This chapter explains how international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign states-system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of how the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR. It aims provoke thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

Introduction

This chapter explains the way international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign state system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states (often called the states-system) that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of the way in which the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR, with the aim of provoking your thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

International relations is often presented as a world of sovereign states, with each claiming exclusive jurisdiction within clearly demarcated territorial borders. From our vantage point in the early twenty-first century, this may seem like an enduring or even permanent and natural feature of international relations. But nothing could be further from the truth.

While the international order of sovereign states has indeed spread throughout the world, this is a distinctly modern phenomenon that only happened in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Prior to this, many areas of the globe organised their polities in different ways, and often had their own distinctive international/regional orders that were very different from those of Europe, where the sovereign states-system originated. Diplomatic relations between the European and the non-European worlds were not based on the exchange of ambassadors or equality among states, as they are today (Suzuki 2009; Zhang 2001). In fact, many of the non- European polities were often much more powerful than the European powers, and this meant that the Europeans had to follow the former's rules and norms if they were to trade or enter into some form of diplomatic relations (Suzuki, Zhang and Quirk 2014).

The spread of the sovereign states system that we see today happened primarily as a result of the imperialist expansion of the West (Europe and the United States). The nineteenth century brought about the Industrial Revolution and a significant increase in the military power of the West.

At first glance, the political economy of the East Asian international order seems to readily offer a ‘home’ for regulatory theories of international political economy (IPE), particularly the realist version of hegemonic stability theory, where the order is primarily interpreted as an expression of China's hegemonic interests. East Asia was long dominated by China, and the norms and rules of the regional international order – often (misleadingly) called the ‘Chinese world order’ – were hegemonic constructs shaped by Confucian philosophy (Fairbank 1968b; Zhang 2001). According to this story, official trade between its member states took the form of ‘tributary trade’, where goods were presented to the Chinese emperor in the form of tribute, and the emperor dispensed ‘official favours’ of trading rights and gifts. Furthermore, the order remained remarkably stable; its final collapse only came about in the wake of China's defeat by Japan in 1895, when China's last ‘tributary’, Korea, was declared an independent, sovereign state in the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

There are two ways of interpreting this international political order. First, it can be interpreted, in similar fashion to Barry Buzan and Richard Little, as a form of a command model of international relations in which ‘vassal kingdoms or tribes paid tribute to imperial suzerains or, depending on the balance of power, imperial suzerains paid appeasement bribes to supposed vassals in return for not being attacked by them’ (Buzan and Little 2000: 234).