary emphases of the list. However, the potential axes of a
comprehensive matrix remained torn between typological, historical and
cultural approaches.35 Cameron and Rössler interpret the failure of the
Global Study as demonstrating, in hindsight, the ‘futility of imposing
rigid frameworks on cultural phenomena at a global level.’36 Strikingly,
however, futile as it may seem in hindsight, the effort to curate cultural
32
There are, of course, other state interests associated with participation in the regime,
such as the generation of tourism revenues. However, such interests, assumed to be
constant, do not account for the changing contours of inclusion and recognition
demands.
33 34
Cameron and Rössler 2016, 79. UNESCO 1990, 20.
35
See, UNESCO 1988b; UNESCO 1989a; UNESCO 1989b; UNESCO 1990; UNESCO
1991a; UNESCO 1991b; UNESCO 1992a; UNESCO 1992b.
36
Cameron and Rössler 2016, 79.
diversity through a singular and universal conception of culture and

towards a shared cultural history of humanity produces the perceived
need for something like the Global Study.
Importantly, while the demand for the Global Study was made by
committee members and taken up by ICOMOS, during the subsequent
discussions both ICOMOS and committee members remarked that one
should not impose rigid categories and limited understandings of culture
at a time when the global understanding of heritage was changing.37 Yet,
this changing global understanding of heritage not only challenged the
regime’s founding conditions, where its universal value was supported by
the epistemic fields and not objected to by the political actors, but the
challenge was taken up differently by the experts and political actors. My
analysis suggests, through continued challenges to expertise, that while
experts guided the resulting paradigm shift through and towards changes
in scientific-expert conceptions of culture, the political demands for
inclusion and representation through a plural conception of culture
exceed these epistemic changes.
The adoption, in 1994, of the Global Strategy for a Representative,38
Balanced and Credible World Heritage List, which marked a departure
from the Global Study, is demonstrative of these broader shifts. The
Global Strategy is grounded on an ICOMOS evaluation of the conven-
tion’s implementation between 1987 and 1993, which diagnosed an
over-representation of elitist architecture, historic periods, sites related
to Christianity and European sites on the World Heritage List.39 The list
did not accurately represent humanity’s cultural diversity. To amend this
imbalance, the Global Strategy made a twofold proposal: a change in the
undergirding concept of culture to take into account human and cultural
coexistence, interactions, spirituality and creative expressions; and the
building of an operational methodology around this expanded under-
standing of culture. This dual move opened up the definition of culture
as dynamic, heterogeneous and shaped through interactions, while
reasserting the necessity to render this broadened concept of culture
translatable and governable through a centralized scientific method of
evaluation. Significantly, the Global Strategy linked the credibility of the
regime, previously hinged on its scientific-technical bases, also to its
ability to represent existing cultural diversity.
37
UNESCO 1989b, 10; UNESCO 1991b, 17.
38
Representativity refers to types of properties and regions of world. The two under-
representations have been understood as linked, as other regions of the world were
understood to be home to non-monumental forms of heritage. UNESCO 2005c,
32–33; UNESCO 2010, 702.
39
For the Global Strategy, see UNESCO 2018b.
The Global Strategy produced a series of meetings that further

cemented the links between the representativity and credibility of the
convention, while exploring the implications of a broader concept of
culture. The June 1994 expert meeting noted that the scientific commu-
nity, like the fields of archaeology, anthropology and art history, had
progressed in its understanding of culture since the convention’s adop-
tion. The experts at the meeting acknowledged the need to move from a
rigid historical periodization and architectural classification to an anthro-
pological conception of culture to reflect existing cultural diversity.40
While the conception of culture at work was broadened, embedding this
concept within fields of scientific knowledge reasserted expert control
over it, supplemented by an emphasis on the need to develop objective
criteria to ensure that only the truly worthwhile properties make it onto
the list.41 To continue to be governable, the new conception of culture
needed to be rendered amenable to valuation through such criteria to
emerge from a series of thematic studies to be prepared by ICOMOS,
drawing upon its network of experts – the international scientific com-
munity – and in conversation with regional experts.
The attempts to reconcile this broader concept of culture, towards a
representative list with centralized scientific governance, is evident in the
meeting on African Cultural Heritage and the World Heritage Conven-
tion held in Zimbabwe in 1995, within the scope of the Global Strategy.
In his opening speech, a prominent expert affiliated with ICOMOS
asserted that the list was at risk of ‘losing all universal representativeness
and thus all credibility.’42 There was continued epistemic support for the
move towards an anthropological concept of culture. The meeting was
divided into five thematic working groups. Each theme was to be intro-
duced by ‘European colleagues’ affiliated with ICOMOS, who would
situate the thematic area within the Global Strategy, and map the con-
tours of eligibility for the list.43 The regional experts, as ‘the best author-
ity on the sites,’ were invited to enrich the discussions with examples and
to use the frames provided to think about eligible sites in their region.44
Thus, while international experts continued to be aligned with the
sources and evaluation of universal cultural value, others were expected
to take a second look at their culture, within this clarified language, to see
what might fit. Returning to the gap described earlier as potentially
40
For the meeting report, see UNESCO 1994.
41
‘This new approach would naturally require … the development of a methodology that
would make it possible to identify a battery of objective criteria and operational
procedures,’ UNESCO 1994, section II.
42 43 44
UNESCO 1995, 16. Ibid., 9. Ibid.
opening between the particular and the universal, this meeting aimed to
bridge it by presenting re-bound, resubstantiated and clarified terms of
the universal into which the particular might fit better. While this re-
bounding drew upon an expanded conception of culture, the procedures,
sources of authority and the relation between the particular and the
universal at work continued to rely on former assumptions of credible
expert translations, constituting the limits of representation. The gap
itself, constitutive of and constituted by the translation process, remained
unchallenged. Put differently, this is a conception of representativity that
continues to work in and through the realm of scientific-technical
credibility.
Informed by these series of meetings, the OUV criteria were revised in
1996 to accommodate a more capacious definition of culture. Criterion i
was broadened beyond artistic or aesthetic achievements to ‘represent
[ation of] a masterpiece of human creative genius’; demonstrative of a
more dynamic and co-constitutive understanding of culture, criterion ii
replaced ‘influence’ with ‘interchange’; and criterion iii was expanded to
include living cultures and civilizations alongside disappeared ones. Cri-
terion v had been revised in 1994 to include traditional land use, in an
attempt to connect natural and cultural heritage to correspond to the
nature-culture continuum relevant to multiple (non-European) cultures.
These changes expanded the concept of culture at work in significant
ways, without giving up on the possibility of its universal value being
adjudicated by international experts.
The 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity, integrated into the
regime’s implementing guidelines only in 2005, presented a stronger
challenge to the regime’s original concept of culture and its centralized
scientific governance. If the Global Study was an effort guided by the
international experts’ concerns for inclusion,45 within the bounds of
scientific knowledge and procedures, the Nara Document brought
within the regime’s remit alternative sources of cultural value and prac-
tices of preservation that have always existed,46 such as Japanese
approaches to conservation that involve periodic rebuilding, in contrast
to the European tradition, which emphasizes minimal material interven-
tion. The Nara Document asserted that heritage values have plural
sources, including spirit and feeling, and that these information sources
need to be understood through their local context, constitutive of their
value and their credibility. Positing that the local context, however it may
be bounded, is constitutive of cultural value and integral to its proper
45 46
Brumann 2014. Meskell 2018.
interpretation presents a fundamental challenge to expert practices of

translating particularity into universality,47 which cannot be overcome by
the insertion of more local sites into the universal language. Instead, it
begins to pose the gap of translation as the problem itself, and proposes a
valuation without translation, or a minimal and multivocal translation.
Where do these changes leave world heritage as a diversity regime and
in what relation to the world order? In her farewell speech to the World
Heritage Bureau, Lourdes Arizpe, the former director of UNESCO’s
Culture Sector remarked: ‘Culture is no longer conceptualized as a set of
norms, symbols and customs that people inside its boundaries unani-
mously agree to. Without going into the more complex questions of
representation and translation of cultural items, at present cultures
are being discussed as a site of contestation.’48 Arizpe may have chosen
not to go into questions of representation and translation, but these
questions take centre stage in an international valuation mechanism.
While the Global Study included representativity as part of the regime’s
credibility, it did so through a conception of culture that was, albeit
broader, still universalizable through particular conventions of expert
translation. In a world political time when culture is salient and divided,
it is the conception of culture in the Nara Document – which is not
only broader in its manifestations but also plural in its sources of value
and attendant interpretive practices – that accompanies inclusion
and recognition demands put forth within the regime. This is an under-
standing of representativity that pushes against translational practices of
evaluation.49
What mechanisms and actors of cultural governance might curate, or
rather wrangle into, a global governance regime this conception of cul-
ture, at a time when cultural diversity has firmly placed itself onto the
global political stage? Within the scope of this chapter, this is also the
question of whether credibility as representativity and as universality can
coexist. The contemporary contestations of expertise I analyse next
suggest that the attempts to supplement the limits of scientific-technical
credibility with credibility as representativeness have not resolved the
question of how the world’s cultural diversity can be legitimately curated.
47 48
See UNESCO 1993, Articles 6 and 11–13. UNESCO 1998, 2, emphases mine.
49
Another demonstration of how the demands for representativity by the political actors
exceed the bounds of epistemic shifts is the continued challenges to expert evaluations
despite ICOMOS’s expansion of its sources of expertise. ICOMOS regularly references
its ‘global multidisciplinary and multicultural network of experts,’ UNESCO 2011a,
16–21; UNESCO 2012, 13; UNESCO 2014, 12–14.
The Regime Today: Competing

Conceptions of Credibility
To date, the regime operates through the two conceptions of credibility
and the attendant understandings of cultural value. While most of this
section will focus on the challenges to the original conception of cred-
ibility within the regime, it is important to note that the original concep-
tion continues to find support. Worries over the scientific-technical
credibility of the convention are expressed annually at the committee
meetings, and in increasingly standardized form since 2010. This
includes opening remarks by UNESCO’s Director-General, reminding
the participants that the effectiveness of the convention hinges on its
credibility.50 The chairperson expresses his/her hopes for the upcoming
proceedings to follow the spirit and letter of the convention.51 Advisory
Bodies make presentations emphasizing that their recommendations are
based on the pursuit of the most rigorous scientific knowledge and
standards.52 The subsequent discussions are punctured by expressions
of discomfort by some States Parties when committee decisions begin to
diverge from the Advisory Body recommendations.53 Once the decisions
are made, the secretariat presents an overview of the preceding days,
including the number of overturned expert recommendations. This is
followed by a few States Parties that read statements of concern. These
interventions share an emphasis on adherence to the spirit of the con-
vention and its rules, and an interpretation of their contestation or
violation as a loss of credibility. However, I contend that what is at stake
is not only loss but also an alternative notion of credibility, attached to a
different conception of culture.
Representation of cultural plurality presents substantive, relational and
foundational challenges to expertise, perceived as linked to a universaliz-
ing understanding of culture. The substantive challenges posit inter-
national experts as lacking understanding of local values and meaning,
such as the value of a site for the population or the importance of
intangible associations. Accordingly, ICOMOS evaluations have been
criticized for lacking the requisite ‘cultural sensitivity’ and fluency in
‘local languages,’ and for using ill-fitting approaches such as deductive
logics that exclude indigenous and traditional forms of knowledge, or
50
UNESCO 2012, 4; UNESCO 2013, 245; UNESCO 2014, 119.
51
UNESCO 2011a, 3; UNESCO 2013, 233.
52
UNESCO 2008, 56; UNESCO 2010, 87 and 112; UNESCO 2012, 89.
53
For a representative example, see UNESCO 2010, 674.
demanding proof of intangible associations.54 Such lack of understand-

ing or misunderstanding, in turn, risks disappearing regions from the
stage of world heritage – such as Asia-Pacific and Africa, which become
visible through non-monumental, intangible, local sources of cultural
value.55 The perception of cultural value as plural and contextual there-
fore puts into question the bases of scientific-technical credibility in its
sources of knowledge and methods of evaluation. Rather than providing
credible evaluations, international experts are posited as at best inad-
equate and at worst biased, both in their sources and methods, and in the
results of their translations.
If these challenges put forth the local as the proper source of cultural
value, the States Parties also invoke the figure of the local expert as a
legitimate authority of adjudication. Delegations have been invoking
local and regional experts as arbiters of value, and demanding their
inclusion in the evaluation of site nominations.56 Through these
demands, local experts emerge as agents who can credibly evaluate,
possibly without attendant translational practices, the kinds of cultural
value that the sites embody. This stands in contrast to the relation
posited between regional and international experts during the 1995
Harare meeting, which envisioned local experts as custodians of heritage
on the ground and international experts as the adjudicators of universal
cultural value. In the pursuit of representation through a plural rather
than a universal and universalizable cultural value, a foundationally
different role is demanded for the local experts. This dual shift is articu-
lated by a delegate who pointed out that within this plural conception of
culture, countries previously excluded from the World Heritage List
become not only home to under-represented sites, but also repositories
of knowledge about them.57
Lastly, in its thicker substantiation, credibility as representativity opens
up the possibility of cases where concerns of representation need to be
foregrounded. A key example is instances when the value of a site is
defined through its ability to contribute to the Global Strategy. The
Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests in Kenya, Jantar Mantar in India and
the Pyu Ancient Cities in Myanmar are among the sites that were
evaluated as not (yet) suitable for the World Heritage List by ICOMOS,
and whose (movement towards) inscription was pushed by delegations
54
UNESCO 2007, 164; UNESCO 2011a, 235; UNESCO 2012, 14.
55
UNESCO 2001, 59.
56
UNESCO 1997, 6; UNESCO 2008, 147; UNESCO 2013, 185; UNESCO 2014,
12–13.
57
UNESCO 2010, 805.
based on arguments for representativeness and credibility.58 What is

significant in these cases is that the arguments posit representativeness
as a value in itself, on which inscriptions can be based, and also as
contributing to the credibility of the list. Thus, what is at stake is not
the representative instantiation of a universal through proper scientific-
technical procedures, but rather representativity taking precedence when
the two are in tension.
Taken together, demands for representation of cultural plurality pre-
sent a layered challenge to the regime’s original conception of scientific-
technical credibility for the governance of culture as universal. At the
very least, these challenges demand a familiarization of international
experts with local sources of meaning and value. The objections to the
evaluative tools of experts press harder against translation practices that
demand the local to provide proof of its value in ways that are amenable
to standardized adjudication. The contextual familiarities required for
credible evaluation begin to suggest a different mode of inclusion in the
universal. This is an inclusion through minimal translation, and one that
can be better provided by local experts. As proposed by the Delegation of
Japan: ‘different cultures could apply [OUV] justification criteria differ-
ently depending on individual cultural expressions of admiration and
emotion.’59 A credible representation of cultural diversity, then, has
not only become a value in itself but also points to alternative mechan-
isms and relations of governance.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that the current contestations of expertise in the
world heritage regime arise out of and point to the changing understand-
ing and salience of culture within broader world politics. In this analysis,
a conception of culture as static and internally homogenous appears not
only as a theoretical or conceptual limit but also as central to the notion
of culture as universally, apolitically and scientific-technically govern-
able. The implications of this analysis are sharpened in relation to the
evolution of the scholarship on world heritage. While earlier scholarship
emphasized the regime’s Eurocentric bases,60 recent scholarship has
argued that state interests now take centre stage.61 Remarkably, the
recent scholarship pays little attention to the substantiation of what it
calls state interests and to the question of why the regime’s governance of
58
UNESCO 2008, 220–222; UNESCO 2010, 606; UNESCO 2014, 165.
59 60
UNESCO 2008, 151. Turtinen 2000; Logan 2001; Labadi 2005a and 2005b.
61
Askew 2010; Meskell 2015, 2018; Meskell and Brumann 2015.
culture is no longer found compelling by a plethora of – strong and

weak – states. I have argued, instead, that the contestations are demon-
strative of a plural conception of culture and the demands for its repre-
sentative governance within a broader world political context where the
stakes of cultural recognition have shifted. It is these demands for repre-
sentation that strain the regime’s original conception of universal value
and credibility as this value’s scientific-technical adjudication. However,
while these demands for representation, as inclusion and recognition,
take place within the world heritage regime, the regime is not where they
begin and end. Rather, the demands are oriented towards the
world stage.
The changing fortunes of the world heritage regime, then, sit at the
crux of this volume’s opening gambit: while cultural diversity has always
been the terrain on which international orders have been built, the
present global political moment witnesses an increased assertion of cul-
tural particularity, raising the question of the existing diversity regimes’
ability to legitimately curate this diversity. Attending to the substance of
the contestations points to the sources, actors and mechanisms of such
curation. In the case of the world heritage regime, it is significant that the
challenges target the governance of culture through the scientific-
technical adjudication of a singular universal value. These contestations
are not, however, a series of parochial, idiosyncratic national interests or
a turn away from the world stage. To the contrary, they have two key
characteristics: a shared substance in the invocation of cultural value as
constitutively local, as well as a common orientation to the world stage as
the proper location for the acknowledgement of such value. It is at the
intersection of these two elements that the inclusion demands from the
regime are located, for coeval (past) cultural production, for civilizational
prowess or for histories of cultural exclusion and hierarchies. Tellingly,
taking the floor after the inscription of the Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site,
where the nomination file describes the cultural devaluation of the island
as constitutive of its designation for evacuation and testing, the Marshall
Islands framed the world heritage status as recognition of a difficult past
that will help the people reconcile with their painful history.62
The future curation of cultural diversity thus sits neither on a terrain of
a proliferation of national interests that can be procedurally guided
towards common interests, nor on an inherently fractious terrain of
heterogeneity on which substantive ends cannot be pursued. Instead,
the contestations of the world heritage regime’s original approach to
62
UNESCO 2010, 620.
curating culture suggest that the current political terrain of cultural

diversity requires a rethinking of the bases and goals of such curation.
My analysis suggests that key to this rethinking is the move from univer-
sality to representativity. A representative World Heritage List might not
be able to – or might not wish to – curate a singular humanity. Instead, it
would be grounded in and curate an international with cultural histories
that are shared and divergent, progressive and violent. Rather than
simply reproducing this international or sidelining it, the regime can
act as the stage on which some of these histories and divergences can
be negotiated. In the end, a representative curation might require dis-
pensing with the current demarcations of curators, including but not
limited to experts. While such moves will unsettle the ideational-
institutional grounds of the liberal international order’s curation of
shared orientations out of diversity, it will open up new mechanisms of
cooperation, albeit in a piecemeal and at times contradictory manner.
Part V
Conclusion
15 Conclusion
In the opening paragraph of the 1994 edition of her classic work Politics
and Culture in International History, Adda Bozeman wrote:
The interplay (the dual play?) of politics and culture has intensified throughout
the world, and that on the plane of international relations as well as on that of
intrastate social existence and governance. Interactions between polities and
cultures are more confounded and conflicted than they had been earlier, and
trust in the validity and efficacy of governmental public order systems as these
had been installed between 1920 and 1950 under Western auspices has subsided
dramatically.1
These observations paint a very different view of world politics to the
liberal triumphalism ascendant at the time Bozeman wrote, and bear a
striking similarity to anxieties aired all too frequently today in academic,
policy, and media circles. They also express a series of stubbornly per-
sistent ideas: the notion that global cultural diversity is a phenomenon of
the late twentieth century onward; the belief that newly emergent cultural
complexity is undermining political order, internationally and domestic-
ally; and the view that ‘public order systems’ established in the twentieth
century depended not just on Western leadership but also on cultural
unity and hegemony.
This book, and the trilogy of which it is part, challenges each of these
assumptions. Moreover, we do this on the very terrain claimed by Boze-
man: interdisciplinary – or in her terms ‘multidisciplinary’ – inquiry and
engagement. She reached her conclusions, she wrote, after ‘close multi-
disciplinary studies of non-European and non-American thoughtways,
historical experiences, and recorded social and political systems.’2 Yet
since Bozeman penned the 1960 first edition of Politics and Culture in
International History there has been a revolution in specialist understand-
ings of culture, and more recently new histories have appeared of diverse
historical orders, from the Roman and early modern to the Ottoman and
1 2
Bozeman 1994, xv. Bozeman 1994, 5.
319
Qing Chinese. This work reveals cultural complexity and heterogeneity

as the norm in human history, shows that political orders – international
and local – emerge in heterogeneous cultural contexts, and suggests that
governing cultural complexity is a key imperative of order building. That
Bozeman failed to see this shifting scholarly terrain when she wrote the
introduction to the 1994 edition is hardly her limitation alone: it is a
blindness characteristic of international relations (IR) more generally.3
This book does more than enlist neglected insights from specialist
fields. It builds on a focused and sustained conversation between leading
scholars of international order and experts on cultural diversity to
develop a new perspective on cultural diversity and international order.
Elements of this perspective were advanced first by Reus-Smit in On
Cultural Diversity: namely that we should start by assuming existential
cultural diversity, that heterogeneous cultural environments pose dis-
tinctive legitimation challenges for order builders, that diversity regimes
evolve in response, and that these regimes create social hierarchies and
attendant grievances, fuelling contestation and change. As explained in
Chapter 2, however, this volume goes well beyond these starting propos-
itions. Illustrated and elaborated upon in our contributors’ chapters, it
stresses the productive power of diversity regimes, interpellating as well
as organizing forms and expressions of cultural difference. It explains in
greater detail how the hierarchies and exclusions created by diversity
regimes condition recognition struggles, encouraging processes of
counter-interpellation, as aggrieved actors mobilize around insurgent
cultural identities. It highlights the recurrent historical connection
between political centralization and less tolerant, more exclusionary
and repressive diversity regimes, a connection that is not a simple expres-
sion of state capacity, and one readily apparent even in the supposedly
pluralist Westphalian order, where decentralization at the systemic level
was purchased at the cost of centralization at the state level. Finally, it
emphasizes the plural and multiscalar nature of diversity regimes, how
orders move from one diversity regime to another, and how, in decentral-
ized orders, diversity regimes can coexist at different levels, either
reinforcing or undermining each other (powerfully illustrated by Ber-
rey’s, Ikenberry’s, and Swidler’s chapters).
In all of this, three historical insights emerge. First, the simplistic
notions that international orders are products of underlying cultural
unity, or that modern institutions neutralize the political effects of cul-
tural diversity, are unsustainable. Second, the governance, management,
3
For a detailed discussion, see Reus-Smit 2018a.
Conclusion 321
or rule of cultural difference appears as a generic, if varied, institutional

practice in international orders. And, following from this, the Westpha-
lian diversity regime appears as but one historical example, and exagger-
ated claims about its superior openness and toleration are tested by
historical comparisons.
This concluding chapter considers two issues. The first concerns the
value of an essentially IR project such as this for the disciplines from
which we have learned. The influence of current ideas from anthropol-
ogy, history, law, and sociology is clear, but what can these disciplines
learn from the perspective on cultural diversity and international order
advanced here? The second issue is the implications of our perspective
for thinking about today’s global condition. Given everything we have
said theoretically and empirically, what does it mean for thinking about
cultural diversity and international order today?
Giving Back
The value of interdisciplinary engagement is one of the catchcries of this
book, and of the larger project of which it is part. A central claim of On
Cultural Diversity is that IR’s discussions about culture lost their way, and
that much could be gained by reconnecting with contemporary under-
standings and debates in specialist fields, particularly anthropology,
cultural studies, history, law, and sociology. Two key insights reappear
across these literatures, and in preceding chapters we picked these up
and ran as hard and far as we could. The first concerns the heterogen-
eity of all culture: its highly variegated, often contradictory, and loosely
integrated and bounded nature. Cultures conceived as coherent
entities, with quasi-agential qualities, are myths. The second concerns
the structuring role of social institutions. For all its heterogeneity,
culture evinces patterns, points of constellation and convergence, and
more or less stable collective identifications and practices, however
multiple and contradictory. To explain such patterning, scholars across
diverse fields have stressed the importance of social institutions – how
they condition the cultural flow, in Hannerz’s words.4 This insight
informs directly the argument advanced here about how the varied
diversity regimes of historical international orders have organized cul-
tural complexity.
If we have productively enlisted these insights from other fields, what
does this project offer in return? The most obvious thing is our focus on
4
Hannerz 1992, 14.
international order as a key locus of the politics of cultural diversity.

Specialist fields have focused principally on the workings of culture in
smaller-scale, more localized settings. Sociologists and cultural studies
scholars have in recent decades addressed the cultural dynamics of
globalization and the varied regional manifestations of modernity. But,
with the notable exception of historians’ research on imperial cultural
universes, little work has addressed the relationship between cultural
diversity and international order specifically. Culture and Order in World
Politics fills this vacuum, but it offers more than a simple shift in focus.
For millennia, international orders in their many forms have provided the
macro-institutional contexts defining axes of legitimate cultural differ-
ence and tying these to structures of political authority. This is not to
deny the importance of more localized sources of meaning, practice, and
identification – a point stressed by Swidler in Chapter 9. But this book
highlights two conditioning effects of the international.
The first is how diversity regimes do more than order extant forms and
expressions of cultural difference; they interpellate them, bringing into
existence new loci of identification, new discursive frames, and, just as
importantly, new modalities of contestation. Barnett’s exploration of the
Jewish Problem, Birnbaum’s analysis of the recognition of religion, and
Berrey’s and Town’s studies of the emergence of anti-liberal identities
and politics all illustrate this. The second conditioning effect concerns
the nesting of lower-level diversity regimes within the overarching organ-
ization of diversity provided by international orders. A key argument of
this book is that diversity regimes can be multiscalar, especially those that
are formally decentralized, like today’s order of sovereign states. The
relationship between these levels of cultural organization is critical to
understand. Previous chapters have shown, first, how dependent
attempts to order culture at the international level are on compatible,
even compliant, institutions and practices within states. We have also
seen, though, how dependent programmes of national cultural organiza-
tion are on permissive international diversity regimes: hence the obses-
sion of far-right nationalists with the perceived evils of the liberal
international order.
The second thing this study offers cultural specialists is the concept
and initial theorization of diversity regimes. This concept builds on the
specialist insight that cultural diversity is patterned by social institutions,
but it takes this several steps further. It rests on a background proposition
that order building in heterogeneous cultural contexts faces distinctive
legitimation challenges – challenges that diversity regimes are con-
structed or evolve to meet. The key innovation, however, is to conceive
diversity regimes as not just defining authorized forms and expressions of
Conclusion 323
difference, but also linking these to legitimate units of political authority.

Diversity regimes thus bridge the institutional organization of difference
and the configuration of political power. This is not a concept of value
only to IR scholars, in the way that the neoliberal concept of ‘inter-
national regimes’ was. The concept of diversity regimes is portable,
fruitfully capturing institutional arrangements that order difference and
power at multiple levels in diverse locales. Just as the Westphalian
settlement and the nineteenth-century standard of civilization were
diversity regimes, so too are the genocidal, assimilatory, or multicultural
policies and practices instituted within states. This is not a simple
matter of naming; the concept illuminates aspects of these practices
previously obscured (or even downplayed). That genocide and assimi-
lation link sanctioned cultural forms and expressions to political power
is clear, but this is less apparent with more liberal diversity regimes, like
various forms of multiculturalism. In our view, these latter regimes have
considerable normative and political merit, but they remain diversity
regimes. They too define authorized forms and expressions of cultural
difference, and they too link these to legitimate configurations of polit-
ical authority. The concept of diversity regimes allows us to think about
all of these varied institutional practices as in some sense cognate, while
providing an analytical framework for understanding their very real
differences.
The third thing this book offers specialist fields – as well as IR
scholars – is a distinctive approach to ‘the global.’ This approach blends
two things: a focus on the global organization of political authority, and
an emphasis on the complex heterogeneity of human culture. IR has
been pulled between two impulses: one defending the field’s traditional
focus on external relations between sovereign states; the other calling for
a broader remit, one addressing ‘global politics’ in all its complexity.
Dissatisfied with both of these positions – the first for being too narrow,
the second too amorphous – our approach concentrates instead on the
shifting ways in which political authority has been organized globally. In
focusing on systems of sovereign states, traditional IR has addressed but
one manifestation of such organization, saying little about imperial,
suzerain, or heteronomous ways for ordering authority. Our approach
to the global locates the system of states within this broader range of
historical forms, exposing new axes of comparison and illuminating the
complex interconnections between large-scale configurations of political
authority. Such configurations evolve in universes of unequally distrib-
uted material resources, but also in heterogeneous cultural contexts.
Indeed, as Hurrell observes, ‘it is precisely differences in social practices,
values, beliefs, and institutions that represent the most important
expression of our common humanity.’5 When IR scholars have acknow-

ledged this, however, their response has been to parcelize diversity, to
imagine it as a diversity of homogeneous cultural units: nations and
civilizations, principally. Our approach refuses such simplifications, as
they obscure the internal heterogeneity of such units, as well as the
vigorous politics required to narrate cultural unity, construct collective
identifications, and choreograph cultural meanings and practices.
The Modern Order

Beyond these contributions to disciplinary cross-fertilization, Culture and
Order in World Politics also contributes to debates about the contempor-
ary international order. Two insights stand out: the first concerning
patterns of contestation, the second to do with the order’s prospective
resilience. To frame these discussions, however, a word is needed first on
the order’s evolution and hybrid history.
Influential accounts of the contemporary order make much of its
supposedly exclusively Western origins.6 Undeniably, today’s order
bears key hallmarks of Western influence.7 But its evolution cannot be
reduced to a simple story of unilinear Western expansion. In the early
modern period, Westphalia represented but one of a range of regional
orders that each organized cultural diversity in their own distinctive
ways.8 Eventually, Westerners were able to impose their own under-
standings of the diversity-order nexus through imperial expansion. But
this imposition came only after centuries of coexistence between Western
and non-Western international orders, during which time Westerners
insinuated themselves into the latter on terms that were initially far from
favourable to them.9 Certainly, once Westerners did win global domin-
ance by the late 1800s, they were able to craft an international order that
interpellated cultural difference to sustain colonial empires. But these
efforts to tie political authority to racial and civilizational hierarchies
proved fragile and fleeting. Through counter-interpellation, subaltern
actors fashioned insurgent cultural identities that enabled them to dele-
gitimate and ultimately destroy a Western-dominated colonial order.10
Colonial markers of identity undeniably exercised a deep constitutive
influence over the polities that emerged from empires’ ashes.11 Neverthe-
less, subaltern struggles for recognition were crucially important in
5 6
Hurrell 2007, 40. See, for example, Bull and Watson 1984; Mead 2008.
7
Hurrell, this volume, Chapter 6; and Ikenberry, this volume, Chapter 7.
8 9
Suzuki, Zhang and Quirk 2013. Phillips and Sharman 2015.
10 11
Bayly 2011; Reus-Smit 2013b. Birnbaum, this volume, Chapter 12.
Conclusion 325
driving the modern international order’s evolution. Today, political

authority is distributed globally through a universal sovereign state
monoculture. This is a far cry from the sovereign-imperial amalgam
that prevailed as late as the 1970s. And its existence is a testament to
subaltern actors’ agency in appropriating Western institutions and
ways of mediating cultural difference, and adapting them in globally
transformative ways.
If today’s international order is ‘an amalgam of orders, built around
often inconsistent and competing norms, principles, and political
projects,’12 then this volume highlights the correspondingly diverse
authors of that hybrid order. The order’s centrepiece – a universal system
of sovereign nation-states – arose out of an Afro-Asian ‘revolution in
sovereignty,’13 in which questions pertaining to the distribution of
political authority and the management of difference were inextricably
intertwined.
The hybridity of today’s world order counsels against alarmist notions
that the rise of non-Western great powers heralds that order’s imminent
disintegration. This is because the order itself already extensively bears
the mark of past non-Western agency. This was evident historically in
decolonization. But it has been more recently apparent in the workings of
international law, which remains flexible enough to peacefully encom-
pass communities of practitioners that freely draw from diverse and often
discordant international legal cultures in defining and defending their
interests.14
The international order’s hybridity – evident in both its historical
evolution and contemporary operation – thus potentially stands as a
powerful source of resilience, decoupling its fate from the decline of
Western hegemony. Conversely, the order’s multiscalar configuration
points to multiple overlapping vectors of cultural contention that could
sharpen legitimation strains within it over the longer term. In light of the
global rise of nativism, a popular trope suggests a world order riven by
conflict between ‘open’ (pro-globalist) and ‘closed’ (anti-globalist’) con-
stituencies.15 But the perspective we have advanced here suggests a more
complicated geometry of conflict, in which the international order is
being buffeted by cultural contestation at multiple levels.
At its apex, the order is seeing the halting emergence of global author-
ity structures. The diverse actors sponsoring this emergent stratum of
international order seek to interpellate a new form of identity anchored
12 13
Ikenberry, this volume, Chapter 7. Philpott 2001.
14 15
Becker Lorca, this volume, Chapter 10. See, for example, The Economist 2016.
around the idea of a common humanity, while subordinating competing

moral claims tied to more parochial – especially national – forms of
cultural difference.16 This places them in conflict with an international
order where nation-states remain the primary units of political authority
and collective identification. The resulting friction has inhibited the con-
solidation of global governance institutions by frustrating efforts to reorder
cultural diversity globally to legitimate and stabilize this enterprise.
While the emergence of global governance institutions forms one focal
point for contestation, the ongoing reorganization of cultural diversity
within developed Western nation-states – the core of the so-called
guiding coalition17 behind the liberal international order – remains
equally contentious. Indeed, as Berrey and Towns demonstrate, Western
nativist resistance to ‘globalism’ and hostility to state-sponsored
multiculturalism have lately become tightly intertwined.18 Opponents of
sustainable development and gender equality have both sought to delegi-
timate these projects by stigmatizing them as ‘foreign’ incursions against
local or national sovereignty, the latter conceived in highly exclusivist
terms. Significantly, they have done so not only to discredit cosmopol-
itan authority claims from without, but also to resist efforts from within
their own societies to dismantle racial and gender hierarchies and to
reorganize diversity regimes domestically in more inclusive terms.
The advent of new communication technologies has finally opened up
novel possibilities for cultural innovation from the periphery, enabling a
broader range of actors to counter-interpellate new identities that are
deeply subversive of the existing order. This trend has been most con-
spicuous in the activities of transnational jihadists, who have harnessed
the internet to interpellate and mobilize a global Islamic constituency
against both the current international order and its (supposedly exclu-
sive) Western sponsors. Beyond its specific significance, the jihadist
challenge is exemplary of a larger dynamic, whereby the diffusion of
capacities for meaning making is allowing for more sustained and multi-
directional assaults on the diversity regimes underpinning political order,
at both the international and domestic levels.19
The nascent emergence of a cosmopolitan global imaginary; the nativ-
ist backlash in liberalism’s erstwhile heartlands; the irruption of reaction-
ary transnational insurgencies – these are but three of the challenges
confronting today’s international order. It has not been our purpose to
anticipate order builders’ likely success in managing these challenges.
16 17
Swidler, this volume, Chapter 9. Mazarr 2017, 30.
18
Berrey, this volume, Chapter 8; and Towns, this volume, Chapter 13.
19
Morris 2016.
Conclusion 327
Instead, the value of our approach lies primarily in providing a framework

that is broad enough to encompass the nexus between diversity manage-
ment and power legitimation that has characterized all international orders
past and present, while also being precise enough to capture the multiple
layers at which contests over the diversity-order nexus are playing out
today, and laying bare their intricate interconnections.
This book offers no definite predictions regarding the liberal inter-
national order’s likely resilience. Nevertheless, our findings do have
important implications for how debates on the liberal international
order’s future are understood.
First, we caution against conceptions of liberal international order that
see it as depending on a ‘thick’ cultural consensus in any deeply consti-
tutive sense. On the contrary, we have stressed that all international
orders – including the present one – arise out of conditions of existential
diversity, and are rendered stable and legitimate only when configur-
ations of political authority are tied to authorized forms of cultural
difference. To the extent that a liberal international order has persisted
over many decades, moreover, it has done so in part because of the
polyvalent, even protean character of ‘liberalism.’ Liberalism’s meaning
and its modalities have continuously shifted and been susceptible to
periodic reinterpretation.20 This is evident in the stark differences distin-
guishing the ‘liberal’ international order during the heyday of empire
from its post-1945 (and, even more so, post-1960) successors.21 Fore-
most among these differences were the dissimilar boundaries of
belonging prescribing who could legitimately be recognized as being
entitled to liberalism’s privileges, and thus to full participation within
that order. And these boundaries of belonging were constructed via
diversity regimes that have varied radically from one another across the
liberal international order’s successive incarnations.
Rather than exaggerating the liberal international order’s historical
continuity, then, we must remain sensitive to the distinctiveness of its
current iteration, and to its dependence on a correspondingly idiosyn-
cratic diversity regime. Similarly, Western states’ contemporary propri-
etary overidentification with the liberal international order elides the fact
that liberalism only emerged as the ‘constitutive ideology of the West’
after 1945.22 Awareness of this historical contingency should counsel
against the idea that the liberal international order is a natural or inevit-
able outgrowth of any particular ‘civilization,’ for this idea fundamentally
20
Bell 2014.
21
On liberalism’s historical compatibility with empire, see, for example, Pitts 2005.
22
Bell 2014, 685.
misreads the unity of both ‘liberalism’ and ‘the West,’ as well as radically
overstating the intimacy of their interconnection.
Lastly, lamentations for the liberal international order’s future typically
fixate on either the rising threat of unambiguously illiberal challengers, or
a collapse of support for the order’s social purposes among its primary
sponsors. Without dismissing these threats, our analysis suggests an
alternative source of tension that conventional accounts overlook. Within
today’s multiscalar order, the degree of compatibility or friction between
diversity regimes operative at the global, international, and domestic
levels may also prove crucial in determining its longevity. Historically,
the post-war order sought to insulate itself from challenge in part by
displacing responsibility for organizing cultural diversity domestically to
its member states. The organization of cultural diversity internationally,
via hybrid sovereign-imperial order, was kept separate from the organiza-
tion of cultural diversity within sovereign states.
This strict separation of international from domestic diversity regimes
was never absolute. Today, however, the boundaries between the global,
the international, and the domestic have become ever more permeable.
Moves to strengthen global governance have seen a partial concentration
of authority upwards from the nation-state, and the emergence of a
nascent cosmopolitan diversity regime to legitimate that reconfiguration.
Within the West, this development has occurred alongside domestic
moves to distribute power and status more equitably among citizens by
recasting diversity regimes on more inclusive terms, and by dismantling
hierarchies of race and gender. Both represent parallel instances where
diversity regimes are being constructed or renegotiated to legitimate an
attempted redistribution of political authority. And both have generated
significant and, in many cases, mutually reinforcing resistance.
Struggles over recognition are thus now playing out simultaneously
across multiple layers of authority, with legitimation strains on one level
intertwining with and potentially amplifying tensions on others. The
multiscalarity of today’s international order, and the complex geography
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Index
Abbasid dynasty, 60 AIDS epidemic

Abd-el-Krim, 224–225 global governance of, informal
Abdülhamid II, 67 coordination of, 193–194
absolutism, in Ottoman Empire, 63 health and welfare services for, 191–192
Adelman, Jeremy, 117 WHO and, 194
Adler, Cyrus, 243 AJC. See American Jewish Committee
agency Akhavan, Payam, 227–228
diffusion of, from global international ‘all under heaven’ concept. See tianxia
society, 118 concept
in diversity regimes, 29 Alvarez, Alejandro, 222
Agenda 21, political opposition to American Jewish Committee (AJC), 246
anti-globalism in, 165–166 anti-Agenda 21 activism. See Agenda 21
as challenge to UN hegemonic concept of ‘anti-family’ arguments, against gender
political membership, 164–166 diversity, 289–292
colorblind racism and, 166–168 anti-gender movement, as transnational,
White nationalism and, 168 284–287
conspiracy theories and anti-globalism, in anti-Agenda 21 activists,
mobilization through, 170–178 165–166
about New World Order, 170–171 anti-Semitism
in right-wing news media, 173–174 the ‘Jewish Problem’ and, 234–235, 238
among White conservative voters, 172 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 239
counter-interpellation strategies of, 166 Arendt, Hannah, 117, 246
cultural consensus as influence on, Arizpe, Lourdes, 310
161–162 Armenian genocide, 13, 67–68
cultural sociology of, 162–164 Aron, Raymond, 151
diversity regimes of, 164–169 Arslan, Shakib, 224–225
racism of, 167–168 ‘Asian Values’ debate, on human rights,
liberal internationalism and 219–220
legitimacy of, challenges to, 178–180 assimilationist policies, under minzu
mobilisation challenges against, system, 88–89, 91–92
169–170 Australia, 225–228
mobilisation against, 169–178
as challenge to liberal internationalism, Bagehot, Walter, 142
169–170 Bannon, Steve, 179
through conspiracy theories, Barnett, Michael, 32
170–178 Bartelson, Jens, 254
by far-right political actors, Battle of Ankara, 55–56
170–178 Bayezid I, 55–56
by Republican Party, 176–177 Beck, Glenn, 173
by Tea Party, 159–160, 174–178 Benedict XVI (Pope), 286
theoretical approach to, 159–161 Berlin, Isaiah, 246
Ahmed, Sara, 255 Berrey, Ellen, 6, 26, 273
367
368 Index
beyliks, 54 Ge Zhaoguang on, 99, 103–104, 107

Bound by Recognition (Markell), 252 political unity in, 95–97
Bozeman, Adda, 319–320 under Russian-Chinese Declaration on
Brandeis, Louis, 238 the Promotion of International Law,
Bright, John, 142 133–134
Bubalo, Anthony, 4 Sinicization in, 100
Buber, Martin, 237–238 in TCWO model, 74–75
Bull, Hedley, 25, 161 Song dynasty, 111
Burke, Edmund, 106 state capacity of, 97, 108
Bush, George H. W., 169–170 Tang dynasty, 110
TCWO model, 73–78
Campbell, William, 227 academic validity of, universal
Cassin, Renee, 246 acceptance of, 75–76
CAT. See Convention Against Torture Confucianism in, 77
CCP. See Chinese Communist Party interpellation in, 75
centralisation Sinicization in, 74–75
of cultural diversity, 37–38 tianxia concept in, 76–77
of international order, 37–38 Warring States’ Period in, 37, 42, 99–100
of Ottoman Empire, 26–27 Yuan dynasty, 110
diversity regimes influenced by, Zhou era, 99–100
53–70 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 83–84,
centralised pluralism, in Qing dynasty, 14, 87
44 The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s
change, contestation and, 30–31 Foreign Relations (Fairbank), 74
Chatham House, 207–208, 211–213, civil society, 147–150
217–220, 222–224, 231 Clark, Hugh, 93–94
Chiang Kai-shek, 14, 83, 88 Clash of Civilizations (Huntington), 4
China. See also People’s Republic of China; Clermont-Tonnerre, Count Stanislas de,
Sinicization theory 235
central territories in, 95 Cobden, Richard, 142
Confucianism in, 93, 100–101 coercive cultural homogeneity
in TCWO model, 77 during Han dynasty, 101–107
cultural diversity in achievements of, 107–111
before homogenisation, 99–101 freedom of expression and, 103
management of, 96–99 limitations of, 107–111
overview of, 111–112 during Qin dynasty, 101–107
cultural homogeneity of, 100 achievements of, 107–111
coercive, 101–111 freedom of expression and, 103
freedom of expression and, 103 limitations of, 107–111
legitimation of power through, standardisation of, 103
104–111 coercive Sinicization, 35–36
persistence of, 104–111 Collier, Jane, 199
standardisation measures, 103 colonial border commissions
diversity regimes in, 101–104 in Israel, 262–268
achievements of, 107–111 partition strategies in, 267–268
limits of, 107–111 Peel Commission, 264–266
dynastic history in, 93–94. See also specific religion as influence on, 266–267
dynasties in Pakistan, 262–268
European empires compared to, 100 Khan and, 267–268
historiography of, 72 Radcliffe and, 263–264
daotong in, 72–73 religion as influence on, 266–267
Ming dynasty, 110 colorblind racism
minority nationalities in, 72 in opposition to Agenda 21, 166–168
plural cultural tradition in, 93–95, White nationalism and, 168
99–101 in U.S., 160
Index 369
communicative technologies under international law, 209

international order and, 35 international law and, 209
nationalism and, 35 hybridity of, 209–210
Confucianism, in China, 93, 100–101 legal cultures as influence on, 228–231
during Han dynasty, 107 IR and, 3–4
in TCWO model, 77 the ‘Jewish Problem’ and, 247–249
Connolly, William, 254 definition of diversity in, 247–248
conspiracy theories, about Agenda 21 self-identity for Jews, 248–249
about New World Order, 170–171 Westphalian order and, 247
political mobilisation through, 170–178 legitimation crises and, 35–36
in right-wing news media, 173–174 liberal internationalism and, 144–153
among White conservative voters, 172 through civil society, 147–150
constructivist theories, on culture, 7 through globalisation, 150–152
contestation through hierarchy, 152–153
change and, 30–31 liberal modernity and, 150–152
in diversity regimes, 30 Westphalian sovereignty as influence
continuity of the Way. See daotong on, 145–147
Convention Against Torture (CAT), management of, 42–43
197–198 in China, 42
Convention Concerning the Protection of in Ottoman Empire, 42–43
World Cultural and National after Peace of Westphalia, 43
Heritage, 297 neutralisation of, 40–41
heritage value criteria, 303–304 in institutional neutralisation thesis, 41
Convention on the Law of the Sea. See in PRC, 71–72
United Nations in Qin dynasty, suppression of, 37
cooperative security, 155 in Qing dynasty, 13–15
cosmopolitan internationalism, 160, 164 selective accommodation with, 36
cosmopolitanism, 249 theoretical approach to, 5–22
counter-interpellation, in diversity regimes, in U.S., 71–72
34–35 in world politics, 4–5
of anti-Agenda 21 activists, 166 cultural heterogeneity, 6, 28
for gender, in Western nations, 287–292 definition of, 49
Creel, Herrlee, 108 diversity regimes and, 45
Cruz, Ted, 177 cultural homogeneity, of China, 100. See
cultural consensus also Han dynasty; Qin dynasty
Agenda 21 and, 161–162 as coercive, 101–111. See also coercive
international order and, 161–162 cultural homogeneity
cultural diversity freedom of expression and, 103
centralisation of, 37–38 legitimation of power through, 104–111
in China persistence of, 104–111
during Han dynasty, suppression of, 37 standardisation measures, 103
before homogenisation, 99–101 cultural identity, during Han dynasty, 95
management of, 96–99 cultural reproduction of nations, 277–279
overview of, 111–112 as female bodies, threats against, 278
during Qin dynasty, suppression of, 37 through gender symbolism, 277–278
consensus on, 40–41 through generational transmission,
decentralisation of, 37–38 278–279
in global international society, 116–133 cultural sociology
as culture-specific, 119–121 Agenda 21 and, 162–164
mediating mechanisms of, 126–133 of international order, 162–164
through religious conflict, 122–124 cultural syncretism, of Islamic identity,
in Han dynasty, suppression of, 37 53–55
institutional organisation of, 10 culture
interdisciplinary engagement in, value of, constructivist theories on, 7
321–324 default conceptions of, 7
370 Index
culture (cont.) cultural differences in, recognition of,

definition of, 24–25 259–262
English School theories on, 7 national minorities in,
as heterogeneous, 6, 28 institutionalisation of, 260
diversity regimes and, 45 political representation in, 260–262
political use of, 24–25 Zionist movement and, religious
rational choice theories on, 7 differences within, 259
realist theories on, 7 the ‘Jewish Problem’ and, 233
social institutions’ role in, 6 legal culture influenced by, 228–231
in mononational models, during
Dahrendorf, Ralf, 151 twentieth century, 276
daotong (continuity of the Way), 72–73 as multi-scalar, 38–40
decentralisation within Ottoman Empire, 12–13, 51–52
of cultural diversity, 37–38 institutionalisation of tolerance,
of international order, 37–38 55–56
Decline of the West (Spengler), 120 management of, 51, 69–70
Devji, Faisal, 262 as metadoxy of state, 58
DeWeese, Tom, 171 political centralisation as influence on,
distribution of the sensible, 257 53–70
diversity. See also cultural diversity in Pakistan
definition of, 49 through census categories, 259–260
existential, 27 cultural differences in, recognition of,
legitimacy and, 28 259–262
cultural heterogeneity as result of, political representation in, 260–262
28 as plural, 38–40
under minzu system, 83 political authority in, 29
diversity regimes, 29–30. See also gender forms of difference under, 29
agency in, 29 productive power of, 32–35
of anti-Agenda 21 activists, 164–169 of twentieth century, shifting of, 274–276
racism of, 167–168 for indigenous peoples, 275
in China, 101–104 in mononational models, 276
achievements of, 107–111 in multicultural rights for immigrant
limits of, 107–111 groups, 275
contestation in, 30 through multiculturalism, 275–276
counter-interpellation in, 34–35 through power-sharing with national
cultural differences and, recognition of, minorities, 275
252–258, 268–270 of UN, 165
differentiation of, 256–258 UN and, multiculturalism as part of, 160
double nature of, 252–254 world heritage regime as, 296–299
epistemic change and, 256–258 culture in, definitions of, 309–310
in Israel, 259–262 experts’ role in, 299–300
in Pakistan, 259–262 liberal governance in, 299–300
recognizability of, 254–256 through regional representivity, 307,
cultural heterogeneity and, 45 310, 312–313
expressions of cultural differences in, universality of, 306–310
29 Doyle, Michael, 137
function and purpose of, 32 Dreyfus, Mark, 228
gender inequality in, 21 Dupuy, Pierre-Marie, 223
global governance institutions and, 40 Duvall, Raymond, 32
global polity and, 199–201
conceptual arguments about, 202–204 Eagleton, Terry, 24
legitimacy of cultural differences as Early Modern Protestantism, 200
tradition, 199–201 Elias, T. O., 222
interpellation practices in, 32–34 empires. See also imperial pluralism;
in Israel imperialism
Index 371
liberal internationalism and, 152–153 transnational anti-gender movement

‘end of history’ notion, 139 in, hubs of, 284–287
English School theories, on culture, 7 gender inequality
ethnic pluralism, in Qing dynasty, 37 in diversity regimes, 21
‘femonationalism’ and, 21, 282
Fairbank, John King, 73–74 gender studies, criticisms of, 286–287
Fan Sui, 102 ghaza (holy conquest), 54, 61
Fanon, Frantz, 257 Giddens, Anthony, 151
Farmer, Paul, 196–197 Gingrich, Newt, 177
Fei-ling Wang, 110 global citizenship, 185–187
‘femonationalism,’ 21, 282 of refugees and displaced persons, 188
Field, David, 211–213 global governance, models of, 187–199
Fioretos, Orfeo, 98 AIDS epidemic
Ford, Henry, 239 global polity on, informal coordination
France, Manif pour Tous movement in, 284 of, 193–194
Francis (Pope), 286, 288–289 health and welfare services for,
freedom of expression, in Han dynasty, 103 191–192
Fullilove, Michael, 4 WHO and, 194
for global justice, 197–198
Ge Jiaxiong, 93–96, 105 for global polity, informal coordination
Ge Zhaoguang, 93–97 of, 193–197
on plurality of Chinese culture, for AIDS epidemic, 193–194
99, 103–104, 107 through issue-oriented professional
Geertz, Clifford, 200 networks, 193–194
gender, in diversity regimes, 277–293 for MDGs, 195
in cultural reproduction of nations, for health and welfare services, 190–193
277–279 for AIDS and HIV infection, 191–192
as female bodies, threats against, 278 external health expenditures for,
through gender symbolism, 277–278 191–192
through generational transmission, through NGOs, 193
278–279 U.S. involvement in, 192
in Hungary, 289 through ‘voluntourism,’ 192–193
multiculturalism and, as organisation of for human rights issues, 198–199
difference, 279–283 for refugees and displaced persons, 188
in liberal Western nations, 281–283 UNICEF, 199
SOGI rights, 280 NGOs’ role in
in Poland, 289 for health and welfare services, 190,
in Russia, 289–290 193
Universal Declaration on the Family and of refugees and displaced persons,
Marriage and, 288–289 188–189
in Western nations, 283–292 regulatory bodies and, 190
‘anti-family’ arguments in, 289–292 of refugees and displaced persons,
counter-interpellation strategies in, 188–189
287–292 human rights issues for, 188
criticism of gender studies in, through NGOs, 188–189
286–287 through regulatory bodies, 189–190
‘ideological colonization’ and, civil law under, 189–190
288–290 through NGOs, 190
Manif pour Tous movement, in France, trade agreements under, 189–190
284 WTO, 190
multiculturalism in, as organisation of global governance institutions, 185–186.
difference, 281–283 See also United Nations
religious groups in, 284–285, 288 diversity regimes and, 40
right-wing ethno-nationalist global international society
movements in, 285 cultural diversity as problem in, 116–133
372 Index
global international society(cont.) Haley, Nikki, 217

as culture-specific, 119–121 Han dynasty, 14
mediating mechanisms of, 126–133 coercive cultural homogeneity during,
through religious conflict, 122–124 101–107
diffusion of agency as result of, 118 achievements of, 107–111
European imperialism as influence on, freedom of expression and, 103
129–130 limitations of, 107–111
expansion of, during 20th century, 117 coercive Sinicization under, 35–36
international law in, cultural and Confucianism and, 107
civilisational context of, 127 cultural diversity in, suppression of, 37
IR and, 128 cultural identity in, 95
liberal optimism in, 130–132 state capacity during, 108–110
as interest-driven, 131 Three Kingdoms period after, 101
long-term impacts of globalisation, during Warring States Period, 108–109
118–119 health and welfare services, global
nationalism in, 123–124 governance models for, 190–193
the Great Separation and, 122–123 for AIDS and HIV infection, 191–192
in non-Western world, 125–126 external health expenditures for,
pluralist views of, 128–129, 135–136 191–192
religious conflict and through NGOs, 190, 193
as cultural diversity issue, 122–124 U.S. involvement in, 192
the Great Separation and, 122–123 through ‘voluntourism,’ 192–193
theoretical approach to, 115–116 Historical Atlas of China, 94
transnational violence in, 115 Historical Records (Shiji) (Sima Qian), 104
Westphalian concept of, 122–123 Hobsbawm, Eric, 34
global justice, governance models of, holy conquest. See ghaza
197–198 Holzer, Elizabeth, 188
global polity, 186, 199–204 Hong Kong, Mandarinization in, 89–90
development of, 186–187 Honneth, Axel, 256–257
diversity regimes and, 199–201 Hu Angang, 87–88
conceptual arguments about, 202–204 Hu Lianhe, 87–88
legitimacy of cultural differences as Hui, Victoria tin-bor, 35–36
tradition, 199–201 human rights
governance models for, 193–197 ‘Asian Values’ debate over, 219–220
for AIDS epidemic, 193–194 global governance models for, 198–199
through issue-oriented professional for refugees and displaced persons, 188
networks, 193–194 the ‘Jewish Problem’ and, 244–247
for MDGs, 195 AJC and, 246
liberal international order and, 201–204 minority rights as, 245–247
The Global Sexual Revolution (Kuby), 286, minority rights as, 245–247
291 under Universal Declaration of Human
Global Strategy, of ICOMOS, 307–309 Rights, 246
globalisation. See also anti-globalism Hungary, gender in diversity regimes in,
of liberal internationalism, 141 289
cultural diversity through, 150–152 Huntington, Samuel, 4, 119–120
long-term impacts of, 118–119 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, 123, 254–255
Great Britain, liberal internationalism in, hybrid legal cultures, 219–228
142
Great Separation, 122–123 ICIC. See International Committee for
Gross, Leo, 145–146 Intellectual Cooperation
Gülhane edict, 66 ICJ. See International Court of Justice
Guo Songtao, 212 ICOMOS. See International Council on
Monuments and Sites
Habsburg Empire, Ottoman Empire and, ICRW. See International Convention for
conflicts with, 61–63 the Regulation of Whaling
Index 373
ICTY. See International Criminal Tribunal in ‘Western’ states, 212–213, 219–228

for the Former Yugoslavia European influences on, 217–219
‘ideological colonization,’ 288–290 legitimate political authority in,
Ikenberry, John, 133, 161–162, 184–185, 213–214
271 international order
imperial pluralism, in Qing dynasty, 73 centralisation of, 37–38
imperialism communicative technologies and, 35
global international society influenced by, contemporary debates on, 324–328
129–130 cultural consensus and, 161–162
liberal internationalism and, 152–153 cultural diversity as influence on, 9
institutional neutralisation thesis, 41 cultural sociology of, 162–164
institutionalists, on international order, 4 decentralisation of, 37–38
International Committee for Intellectual definition of, 9, 25–27, 51
Cooperation (ICIC), 297 essential features of, 25–26
International Convention for the hybridity of, 325
Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), institutionalists on, 4
225–226 liberal democracies in, 141–143
International Council on Monuments and liberal internationalism and,
Sites (ICOMOS), 306–310 141–144, 327–328
credibility and, 303 in liberal democracies, 141–143
Global Strategy of, 307–309 nationalism in, 141–142
International Court of Justice (ICJ), liberals on, 4
228–231 under minzu system, 90–92
International Criminal Tribunal for the nationalism and, 35
Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Ottoman Empire and, 53–68
197–198 political authority and, 25–27
international law rules-based, 4
Chatham House guidelines on, 207–208, theoretical approach to, 5–22
211–213, 217–220, 222–224, 231 International Relations (IR)
in ‘civilized’ countries, 215–217 cultural diversity as concern in,
cultural diversity structured under, 209 3–4, 321–324
hybridity and, 209–210 global international society and, 128
legal cultures as influence on, 228–231 scholarship on, 5
in ‘Eastern’ states, 212–213 social order as concern in, 3–4
in Japan, 215–217 International Whaling Commission (IWC),
in global international society, 127 225–226
law of independence and solidarity, 222 internationalism. See also liberal
legal culture of, 211–215 internationalism
diversity regimes influenced by, cosmopolitan, 160, 164
228–231 Jewish, 239
as heterogeneous, 223 interpellation, 9
hybrid, 219–228 in diversity regimes, 32–34
patterns within, 225–228 in TCWO model, 75
natural law and, 208 IR. See International Relations
non-intervention principles, 211 Islamic identity, in Ottoman Empire,
“The Promotion of International Law,” 53–59
220–221 cultural syncretism of, 53–55
self-determination principles, 211 ghaza ideology as part of, 54, 61
sovereignty through, protection of, 222 Israel. See also Palestine
theoretical approach to, 207–210 colonial border commissions in,
TWAIL, 208, 214 262–268
UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, partition strategies in, 267–268
220–221 Peel Commission, 264–266
universality of, 211–212, 215–219, religion as influence on, 266–267
222–223 diversity regimes in
374 Index
Israel. (cont.) Zionism and, 242–244

cultural differences in, recognition of, as nationalism, 237
259–262 Jewish state, creation of, 244–247
national minorities in, Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 260–261
institutionalisation of, 260 ‘Two-Nation Theory,’ 261
political representation in, 260–262 Jones, Brian, 288
Zionist movement and, religious
differences within, 259 Kadizadeli movement, 50
as Jewish state, creation of, 244–247 Kallen, Horace, 236
IWC. See International Whaling Katzenstein, Peter, 96
Commission Kelly, Paul, 148
Khan, Muhammad Zafrullah, 267–268
Jacobs, Larry, 291 Kim, Jim Yong, 192, 196–197
Jafflin, Kristin, 194–195 Kissinger, Henry, 4, 93
jannisary corps, in Ottoman Empire, 55, 61, on Westphalian order, 12
64–65 Koch, Charles, 171
Japan, 225–228 Koch, David, 171
ICRW and, 225–226 Koch, Fred, 171
Jewish internationalism, 239 Koh, Harold, 220
Jewish nationalism, 237. See also Zionism Komov, Alexey, 291
the ‘Jewish Problem,’ in international Kositza, Ellen, 291–292
society Koskenniemi, Martti, 222–224
anti-Semitism fears and, 234–235, 238 Kuby, Gabriele, 286, 291
cosmopolitanism and, 249
cultural diversity and, 247–249 LaRouche, Lyndon, 171
definition of, 247–248 latitudinarianism, in Ottoman Empire, 44
self-identity for Jews through, 248–249 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 123, 207–208, 246
Westphalian system and, 247 law of independence and solidarity, 222
definition of, 235 Le Pen, Marine, 291–292
diversity regimes and, 233 League of Nations, 242–244
‘Eastern’ Jews, 233 ICIC, 297
outsider status of, acceptance of, 237 legal culture, of international law, 211–215
‘Western’ Jews’ aid to, mobilisation of, diversity regimes influenced by, 228–231
238–241 as heterogeneous, 223
emergence of, 232–234 hybrid, 219–228
international order, 234–241 patterns within, 225–228
human rights issues and, 244–247 legitimacy
AJC role in, 246 cultural diversity and, 35–36
minority rights as, 245–247 diversity and, 28
Jewish internationalism and, 239 cultural heterogeneity as result of, 28
Jewish state and, creation of, 244–247 liberal democracies, 147–150
League of Nations and, 242–244 world order in, 141–143
minority rights and, 242–244 liberal internationalism
human rights and, 245–247 anti-Agenda 21 activism and
nationalism and legitimacy challenges by, 178–180
development of, 235 mobilisation challenges through,
Jewish, 237 169–170
Zionism as, 237 cooperative security and, 155
from 1914-1939, 242–244 cultural diversity and, 144–153
‘Western’ Jews, 233 through civil society, 147–150
creation of ethnic identity by, 236 through globalisation, 150–152
mobilisation of, to aid ‘Eastern’ Jews, through hierarchy, 152–153
238–241 liberal modernity and, 150–152
after World War Two, 244–247 Westphalian sovereignty as influence
AJC and, 246 on, 145–147
Index 375
definition of, 155 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 148

empires and, 152–153 MDGs. See Millennium Development
‘end of history’ notion in, 139 Goals
evolution of, 138, 143–144 Mehmed II, 56
future of, 157–158 Meyer, John, 185–186, 193
globalisation of, 141 micropolitics. See Agenda 21
cultural diversity through, 150–152 Migdal, Joel, 187, 203
in Great Britain, 142 Mihal, Köse, 53–54
imperialism and, 152–153 Mill, John Stuart, 142, 148
liberal democracies and, 147–150 millenarianism, in Europe, 62
world order in, 141–143 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
limits of, 153–157 195
multilateralism and, 155 millet system, 12, 32–33, 42–43
nationalism and creation of, 56–57
civic, 154 institutionalisation of, 51–52
in world order, 141–142 Millward, James, 6, 107–108, 129
openness and, 155 Ming dynasty, 110
in postwar era, 140–141, 156 minority rights
progressive development and, 155 as human rights, 245–247
rights and protections and, 155 the ‘Jewish Problem’ and, 242–244
social purpose of, 140 minzu system, in PRC, 73, 82–87. See also
theoretical approach to, 137–141 centralised pluralism
under Wilson, 140, 142–143, 146–147, CCP and, 83–84, 87
156 de-extremification of, 91
world order, 141–144 diversity under, conflicting applications
in liberal democracies, 141–143 of, 83
nationalism in, 141–142 educational transformation programs
Liberal Leviathan (Ikenberry), 161–162 and, 91
liberal modernity, 150–152 future applications of, 90–92
liberal optimism, in global international Han assimilationist policies under,
society, 130–132 88–89, 91–92
as interest-driven, 131 identity-based resources influenced by,
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 151 85
Liu Bang, 102–103 international order under, 90–92
Locke, John, 142 Mandarinization in Hong Kong,
Lorca, Arnulf Becker, 6 89–90
Lorge, Peter, 95–96 as nationality system, 82–83
Lu Jia, 106–107 replacement of, 87–90
Ludden, David, 120 nationalism as factor in, 90
revision of, 87–90
Ma Rong, 88 Sinicization and, 82
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 258 modernity, liberal, 150–152
Mackinder, Halford, 117 The Moral Purpose of the State (Reus-Smit),
Mahmud II, 66–67 161–162
Mälksoo, Lauri, 223 Mufti, Aamir, 260
Mamluks, 60 Mullaney, Thomas, 84
Manchus multiculturalism, 160
centralised pluralism strategy of, 42–43 gendered diversity regimes and, as
in New Qing History, 80–81 organisation of difference, 279–283
self-segregation of, 42–43 in liberal Western nations,
Mandarinization, in Hong Kong, 89–90 281–283
Mao Zedong, 95–96 SOGI rights, 280
Markell, Patchen, 252 Muslim heterodoxy, Ottoman Empire,
Marshall, Louis, 243 68–69
Mazower, Mark, 142, 184–186, 189 the ‘Muslim Problem,’ 248
376 Index
national minorities, in Israel, Habsburg Empire and, international

institutionalisation of, 260 conflicts with, 61–63
nationalisation, in Ottoman Empire, historic vilification of, 49
63–68 international order and, 53–68
nationalism Islamic identity of, 53–59
communicative technologies and, 35 cultural syncretism of, 53–55
‘femonationalism,’ 21, 282 development of, 53–54
international order and, 35 ghaza ideology as part of, 54, 61
Jewish, 237 jannisary corps in, 55, 61, 64–65
the ‘Jewish Problem’ and Kadizadeli movement in, 50
development of nationalism, 235 latitudinarianism in, 44
Zionism and, 237 Manchus in
minzu system and, 90 centralised pluralism strategy of, 42–43
White, in U.S., 168 self-segregation of, 42–43
Zionism and, 237 millet system in, 12, 32–33, 42–43
natural law, 208 creation of, 56–57
the ‘Negro Problem,’ 248 institutionalisation of, 51–52
New Qing History, 78–82 Muslim heterodoxy in, 68–69
central tenets of, 79–80 nationalisation in, 63–68
Manchu identity in, 80–81 non-Muslims in, 65–66
Sinicization theory and, 79 Reform edict in, 66
New World Order (Wells), 170 religious freedom in, 66
New World Order, conspiracy theories Safavids and, international conflicts with,
about, 170–171 61–63
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), social world of, 63–64
in global governance models, role in Sunnitisation campaign in, 59–63
for health and welfare services, 190, 193 centralisation of power in, 59–61
of refugees and displaced persons, international rivalries during, 61–63
188–189 social disciplining as part of, 59
regulatory bodies and, 190 sovereignty claims during, 55–60
Tanzimat period in, 66
Obama, Barack, 4 taxation of non-Muslim citizens in, 50
Tea Party movement as response to, 174 Young Turk Revolution in, 67
Okin, Susan, 272–273 Owen, John, 138–139
On Cultural Diversity (Reus-Smit), 7–8, 27,
30 Pahuja, Sundhya, 218
openness, 155 Pakistan
Oppenheim’s International Law, 207–208 colonial border commissions in,
order. See international order; social order 262–268
Ottoman Empire Khan and, 267–268
Abbasid dynasty in, 60 Radcliffe and, 263–264
absolutism in, dismantling of, 63 religion as influence on, 266–267
academic approach to, 49–53 diversity regimes in
Armenian genocide at end of, 13, 67–68 through census categories, 259–260
beyliks in, 54 cultural differences in, recognition of,
centralisation of, 26–27 259–262
diversity regimes influenced by, 53–70 political representation in, 260–262
diversity regimes within, 12–13, 51–52 independence of, 263–264
institutionalisation of tolerance, 55–56 ‘Two-Nation Theory,’ 261
management of, 51, 69–70 Palestine
as metadoxy of state, 58 British Mandate for, 264–266
political centralisation as influence on, partition strategies for, 267–268
53–70 Peace of Augsburg, 146
Europe millenarianism and, 62 Peace of Westphalia, 28, 41
Gülhane edict, 66 cultural diversity management after, 43
Index 377
People’s Republic of China (PRC). racism. See also colorblind racism

See also minzu system of anti-Agenda 21 activists, 167–168
assimilationism in, 73 Radcliffe, Cyril, 263–264
cultural diversity issues in, 71–72 Rancière, Jacques, 256–258
diversity regimes in distribution of the sensible, 257
centralisation of, 85 Ranger, Terence, 34
institutionalisation of, 87 rational choice theories, on culture, 7
Phillips, Andrew, 163 Reagan, Ronald, 172
Pitkin, Hanna, 258 realist theories, on culture, 7
plural cultural tradition, in China, 93–95, refugees and displaced persons, global
99–101 governance models for, 188–189
Ge Zhaoguang on, 99, 103–104, 107 human rights issues for, 188
pluralism through NGOs, 188–189
centralised, 14, 44 religious conflicts, in global international
ethnic, 37 society
in global international society, 128–129, as cultural diversity issue, 122–124
135–136 the Great Separation and, 122–123
imperial, 73 religious freedom, in Ottoman Empire, 66
Poland, gender in diversity regimes in, 289 Republican Party
political authority Agenda 21 and, political opposition to,
in diversity regimes, 29 176–177. See also Agenda 21
forms of difference under, 29 Tea Party movement in,
international order and, 25–26 17, 159–160
Politics and Culture in International History colorblind racism of, 174, 176
(Bozeman), 319–320 Obama’s election and, 174
Popper, Karl, 236 Reus-Smit, Christian, 7–8, 27, 30, 161–162
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 255 Ricci, Matteo, 108
PRC. See People’s Republic of China right-wing ethno-nationalist movements,
“The Promotion of International Law,” 285
220–221 The Rising Tide of Color Against World
The Protestant Ethic (Weber), 200 Supremacy (Stoddart), 120
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 239 Roberts, Malcolm, 177
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 246
Qin dynasty, 14 Rosecrance, Richard, 138–139
coercive cultural homogeneity under, Rudd, Kevin, 102
101–107 Ruggie, John, 16, 161–162
achievements of, 107–111 rules-based international order, 4
freedom of expression and, 103 Ruse, Austin, 286–287
limitations of, 107–111 Russia, gender in diversity regimes in,
standardisation of, 103 289–290
coercive Sinicization under, 35–36 Russian-Chinese Declaration on the
cultural diversity in, suppression of, 37 Promotion of International Law,
political unity during, 101–102 133–134
Qing dynasty
aggressive assimilationism in, 14 Safavids, Ottoman Empire and,
centralised pluralism in, 14, 44 61–63
cultural diversity in, 13–15, 81–82 Scott, James C., 203
ethnic pluralism in, 37 Selim I, 60–61
imperial pluralism in, 73 sexual orientation and gender identity
New Qing History and, 78–82 (SOGI) rights, 280
central tenets of, 79–80 Shi Yinhong, 101
Manchu identity in, 80–81 Shils, Edward, 151
Sinicization theory, 79 Shotwell, James, 246
state capacity during, 110 Sikkink, Kathryn, 198
territorial expansion during, 80–81 Sima Qian, 104
378 Index
Sinicization theory, 100 academic validity of, universal acceptance

coercive, 35–36 of, 75–76
during Han dynasty, as coercive, 35–36 Confucianism in, 77
minzu system and, 82 interpellation in, 75
in New Qing History, 79 Sinicization in, 74–75
during Qin dynasty, as coercive, 35–36 tianxia concept in, 76–77
in TCWO model, 74–75 transnational violence, in global
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 185–186 international society, 115
Smith, Adam, 142, 150 Treaties of Westphalia, 37–38
social order, IR and, 3–4 Trump, Donald, 17, 179–180
SOGI rights. See sexual orientation and Tsuruoka, Koji, 226–227
gender identity rights Tsurutaro Senga, 214–215, 224–225
Song dynasty, 111 Tully, James, 27
sovereignty, through international law, TWAIL. See Third World approaches to
222 international law
Spengler, Oswald, 120 ‘Two-Nation Theory,’ for Pakistan, 261
Spykman, Nicholas, 127
state capacity, of China, 97, 108 Ueno Kagenori, 212
during Han dynasty, 108–110 United Nations (UN). See also Agenda 21;
during Qing dynasty, 110 global governance; world heritage
Stoddard, Lothrop, 120 regimeConvention on the Law of the
Stovel, Herb, 306 Sea, 220–221
Süleyman I, 60–61 cosmopolitan internationalism of,
Sun Yat-sen, 83 164
Sunnitisation campaign, in Ottoman diversity regime of, 165
Empire, 59–63 diversity regimes, multiculturalism as
centralisation of power in, 59–61 part of, 160
international rivalries during, 61–63 global governance, models of, for human
social disciplining as part of, 59 rights issues, UNICEF, 199
sovereignty claims during, 55–60 hegemonic concept of political
Swidler, Ann, 6, 27 membership, 164–166
syncretism. See cultural syncretism UNESCO, 294–297
credibility issues influenced by,
Takahashi, Sakuyei, 216 301–306
Tan Qixiang, 94 United States (U.S.)
Tang dynasty, 110 colorblind racism in, 160
Tanzimat period, in Ottoman Empire, cultural diversity issues in, 71–72
66 global health and welfare expenditures
Tarrow, Sidney, 96 by, 192
taxation, in Ottoman Empire, of international order and, political
non-Muslim citizens, 50 orientation to, 180
Taylor, Charles, 127 Republican Party in. See also Agenda 21
TCWO model. See Traditional Chinese Agenda 21 and, political opposition to,
World Order model 176–177
Tea Party movement, 17, 159–160 Tea Party movement in, 17, 159–160
colorblind racism of, 174, 176 colorblind racism of, 174, 176
Obama’s election and, 174 Obama’s election and, 174
Third World approaches to international White nationalism in, 168
law (TWAIL), 208, 214 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Three Kingdoms period, in China, 246
101 Universal Declaration on the Family and
tianxia (‘all under heaven’) concept, 76–77 Marriage, 288–289
Tilly, Charles, 96 U.S. See United States
Traditional Chinese World Order (TCWO)
model, 73–78 ‘voluntourism,’ 192–193
Index 379
Waldman, Morris, 245–246 heritage value criteria, 303–304

Warring States’ Period, in China, 37, 42, credibility of, 301–313
99–100 competing conceptions of, 311–313
Wars of Religion, 44 ICOMOS and, 303
Weber, Max, 108, 200 UNESCO and, 301–306
Weizmann, Chaim, 259 as diversity regime, 296–299
Wells, H. G., 170 culture in, definitions of, 309–310
Western nations. See United States; specific experts’ role in, 299–300
nations liberal governance in, 299–300
gendered diversity regimes in. See gender through regional representivity, 307,
Westlake, John, 207 310, 312–313
Westphalian settlement of 1648, 11–12, 44, universality of, 306–310
146 establishment of, 294–296
Westphalian system, 43–45. See also Peace international order-making through,
of Westphalia; Treaty of Westphalia 298–299
founding principles of, 145–146 future of, 313–315
in global international society, 122–123 ICIC, 297
the ‘Jewish Problem’ and, 247 ICOMOS, 306–310
Kissinger on, 12 credibility and, 303
liberal internationalism and, 145–147 Global Strategy of, 307–309
Peace of Augsburg, 146 under Nara Document on Authenticity,
White nationalism, in U.S., 168 309–310
WHO. See World Health Organization UNESCO and, 294–297
Wight, Martin, 27, 125, 161 credibility issues influenced by,
Wilson, Woodrow, 140, 142–143, 156 301–306
Fourteen Points, 146–147 World Trade Organization (WTO),
Wittrock, Bjorn, 151 190
Wolf, Lucien, 238
women, in cultural reproduction of nations Xi Jinping, 38, 76, 112
gender symbolism, 277–278 minzu system under, 89–90, 92
nation as female body, 278
world culture, 186 Ying-shih Yü, 111
World Health Organization (WHO), 194 Young Turk Revolution, in Ottoman
World Heritage Convention. See Empire, 67
Convention Concerning the Yuan dynasty, 110
Protection of World Cultural and
National Heritage Zarakol, Ayşe, 88, 98, 129
world heritage regime Zhou era, in China, 99–100
Convention Concerning the Protection of Zionism, 237, 242–244
World Cultural and National religious differences within,
Heritage, 297 259

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Culture and Order in World

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Understanding how cultural diversity relates to international order is an

a n d r e w p h i l l i p s is Associate Professor in International Relations at

This series, published in association with the Centre for International

List of Contributors page viii

Part II Historical Orders 47

Part III The Modern ‘Liberal’ Order 113

8 When Liberal States Bite Back: The Micro-politics of Culture 159

Part IV Constitution and Contestation 205

Part V Conclusion 317

Michael Barnett is University Professor of Political Science and Inter-

University of Oslo. Her dissertation, Becoming Recognizable: Postcolo-

of Order after Major Wars (2001) won the 2002 Jervis-Schroeder

Short Introduction (2020), On Cultural Diversity (2018), Individual

This book is the second of three volumes on cultural diversity and

has inﬂuenced the arguments advanced here. He thanks audiences at

Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit

and the decolonization of Europe’s empires threatened to undermine

alternative bears little scrutiny. As we shall see, institutions play an

even if not to the study of culture speciﬁcally. These scholars brought to

patterns of contention and struggles for recognition. Culture and Order in

While these assumptions obtain across all forms of political order, we

expression. Second, because diversity regimes create cultural and polit-

the heterogeneous cultural contexts in which they emerged, their con-

instituted, through the Westphalian settlement of 1648, a nascent order

regimes, in which a generally ‘latitudinarian’ approach to the manage-

Against this background, Millward examines the diversity regimes insti-

pluralist international society have never provided ‘a religiously and

order started to reveal its limits, Ikenberry argues. Modernity is clearly

Ikenberry’s concern that the social purposes that animated liberal

prevailing civic conceptions of nation by joining the civic nation and

In Chapter 2, we highlight the legitimation challenges that order builders

as a test of credibility, has undercut the authority of international scien-

Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit

concepts: international order and culture (and cultural diversity). We then

artefacts, and practices. These meanings are constitutive, shaping iden-

to be their essential feature: that they are all large-scale arrangements of

Diversity and Legitimacy

macro-conﬁgurations of cultural difference, the concept of diversity

Contestation and Change

the conceptual vocabulary of this volume, ‘counter-interpellated’. Berry

The Productive Power of Diversity Regimes

distinct Western and non-Western legal cultures (Chapter 10); and in

of print nationalism;28 the contemporary, internet-fuelled growth of anti-

Cultural Diversity and Legitimation Crises

of heretical forms of Islam and ethno-nationalist challengers in the six-

Centralization and Decentralization

internationally by tying sovereign political authority to nationality and

Plural and Multiscalar Diversity Regimes

and with different effects. Because international orders are large-scale

states and the rise of reactionary and radically anti-systemic transnational

Beyond Consensus and Neutralization

repudiate the idea that international order is dependent on cultural

Diversity Management as a Generic Practice

strategy of ‘centralized pluralism’. The institutions they adopted likewise

The Particularity of Westphalia

marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world.36

globally. Acknowledging Westphalia’s dark underbelly is essential, not

dealings with cultural diversity (at least in comparison to other polities of

us into thinking of Ottoman communities as easily divisible into Muslims

Ottoman state pursued an aggressive campaign of Sunnitisation towards

A Syncretic, Islamic Empire

more expansive; it appealed as much to the Muslim as the non-Muslim

Phillips & Reus-Smit 2020

Phillips & Reus-Smit 2020