Not only that, there were several Prime Ministers who came from Scotland.

As to unipolarity, you’re right of course, we do live in a unipolar world without hegemony, if that means the hegemony of a state. But I’d bet that’s our anomalous situation, our new category, and only made possible by advanced levels of communication and by the internationalization of capital, your “rather different can of worms.”——

You seem to be committing the common mistake of assuming that all imperial relations are …somehow more inherently coercive than… other forms of political domination.

Prestige politics writ large, and writ dumb, basically.

Sorry for being a bore, but it’s probably not reasonable to expect the XXIst century to be a “slower news century”, so to speak, than the XXth century. And it’s probably illusory to expect the US or even the West as a whole to be making most of the news. And it’s those news, and not the “policy mix” associated with the American “imperial order”, that will determine the fate of American and Western global pre-eminence.

Not that Nexon/Wright appear to be oblivious to that, mind. They do come across as somewhat coy, however. Ghosts of Beltway present, one reckons.

Oh, and next time I hear a comparison with the Roman Empire I’m afraid I’ll have to barf. The US, it pains me to say, is no new Rome. Those comparisons go well beyond innocuous attempts to point out structural similarities.

The fact that Catalonia has at various times sought autonomy or independence from Spain does not mean, for example, that it was part of the periphery of the 16th Century Spanish empire.

Some would argue that it was, indeed. Almost the entirety of the burden associated with the expensive and mostly ill-advised wars waged by the Spanish Habsburgs was born by the kingdom of Castile. The contributions of the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, and of Navarre (which was incorporated into Castile but enjoyed broad privileges or fueros ) was far more modest, and those of Portugal and the County of Barcelona (i.e. Catalonia) almost non-existent. This led the valido or favourite of king Philip IV, the Count-Duke of Olivares, to the formulation of the Unión de Armas i.e. an attempt during the Thirty Years War to involve the non-Castilian parts of the Empire more directly in the war effort.

Add to that that Catalonia suffered greatly due to the relative commercial marginalization of the Mediterranean basin, absenteeism and neglect on the part of the nobility and the viceroys, widespread banditry, etc. and you have a pretty debatable part of the imperial “core”.

Catalonia only became more involved in the destinies of the Spanish empire—by the time already demoted to middling power status, of course—after the reign of Philip IV, and more notably after the arrival of the Spanish Bourbons, with the (forced) transformation of Spain into more than a dynastic conglomerate and the first tentative signs of industrialization in Catalonia.

Catalan nationalists, a notoriously whiney lot, have built an entire mystique around all those grudges, turning in particular the first Bourbon king, Philip V, into some sort of blood-drinking bugaboo. Fuckers have turned what once was the most cosmopolitan patch of the Iberian peninsula into a pretty parochial place. But that’s neither here nor there, of course.

Just nitpicking, without much of a point in mind. Apart from showing off and being a bit of a prick, that is.

Scotland certainly supplied imperial agents and participated greatly in the British Empire. But whether that makes it part of the metropople and not a “core-periphery” (or some other awkward neologism0? That’s a subject of not insignificant debate, including, I imagine among contemporary Scots.

No, it’s an indication that the “cores” of empires can be complicated things, while nonetheless still being distinct from the periphery.

The fact of the matter is that the British Empire of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries was run by a coalition of England and Scotland, with Scotland being the junior partner. Much of Scotland’s wealth during that time was built on the empire, through involvement in imperial trade, through participation in the administration of the empire, through the textile industry (benefitting from British control of India, which transformed the Indian textile economy into one of supplying raw materials to Great Britain and consuming the textiles manufactured there), the shipbuilding industry, etc., etc.

You seem to be assuming that the “core” must be some homogeneous entity with no internal divisions, but that isn’t necessarily the case. The fact that Catalonia has at various times sought autonomy or independence from Spain does not mean, for example, that it was part of the periphery of the 16th Century Spanish empire.

I disagree. What about the Roman Empire after Constantine? Or the Byzantine Empire?

Show me the bit in the New Testament where Christ argues against slavery (or against imperialism, for that matter).

When the Spaniards invaded the Americas, they were motivated by Christian motives. To begin with, they needed gold to fight the Muslim hordes (which posed, to coin a phrase, an ‘existential threat’ to Christendom). That was the reason Colombus went to ‘India’ (as he thought) in the first place. When they arrived, they discovered peoples who were not Christian: ergo, of a lower level of humanity to themselves. The Indians were offered a choice: convert or die.

This is too big an issue to go into here, but one last thing: Christianity is not JUST based on the New Testament. It is ALSO based on the old testament whose attitude to things like genocide, rape and slaughter is….shall we say…more down to earth.

“Contract” here is used as an analytical term to describe (asymmetric and coercive) relationships that nonetheless contain tacit or explicit commitments between two parties, not in the normative sense of an equal agreement between two autonomous, rational actors. Even “give us tribute or we’ll destroy your cities” involves a contractual commitment to not destroying said cities if tribute materializes. And our point is, in fact, that empires that fail to uphold their end of the relationship often get into trouble.

Has there been “unipolarity” without “hegemony?” If we treat these terms as absolute (a position rejected in the paper), then “no.” But unipolarity does not translate into universal hegemony in the current period, and we have had hegemonic relations in the absence of unipolarity. One could, of course, imagine that an isolationalist US would be a “unipole without hegemony. But I think you mean here a rather distinctive set of arguments about the hegemony of “capital,” which is a rather different can of worms.

Hank: that’s an interesting implication. I wouldn’t quite put it in those terms, as there are tradeoffs here between conditions for inter-periphery coordination and the immense benefits that accrue from encouraging economic exchange.

Nick L: I hope it works out. Thanks for the kind words. One note: we don’t follow the conventional indirect/direct rule distinction, and thus include both agents from the core and empowered local elites as “intermediaries.” So, Bremmer was an intermediary, but so is Talabani. The mileage here varies tremendously, of course, which is where things get interesting.

The USSR, in my view, combined aspects of what we call imperial rule with conventional state rule. Alex Cooley (of the 3 Quarks Daily piece Henry linked to) has a provocative book, Logics of Hierarchy that deals with this.

Yes, that’s saying too much.

Some questions:
Has unipolarity ever existed without resulting in hegemony?
Does not one fade inevitably into the other?

How is this discussion in any way outside the logic of the unipolar hegemonic or imperial world-view? I was raised to think of adults as opposed to such things.
Maybe I’m alone in this.

Alex Cooley:

“But the more counterintuitive point is that America’s use of overtly imperial systems is actually not as widespread as it was during the 1960s and 1970s.
One major reason for this decline is that globalization – contra the claims of many globalization critics[?] – undermines the conditions necessary for effective imperial management by the center.”

As regards the vulgar behaviors of empire, slaughter of innocents etc. I thought we’d also come to assume that the United States was a bit schizophrenic about that. Surely the Romans weren’t, and the 19th century English were much less so than we are. This has to do with the increasing contradictions of christian modernity and the new proximity of the ruled to the ruler. The crises of 19th and early 20th century empires (and their internal social life as well) were the result of that. Modern European empires were based on hypocrisy. The Romans were simply honest Barbarians fighting others of their own kind. Gandhi won by daring the British to be as Christian as he was. That’s the end of Empire with a whimper.
And of course The Germans attacked the Jews in a frenzied panic not because they were separate but when they were assimilating (no longer separate).
Category panic.

Of course empires will find different ways to run different parts of their empire. Different societies have different weaknesses and are best ruled with understanding of just what those are. Empires need to be run practically. Empire is a business first isn’t it?

Other than that the language used in describing the relationship of ruler to ruled is akin to that describing a rape as “a relation of negotiated inequality.”
Simply bizarre.
As is the nearly pathological denial of psychological historical and cultural specificity and complexity.
Is there a heterodox school of political science?
My god I hope someone’s working on that.

Example In the Nexon/Wright structure “restricting free trade is a means of imperial control.” Would certainly be an interesting research topic.

Most of today’s hot issues could be examined that way.