Power and the Varieties of Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 37

Across world history, states have grown powerful and built hierarchically organized polit-
ical orders. Indeed, for most of the last two thousand years, world politics has been dominated
by major states seeking to extend their rule over other people. For most of these centuries, the
vast majority of the world's population has lived—for better or worse—within imperial polit-
ical orders of one kind or another. In the ancient world, Athens, Rome, China, and the Mon-
gols built far-flung and long-lasting empires that incorporated diverse peoples. In the modern
era, the European great powers built empires and colonial systems that extended throughout
Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 25 In each instance, a hierarchical political entity ruled from
the top. “Violence and day-to-day coercion were fundamental to how empires were built and
how they operated,” observe the historians Burbank and Cooper. “But as successful empires
turned their conquests into profit, they had to manage their unlike populations, in the process
producing a variety of ways to both exploit and rule.” 26
Hierarchical systems are marked by ordered relations between units where power and au-
thority is centralized and the units in the system are functionally differentiated. In a hierarch-
ical international order, states are integrated vertically within well-defined superordinate and
subordinate positions. In anarchical systems, order is the equilibrium that results from the
balancing of a decentralized array of competing states. In hierarchical systems, order is estab-
lished or imposed by a leading state wielding concentrated power and authority. Hierarchical
orders are characterized by stratified relations between leading and secondary states. 27 Bey-
ond this, hierarchical orders can vary widely in terms of the degree to which superordinate
and subordinate roles are established and maintained by such factors as coercive power, le-
gitimate authority, institutionalized relations, and a division of labor. 28
In this view, international order is shaped by a succession of powerful—imperial or he-
gemonic—states that rise up to organize and dominate the system. They create and enforce
the rules and institutions that ensure a stable order in which to pursue their interests. Change
occurs as great powers rise and decline and as they struggle over the rules and institutions
of order. Robert Gilpin provides a classic account of the dynamics of international relations
in these terms, arguing that “the evolution of any system has been characterized by success-
ive rises of powerful states that have governed the system and have determined the patterns
of international interactions and established the rules of the system.” 29 Steady and inevitable
shifts in the distribution of power among states gives rise to new challenger states that even-
tually engage the leading state in hegemonic war. This in turn gives rise to a new hegemonic
state that uses its dominant position to establish an order favorable to its interests.
Within a hegemonic order, rules and rights are established and enforced by the power ca-
pacities of the leading state. Compliance and participation within the order are ultimately en-
sured by the range of power capabilities available to the hegemon—military power, financial
capital, market access, technology, and so forth. Direct coercion is always an option in the
enforcement of order, but less direct “carrots and sticks” also maintain hegemonic control.