Posts Tagged ‘Mongol Empire’
“The metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility”*…
It feels only too clear that the global order that defined geopolitics, geoeconomics, and life in the world’s constituent parts is changing fundamentally. But what lies on the other side of this change? It’s a sucker’s bet to try to predict that outcome with any precision; there’s just too much fundamental uncertainty. As Antonio Gramsci said (of another era, though he might have been describing ours): “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Still, it’s important that we try. It’s only by wrestling with what’s going on to determine what’s possible, then what’s desirable, that we can shape a future in which we want to live.
The models and metaphors that we use are key to that wrestling. Our natural inclinations seem to tend in one of two directions. Either we tweak the models we have to try to accomodate the change that we see… which seems to work until (given that the change just keeps on coming) it doesn’t. Or we flip to the opposite– we imaging that everything simply falls apart. In geopolitical/geoeconomic terms, we assume that we get an incrementally-revised version of the world order that we’ve known; or we imagine dissolution (into what tends to be called a “multi-polar” world)… neither of which imagines materially different world orders that, as hard as they are to describe, are entirely plausible. Part of our problem in visualizing those new orders is our lack of models and metaphors for them…
The two pieces featured here posit frameworks and metaphors that, while they may or may not prove to be “accurate” in any comprehensive way, can help us open our thinking, and model the ways in which fresh metaphors can help us see problems anew and find new solutions.
First a piece from Trine Flockhart, from the Global (Dis)Order International Policy Programme of the British Academy and The Carnegoe Endowment for International Peace, part of a recent book)…
Is global order a thing of the past? Is the liberal international order fraying and what is
happening to previously stable alliances and cooperative relationships such as the
transatlantic relationship or the relationship between the United States and Canada? Not
such a long time ago, these questions would have been regarded as alarmist, but today the
prospect of large-scale order transformation is part and parcel of daily debates. This rupture
is probably as important as the transformation that followed the end of the Second World War,
and together with the simultaneous transformations in technology and science, the impact
on people and societies may well be on par with the Industrial Revolution. As Gramsci wrote
from his prison cell, we live ‘in times of monsters’ where ‘the old world is dying and the new one
struggles to be born’(Gramsci & Buttigieg 1992). In these circumstances, we see the political
consequences in populist parties as voters seek certainty in an uncertain and turbulent world,
whilst policymakers struggle to find their feet in the emerging world and seek to manage the
fallout from the ending of the old world.
To ensure that the policy decisions of today are relevant for the geopolitical reality of tomorrow,
policymakers must have a clear sense about the likely outcome of the ongoing transformation
– in other words what kind of global order will be in place and what kind of relationships can
be expected within it? These are big and complex questions that have no easy answers, yet
many scholars and policy practitioners seem to already have their answer – the world will be
multipolar (Ashford 2023; Bekkevold 2023; Borrell 2021). At least anecdotally, it seems there
is widespread agreement that the international system is transforming from a unipolar system
anchored in American hegemony, to a multipolar system reflecting the shift of power to a larger
number of states. However, although the idea that the international system will be multipolar
is persuasive, and although the use of analytical concepts such as polarity can be useful for
gaining an overview of complex matters, we must be aware that polarity as a concept rests on
a specific form of analysis that tends to emphasize states, sameness, power and interest, and
which is only partially sighted when it comes to values, identities, lesser powers and complexity.
I worry that the focus on multipolarity, means that policymakers are trying to understand the
current order transformation through conceptual lenses that are blurred and not very relevant.
This article presents a different position. It starts from the counterintuitive position that
it is logically implausible for the global ordering architecture to return to an international
system that was in place a century ago. Those suggesting that we are currently witnessing
a return to multipolarity emphasise shifts in the global distribution of power and the rising
number of powerful states, most notably China. These are certainly important changes, but
The arrival of the multi-order world and its geopolitical implications
other important changes are overlooked, which suggest a fundamentally different global
ordering architecture is in the making. Continuing to portray the world as multipolar belies the
complexity, significance, and extent of many other important changes. This paper presents an
alternative interpretation of the ongoing global order transformation, demonstrating why it will
be neither bipolar nor multipolar but rather multi-order.
A multi-order world is a global ordering architecture consisting of several international orders.
Gramsci was right that order transformations take time, so the multi-order architecture is still
in development, but can be glimpsed through the existence of three independent international
orders already clearly visible within the global ordering architecture – the American-led liberal
international order (albeit that American leadership under Trump is currently in question),
the Russian-led Eurasian order, and the Chinese-led Belt and Road order.1 Other orders and
other forms of relationships of importance are also in the making suggesting a more complex
architecture than a multipolar one. The paper does not claim to present a full picture of the
emerging ordering architecture but seeks merely to demonstrate the importance of embracing
new thinking to contemplate the possibility of an entirely new form of international system
in which multiple international orders with very different dynamics and different behavioural
patterns make up the global ordering architecture. The perspective brings into light important
relationships and dynamics that are not readily apparent in the multipolar perspective –
especially that relationships within orders are just as important as relations between different
international orders, and it leaves room for considering other aspects than powershifts and for
acknowledging the importance of other actors than just a handful of “pole states”. I argue that
awareness of the subtle differences between the multi-order architecture and more traditional
polarity-based understandings is an essential first step towards timely strategic policymaking
fit for the multi-order world.
The paper proceeds in four moves. First, I outline three significant events over the past four
years which only partially fit the polarity-based narrative. Second, I outline the multi-order
perspective by focusing on order as a condition, a social domain, and as practices of ordering.
Thirdly, I show how changes in three characteristics of the global system indicate a multi-order
world rather than a multipolar one. Finally, I briefly consider some of the broader geopolitical
implications of a multi-order world and demonstrate the importance of ordering dynamics
within and between international orders. The picture that emerges challenges some of the
most foundational assumptions about international relations and global order including the
prospect of achieving convergence around common rules in multilateral governance to meet
shared challenges…– “The arrival of the multi-order world and its geopolitical implications”
The second, by Jessica Burbank, takes a different– and in some ways, more provocative– tack…
… A new world order is here. States (countries) are no longer the highest form of power globally. Power has shifted to wealthy individuals who work in groups and operate across borders: syndicates of capital.
Syndicates of capital cannot be categorized as legal or illegal. They exist primarily in the extralegal sphere, where either no regulations apply to their behavior or, where laws do exist, there is no entity powerful enough to enforce them in a manner that asserts control over the syndicates’ behavior.
In many occasions, capital is both the power source for syndicates, and the shared goal. Wealthy individuals form syndicates if their strategic objectives align. Those objectives typically revolve around securing new capital flows and preserving existing ones. Syndicates’ power is vast but fragile. If all members of a syndicate were cut off from accessing capital and the resources they control, they would lose their power.
Author’s Note: Sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorists, but I am not speaking of secret societies, the illuminati, or a cabal. Syndicates of capital do not hide their power, nor do they operate in secret. Their multi-billion dollar deals and contracts are publicly disclosed. They are also not united in ethnic background, religious, or political beliefs.
It is not enough to say: ‘democracies are being replaced with oligarchies because wealthy individuals have too much power in society.’ That may be true, but is not the full picture. Oligarchies are states run by a small group of wealthy individuals. That may accurately describe the politics of one nation, but it does not suffice to describe how power is organized on a global scale.
‘Global oligarchy’ also falls short of describing how power is organized in our world, because there is not one small group of wealthy individuals, there are many, and they compete. Still, the identification of oligarchs is useful for global political analysis because many of the oligarchs within a state also operate globally as leaders or members ofsyndicates of capital.
The new world order emerged before it could be identified. Platitudes like: “our world has gone crazy,” served as an emotional crutch, and an implicit acknowledgement that we lack a sound analysis of contemporary global power. What has felt like an ineffable force, an inexplicable undercurrent of darkness, is the ambiance of global dominion by syndicates of capital.
Though abstract, examining how global power is organized is essential to understanding the world we live in. Developing a coherent framework for evaluating global affairs allows us to more effortlessly make sense of current events. You’ll be surprised how quickly things click and how easily your mind makes connections when you absorb the news with a conception of syndicates of capital…
Both are eminently worth reading in full: whether or not one buys all– or any– of either set of conclusions, the mental calisthenics are the point…
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As we muse on metaphors, we might recall that it was on this date in 1279 that Mongol forces led by Kublai Khan were victorious at the Battle of Yamen— ending the Song dynasty in China. Kublai has already conquered parts of northern and southern China, and had declared the Yuan dynasty (with himself as the emperor “Great Yuan”). With the fall of the Song, the Mongols ruled all of continental East Asia under Han-style Yuan rule, which was a division of the Mongol Empire.
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”*…
Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity. But, Manvir Singh asks, do we have the right measure of their success?…
[Last] September, Pope Francis became the first leader of the Catholic Church ever to visit Mongolia. It must have been a humbling stopover. The country has fewer than fifteen hundred Catholics. The welcoming ceremony, in Ulaanbaatar’s main square, attracted a few hundred spectators—a crowd less than a thousandth the size of one that had gathered to see him in Lisbon a month earlier. One of the attendees had come out to do his morning Tai Chi and unknowingly ended up at the event…
Not everyone understood why the Pontiff was there. A caterer at a banquet for the Vatican entourage asked a Times reporter, “What are Catholics again?” But the Pope came prepared. Speaking to diplomats, cultural leaders, and the Mongolian President, he celebrated the religious freedom protected under the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—“the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development.” He also celebrated “the Pax Mongolica,” the period of Mongol-enforced stability across Eurasia, citing its “absence of conflicts” and respect “of international laws.”
Many earlier Christians would have been staggered by Francis’s words…
[Singh recounts the long Christian– and Muslim– tradition of seeing the “Mogol Horde” as blood-thirsty savages…]
But Pope Francis was far from alone in challenging the old tropes. “We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease,” Marie Favereau writes in “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World” (Harvard). Her work joins other recent volumes—Kenneth W. Harl’s “Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization” (Hanover Square), Anthony Sattin’s “Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World” (Norton), and Nicholas Morton’s “The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East” (Basic)—in a decades-long effort to overhaul narratives about the barbarity of the nomad, and especially Mongols. These works advance a kind of steppe restoration. Instead of blood-drunk man-beasts, we meet crafty administrators who supported debate, commerce, and religious freedom. Yes, they overran cities, but state formation often demanded it. And, yes, they enslaved, but so did lots of societies, and many were much crueler.
The steppe restoration typifies what historians call the global turn, a larger project of shifting histories away from nation-states and colonialist defamation and toward the peoples and processes that have knotted us together. It’s a survey of shadows, a tracing of negative space. It focusses on peoples who, in Sattin’s words, “have long been confined to the anecdotes and afterthoughts of our writers and histories.” These are some of the most maligned groups in historical chronicles: the uncivilized; the barbarians at the gate; the tribes who seem to appear from some demonic portal, destroy everything in sight, and then recede back into darkness. The steppe restoration repositions them. It treats them as subjects in their own right—as peoples who have their own histories, who formed societies no less complex than the sedentary states they confronted, and who helped craft the world we inhabit.
…
The idea that the Mongols were the architects of modernity is a mainstay of the new scholarship. Sattin presents an argument similar to Harl’s, adding the compass to the list of innovations sent westward, although he acknowledges that other nomads, such as the Arabs, helped deliver them to Europeans. Both authors are able to draw upon such earlier work as the anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” (2004), a charming, poetic, and laudatory introduction to the Mongols that, more than any other book, helped advance the steppe restoration.
All these chroniclers tell a similar story of the Mongols’ ascent. A modest, resourceful, and sometimes ruthless hunter-nomad named Temujin, having been abandoned by his clan as a nine-year-old, united the tribes of the eastern steppes for the first time in four centuries. In 1206, at a gathering of steppe leaders, he was bequeathed the title Chinggis Khan, which means something like “fierce” or “oceanic” ruler. (The English “Genghis” comes from translations of Persian sources.) In the next two decades, he and his followers became the first to bring under one dominion the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean, an area nearly as wide as the steppe itself.
After his death, in 1227, Genghis Khan’s domain continued to swell until it covered some twenty per cent of the world’s landmass, from Syria to Korea. In the east, his son Ogedei subdued northern China. When Kublai Khan, Genghis’ grandson, overtook the south, he unified the country and founded the Yuan dynasty…
…
The steppe restoration shows the strengths—and the limitations—of the resplendent new discipline of “global history.” Often said to have begun around the start of the twenty-first century, this approach emerged amid the excitement of a commerce-connected, borderless world. In 2005, Thomas Friedman published his treatise of globalization, “The World Is Flat.” The next year, three academics started The Journal of Global History. Writing in the first issue, the British historian Patrick O’Brien declared that global history aimed to leave behind “the arrogance of Rome” as well as “the scientific and technological triumphalism of the West.” Rather than building stories around the greatness of Europe (or of the Caliphate, or Confucianism), he advocated for a study of “connexions” and “comparisons” that would also spotlight “the manifold achievements of more peoples, communities, and cultures over long spans of human history.”
The emerging discipline had to overcome centuries of historiographic hubris. Writing about other peoples has long been in service of self-glorification…
[Singh traces the habit from Herodotus through colonial/imperial histories to the more modern likes of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (1997), Niall Ferguson’s “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (2011), and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail” (2012), and Ian Morris’s “Why the West Rules—for Now.”]
Global history was supposed to transcend all such forms of parochialism, and this goal, at first, seems realized in the steppe restoration. The nomads, we are told, created cities, enforced peace, and guaranteed religious freedom. They encouraged trade and cultural interaction, recombining ideas, peoples, and technologies—with world-shaking consequences.
Yet a paradox runs through these books. Steppe peoples are most noteworthy, they seem to assure us, when they look like rich, settled societies. They have a role in “world history” insofar as they affect the rise and fall of sedentary, often European, polities. And so the steppe restoration ends up affirming the standards it set out to challenge.
Consider how historical significance is determined. Scholars routinely scoff at Hegel’s comment that history ended in the West, and yet the steppe restoration shows just how ingrained the notion remains…
The new global history has eagerly set out to establish that steppe nomads displayed key features of classic civilizations and liberal democracies—writing, urbanization, and apparently progressive values. But as long as these advances are considered signs of sophistication, nomads will come up short…
Global history’s professed aim of decentering world history requires a more sophisticated grasp of what sophistication looks like. In the case of nomadic societies, we need to shift our orientation from the static to the flexible, from social complexity embodied in brick and bureaucracies to something that dwells within networks: an ever-responsive capacity for large-scale collective action. What made nomads impressive, after all, is what made them unique. They lived in enormous, travelling societies. They subsumed diverse ethnic groups and could mobilize for war almost instantly. They overran the empires at their borders and ruled over them, sometimes for generations. Mongol organization reached its pinnacle in those hordes—self-sufficient, mobile units that contained as many as a hundred thousand people and that transported homes, statues, workshops, palaces, and supply lines. Through settled eyes, we might call these “moving cities,” yet the phrase misses their almost aqueous nature, their ability to restructure around births, departures, and political scuffles.
Historians have worked to show that, in Sattin’s words, “the nomad story is neither less wonderful nor less significant than ours.” But we’ll still be treating ourselves as the measure of everything unless we learn to revise our sense of significance. This may be the greatest gift a more global history offers us: greatness redefined…
The discipline of “global history,” shifting history away from nation-states toward trans-regional processes, was meant to leave behind the ethnocentrism of what had preceded it. The new steppe scholarship shows how tricky a task that is: “The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us,” from @mnvrsngh in @NewYorker.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we rethink the rudiments, we might recall that it was on this date in 27 BCE that Gaius Julius Caesar (born Gaius Octavius) was given the added honorific “Augustus” and became the first Roman Emperor.
“God has no religion”*…
Your correspondent is off for his annual sojourn in the land of dunes and deep-fried food (this year, with a glimpse of the eclipse); regular service should resume on or around August 28. Meantime…
Not since the angel Gabriel visited Muhammad in a cave around 610 AD, informing him that he is God’s prophet, has there been a new globally influential religion with hundreds of millions of followers. Though the world’s religions are very dynamic, and major faiths continue to shift and evolve in ritual and doctrine, the world today is dominated by the same four faiths that dominated the globe a millennium ago: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. According to a 2012 Pew study, 92 percent of religiously affiliated people around the globe belong to one of these four faiths.
While some relatively recent faiths have succeeded in recruiting millions of followers—such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism), Scientology, and Baha’i—their numbers of adherents are dwarfed in scale by these earlier four. The Baha’i, for example, are a relatively numerous recent faith with an estimated 7 million adherents. That sounds impressive, but it still means that just 0.1 percent of humanity has joined Baha’ism—and the faith has been around for 150 years (since 1863).
Faiths, of course, don’t have to be numerous to deliver spiritual sustenance to their followers, or even to be influential, as Judaism (a religion of 14 million) shows. Still, the small scale of new faiths over the past 1,500 years since Islam raises a question: Why, if creating new faiths is an inextinguishable feature of the human condition, have new religions had such limited recent success?…
The story of one imprisoned prophet illustrates the difficulties of getting a “baby religion” off the ground: “Why Are There No New Major Religions?”
C.F. also: Britannica‘s piece on New Religious Movements.
* Mahatma Gandhi
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As we direct our prayers, we might spare a thought for Genghis Khan, nee Temüjin; he died on this date in 1227. The founder of founder of the Mongol Empire (which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death), he launched the Mongol invasions that conquered most of Eurasia, bringing the Silk Road under cohesive political control. Though renown for the brutality of his campaigns, he practiced meritocracy– and religious freedom.
Imperial dreams…
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.– “Ozymandias” Percy Bysshe Shelly (1818)
The Roman Empire encircled the Mediterranean:
The Mongol Empire once stretched from the Pacific to the Danube:
More recently, the Ottoman Empire was almost as large:
While the British Empire was the most widely dispersed:
As we remark with Shelley that empires come and empires go, we might recall that it was on this date in 1781 that the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were finally ratified, and the Second Continental Congress became the Congress of the Confederation of the United States of America.
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