Two Books on the West and World Order

As the West’s domination of the world wanes, two new books tackle classic questions about the roles Europe and America played in shaping the current global order. Acharya makes the spirited argument that today’s order is not simply a product of Western power and values but derived from ideas and institutional practices that emerged over thousands of years from ancient and premodern societies and civilizations all over the globe. In a fast-paced survey of 5,000 years of global history, Acharya finds precursors to the modern Western-led international order in often forgotten and overlooked earlier times and places: in ancient Persia, India, and China; in medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires; in Mesoamerica and Africa. Core ideas that are central to contemporary world order—diplomacy, economic interdependence, freedom of the seas, principles of protection of peoples, and cooperation among major states—were not invented in the West. The book acknowledges that Europe and the United States led the way in building democratic and rules-based societies, but it resists the notion advanced by most scholars that these centuries-long Western efforts were instrumental in establishing the principles and institutions of international order that set the world on a path away from empire and anarchy. Instead, the U.S.-led liberal international order is built on a logic of “imperial primacy,” and so the decline of the United States and the West should be welcomed. How a more fragmented and multipolar world system—what Acharya calls a “multiplex” order—will generate rules and cooperation to tackle twenty-first-century problems remains a bit vague.

Seigel offers a very different portrait of the West, emphasizing its unique world-historical role in shaping the global system and the direction of modernity. He tells the story of the West’s outsize role across the last five centuries as the chief agent in unifying the globe, fostering complex networks of connection, and making originally European ways of interaction into points of reference for the rest of the world. This European impact was multidimensional: in economics, it brought the Industrial Revolution; in politics, it produced a distinctive preoccupation with the sources and meaning of freedom and equality; and in society and culture, it led to a reconceptualization of the cosmos and the modern imagination. In explaining why this grand transformation happened in Europe and not in the other great civilizations, Seigel points to the West’s distinctive trajectory within the larger global system: after the fall of Rome, no aspiring hegemon succeeded in remaking Europe into a continent-sized empire, whereas its civilizational peers—China, Mughal India, and the Islamic dynasties—remained imperial in form. This fragmented and competitive early modern European landscape, Seigel argues, generated unique incentives for a dynamic process of “creative destruction,” laying the foundation of the great nineteenth-century explosion in wealth, power, and global imperial domination.

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