Response to Barry Buzan and George Lawson

Abstract

Buzan and Lawson propose a wide critique that contends that important developments that occurred during the “long 19th century” (1789–1914) have been ignored or misconstrued by most other international relations theorists. And they assert their own version of what was important about the 19th century as the period when fundamental features of the world-system emerged that are still central in the 21st century. They are right that the 19th century was important because for the first time, there was a nearly global single network of allying and fighting states organized around the rise of the European great powers and the encirclement of China, long the hegemonic great power of a largely separate East Asian international system. Buzan and Lawson assert that the rise of the European Great powers was made possible by “a novel configuration which linked industrialization, the rational state, and ideologies of progress.” Buzan and Lawson improve upon the more usual core-centric bias in international relations by focusing attention on the important role played by the Global South in the reproduction and transformation of international orders. They note that it was during the 19th century that huge economic inequalities between the European Great Powers and Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerged. Those with machine guns, medicine, industrial power, railroads, and new forms of organization gained a pronounced advantage over those with limited access to these sources of power. The resulting inequalities fostered the emergence of a hierarchical international order, the establishment of which defines the basic commonality between the 19th century and the contemporary world (Buzan and Lawson 2013). They see the non-core Global South as both a field of competition in which the core powers sought …