Qiang Shigong: What are the three pillars of US hegemony?
Source: Institute of Chinese Studies, Fudan University; Research Base of Chinese and Foreign People-to-People Exchanges at Peking University
WeChat platform editor: Zhou Yue
Small i Introduction
Since 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the world and has had a profound impact on the world landscape. In the post-epidemic era, where will the world pattern go? What is the essence of the game between China and the United States? How will "deep globalization" affect the world of the future? Qiang Shigong, director of the Department of Social Sciences of Peking University, professor of the Law School, and academic committee member of the Sino-foreign People-to-People Exchange Research Base, wrote an article on this issue, deeply interpreting the "world empire" system constructed by the United States and the future development of global governance.
Xiao I will reprint the three parts of this article in three installments: "The Legal Order of World Empires", "The Inherent Contradictions between 'Deep Globalization' and World Empires", and "'One Under Heaven': Inheriting and Surpassing 'May Fourth'" for the benefit of readers.
Strong world gong
Director of the Department of Social Sciences of Peking University
Professor, Peking University School of Law
He is an academic member of the Research Base for Humanities Exchanges between China and Foreign Countries at Peking University
This article is about 9900 words and takes about 25 minutes to read
The covid-19 pandemic (COVID-19) that has swept the world has undoubtedly had a profound impact on the global landscape. Different scholars have begun to analyze the global pattern in the post-pandemic era based on different theoretical paradigms. Some european scholars have compared the new crown epidemic to the Black Death in the European Middle Ages, analyzing its far-reaching impact on human behavior habits and political order¹. The US "Foreign Policy" magazine predicts that the new crown epidemic will become the last straw to crush economic globalization, the world cannot return to the mutually beneficial and win-win globalization state of the early 21st century, nationalism will aggravate the trend of great power confrontation and strategic decoupling, resulting in a reshuffle of the international power structure, and the Sino-US strategic game has become the center of gravity². However, in order to truly understand the nature of the Sino-US game, we cannot simply fall into the theoretical perspective of international realism, and simply regard the contest between China and the United States as a contest of power between major powers, thus simply boiling it down to the "Thucydides Trap". On the contrary, we need to shift our theoretical perspective from the paradigm of international relations based on the thinking of sovereign states to the imperial paradigm based on the global order, so as to fully understand the world imperial system constructed by the United States. Today's Sino-US relationship is a contradiction between the designers and leaders of the world imperial system and the participants and rebels of the world imperial system.
It is precisely based on the thinking of the global order that we must realize that the contradiction between the historical trend of "deep globalization" and the current world imperial system dominated by the United States is becoming more and more acute. The pandemic has shown this long-standing contradiction in an extreme form. The epidemic means that the advancement of globalization must rely on mutual cooperation, and mankind has formed a more closely related community of common destiny, and a new internationalist trend of thought is needed to overcome nationalism, populism and hegemonism. The world imperial system constructed by the United States that serves American interests constantly provokes conflict and hatred between countries, tearing apart great power cooperation and global cooperation. Thus, the current situation is particularly similar to the historical context of the period of great changes in the international order in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In that shock of globalization encountering anti-globalization, it was ultimately the two theoretical narratives of globalization of communists and liberals that liberated Europe and the world from monroeism, nationalism, populism, racism and even Nazism. Therefore, when we discuss Sino-US relations today, we cannot simply fall into the contest of power in the great power game under the realist thinking, but should pay attention to the global governance system laid down since World War II (especially since the end of the Cold War) and the problems it faces from the perspective of a community with a shared future for mankind.
It is from the perspective of the global order and global governance that the COVID-19 pandemic has not fundamentally changed the direction of the evolution of the global order since the end of the Cold War, but has accelerated this historical process with new problems. We cannot exaggerate the COVID-19 pandemic as the beginning of a certain historical period, but combine it with the events of 9/11, the 2008 Western financial crisis, the rise of China, and the Sino-US trade war, and examine the contradiction between the accelerating historical process of "deep globalization" facing the global governance pattern since the end of the Cold War and the strengthening of the world imperial system by the United States. Specifically, "deep globalization" promotes the integration of all countries in the world and becomes a community with a shared future for mankind, which means that it is necessary to pay attention to global governance from the perspective of "one world under one roof", promote international cooperation, and let the United Nations and other international organizations play a greater role in global governance. However, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has taken advantage of the "unipolar world" to continuously disintegrate the United Nations system and strive to build a "new Roman Empire". This world imperial system, lacking the constraints of international political power and the constraints of international law, has degenerated into a wayward imperial dictatorship that refuses to assume international responsibility. We need to face this contradiction in a real way, the rise of China and the competition between China and the United States is a contest between two globalizations, two global governance systems and two governance methods, and a contradiction between China's commitment to building a community with a shared future for mankind and the United States continuing to maintain and consolidate its world imperial system.
The legal order of the world empire
A global history is actually a history of imperial hegemony and constant evolution³, the history of moving from a regional civilization empire to a world empire⁴. Even in the era of sovereign states promoted by modern Europe, the European powers were modern colonial empires in the form of sovereign states, because behind these sovereign states were a large number of occupied colonies. If we only look at the surface of the sovereign construction of European countries and ignore the back of their colonial empires, we will not only fail to understand the global history of European sovereign states since the rise of them, but also understand the real problems facing China in today's Sino-US trade war. For example, why is it that the trade war between China and the United States is launched, but It is Canada that detains Meng Wanzhou of the Chinese company Huawei? Why is it that the trade war between China and the United States is that the EU follows the United States to slander China's Xinjiang cotton and impose corresponding sanctions on China? Only from the theoretical and historical perspective of the imperial order can we truly grasp today's Sino-US relations, that is, the relationship between China and the United States is not simply the relationship between two sovereign countries with different strengths, but the relationship between China and a world empire, whether it is the "Indo-Pacific strategy" that the United States has been strengthening, or the "Atlantic Charter" and the strengthened G7 "democratic alliance" signed by Biden and Britain after taking office. That is, the construction of modern empires is hidden behind international treaties, using formalized and legalized legal relations of equal sovereign states to cover up the domination of the imperial center over marginal vassal states or invisible colonies.
The construction of the United States has been an imperial construction from the beginning. In the American historical documents, Americans have always called themselves "empires", especially a "free empire" with a "destiny", not only has a vast land in the west to conquer and expand, but also with the acceleration and rapid rise of American industrialization after the Civil War, the United States began to continuously erode the territory of European colonial empires in the Americas and incorporate them into their own imperial territory, and the resulting "Monroe Doctrine" is a declaration that the United States and European empires compete for American colonies and redivide the scope of imperial power. With the Spanish-American War and the excavation of the Panama Canal, the United States changed from an Atlantic country to a two-ocean power facing both the Atlantic and the Pacific, thus entering the global hegemony war with the European powers. After experiencing two world wars, the United States took over the world empire system created by the British Empire and transformed it to build its own new world empire system. With the end of the Cold War, the world imperial system constructed by the United States has triumphed, and the discussion of the "New Roman Empire" in Western academic circles from the Kosovo War to the post-9/11 era is only to strengthen the world imperial system that has been established for a long time. The "Cold War" obscures the essence of the world empire in ideological discourse, but it is precisely the urgent situation of the "Cold War" that objectively helps the United States to complete the construction of the world empire, whether it is the control of the "NATO" system in Europe or a series of treaties controlling Japan and South Korea, all of which were completed in the context of the "Cold War".
Western scholars have had a great deal of discussion about the world imperial order constructed by the United States, but these discussions are from the perspective of a professional discipline, focusing on the description of certain specific characteristics, and lacking a complete understanding of the entire system. In fact, the world empire constructed by the United States has become a complex polyhedra, and what can effectively construct these polyhedra is some fundamental forces, and the combination of these forces constitutes the legal order of the world empire, thus presenting three dimensions.
1. Economic field: trade-technology-finance world system
At present, the academic community has widely adopted the concepts of "information empire", "trade empire", "business empire", "financial empire" and other concepts to describe the characteristics of world empires in the economic field. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein used the concept of a "world system" of center-periphery structures to summarize the global economic order. The expanding division of labour in trade facilitation has drawn the globe into a system of interaction that meets each other's needs. As trade goods shifted from natural products to industrial manufactured goods, the Western powers adopted mercantilist and protectionist strategies, resulting in the continuous expansion of trade inequality between Western and non-Western regions, industrialized countries and agricultural countries in global trade, so that after the Industrial Revolution, global trade products formed a hierarchical chain from naturally produced raw materials to industrial products with different scientific and technological content. This is what we call the "industrial chain" today. The industrial chain formed according to the different scientific and technological content means that the distribution of commercial trade profits is different, and it is precisely this difference in the distribution of profits and wealth that leads to the formation of a rich-poor, strong-weak, center-periphery imperial hierarchical domination relationship ⁵ in the process of integration of human beings in the process of integration. The concept of a "world system," although used to emphasize differences in economic power, forms the basis of a world imperial order in which the strong dominate the weak. Therefore, the world imperial order has always revolved around the issue of trade, and the various debates between mercantilism and free trade, free trade and fair trade, trade in goods and trade in services are actually centered on the distribution of interests within the world imperial order.
However, the inequality of trade profits is ultimately an inequality of technological power. The center-periphery structure of the world system is actually based on the development of science and technology-driven industries – the Archimedesian point of modern Europe's rise and empire-building. A scientific and technological power can easily become a trading power, so the center of the world empire often shifts with the transfer of scientific and technological innovation centers and trade centers in the global geographical space. Science and technology is the fundamental driving force for the development of human history. On the one hand, the power of science and technology allows human beings to unite from scattered corners of the earth into a community, but on the other hand, the nation or country that masters the power of science and technology can easily use this power to build an empire, so that the traditional civilization empire scattered on the earth will move towards a modern world empire. The reason why the United States can establish a world empire lies in its leading global scientific and technological development, and it has become a leader in global scientific and technological innovation and industrial transformation, so that it has always monopolized high-profit industries in the division of labor in the global industrial chain, and this scientific and technological advantage will quickly transform into military advantages.
If technology is the driving force behind trade, then trade undoubtedly requires a currency that acts as an intermediary for transactions, and the trading powerhouse undoubtedly has the greatest possibility of providing a benchmark currency. Because any country that wants to trade with this country must use the country's currency. When global commerce gradually formed a global currency, the basis of the economic order of the world empire was formed. In the debate over the world system, one argument argues that the tributary trading system of China during the Ming and Qing dynasties is regarded as the only world system, that is, the global formation of a trade line that sells African black slaves to the Americas to mine silver in order to meet China's demand for silver, in this sense, silver is the global common currency formed around China's tributary system⁶. In the centuries that followed, the pound sterling, based on the gold standard, replaced silver as the universal currency for global commercial trade. In the Bretton Woods system after World War II, the institutional design of the dollar pegged to gold directly gave the dollar the privilege of being the world's currency. Although gold was decoupled from the US dollar in the 1970s, with the formation of the "petrodollar" mechanism, especially with the electronic settlement of the US dollar across borders, the international monetary function of the US dollar was further strengthened, which made any country and multinational corporations excluded from the US dollar payment system an island excluded from the world system. The issuance of the U.S. dollar as an international currency and the exchange rate changes of the U.S. dollar with other sovereign national currencies directly affect the development of global trade and the global economy.
However, international money itself can continue to appreciate in exchange, even seriously out of the real global wealth it represents as use value, triggering cyclical financial crises. In this sense, global financial activity as "upper capitalism" actually controls and affects the development of the global economy⁷. As a result, the United States can use the hegemonic advantage of the US dollar as an international currency to strengthen its technological industry development and trade advantages. For example, the United States, faced with the challenges of Japanese manufacturing in global trade, signed the Plaza Accord to force the yen to appreciate sharply against the dollar, resulting in a sharp increase in the export price of Japanese industrial goods. For example, in 2021, the United States plundered global wealth by triggering global inflation by massively over-issuing dollars.
It can be said that in the world system, trade-technology-finance is a triangular relationship of mutual support, trade volume promotes the development of science and technology, scientific and technological advantages are transformed into trade advantages and thus have financial advantages, and financial advantages can continuously consolidate scientific and technological advantages, and then strengthen trade advantages. It is precisely because the United States firmly controls its superiority in the field of global trade-technology-finance, and this world system of center-periphery structure lays the economic foundation for its becoming a world empire. However, competition in trade, science and technology, and even finance inevitably leads to conflicts between countries, so this world order needs to establish a political and legal order that is compatible with it.
2. Political sphere: Violent-ally-rule-supporting imperial hegemony
The formation, maintenance and change of political order are often manifested through violence. War and violence create the most fundamental law, namely the demarcation of territorial boundaries under domination. This violent conquest continues to merge small communities into larger ones, and even promotes the formation of several long-term stable regional civilizational empires in different geographical spaces around the world. With the great discovery of geography, violence also expanded globally with trade, and the market expansion and competition promoted by European trade was usually not done through the "invisible hand" of market competition, but through military war and plunder. Without the conquest of gunboats, the Western powers could not open the door to the East through trade, not because the Eastern Empire was closed to the country, but because the rules of trade in the East were based on the tributary trade system, which was completely different from the private trade system of Western capitalism. This expansion of the capitalist private trading system has led to the rise of this peculiar form of organization of the modern sovereign state in the West. When this trade was closely integrated with markets, wars, and finance, it promoted the rise of the "military-financial state." Since then, the form of war in human history has undergone fundamental changes, that is, war has become normalized with the competition for markets and interests, and a "hybrid war" has been formed around economic interests, such as trade wars, industrial wars, scientific and technological wars, financial wars and military wars, and military wars have become "political extensions".
It is the rise of this hybrid warfare that has given traditional violent warfare a more moderate, everyday, and neutral name—"competition" or "struggle." The "competition" between private and private in the commercial market promotes the "struggle" between parties and parties in political life, and eventually evolves into the high degree of organization of private individuals in the "container of power" of the sovereign state, and the "struggle" between countries is launched. Struggle or war is the norm of the capitalist order, and peace is the intermittent period after the conquest of war.¹¹.05 In this way, we can understand the various types of wars that have occurred frequently in the rise of modern Europe. These wars fueled the rise and fall of empires and the transformation. It was this hybrid warfare that the British Empire destroyed India's cotton textile industry, thus establishing Britain's central position in the global cotton textile industry, thus establishing a "free trade empire", that is, what can be defeated by trade is not militarily, and what cannot be defeated by trade requires military war¹². Behind the global maritime trade has always been the navy and sea power, capitalist trade always needs the protection of military violence, if it can not occupy a dominant position in trade, then directly through violent conquest, land-cutting indemnity to plunder, thus forming a modern colonial empire system.
Therefore, the world system of the center-periphery structure in the economic field is built on this mixed war of economy and violence, and then breaking this structure will undoubtedly require the help of a mixed war of economy and violence. The two world wars were in fact a struggle around the distribution of trade profits and for the dominance of the world system, which led to the shift of the center of the world system from Britain to the United States, from the British-led world empire to the United States-led world system. Thus, the world imperial system was never a natural formation, but the result of human effort. The Industrial Revolution in Europe was not a natural process of development in which technology and resources accumulated, but rather a product of fierce competition between military-financial states and the struggle for trade interests based on violent wars. Behind mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution was the brutal colonialism of the European Empire around the globe and its long war of life and death.
The founding of the United States was in fact the product of a series of wars of hegemony between European colonial empires. France, which had lost the global struggle with Britain, retaliated by supporting the division of North America from the British Empire. The United States, which won the war against colonial empire and independence, also quickly joined the ranks of the French Revolution. Thus, the American Revolution and the French Revolution brought about a new political order, that is, the destruction of the colonial empire under the hereditary monarchs of the old European monarchs, and the establishment of new states based on the political principles of freedom and equality. The globalization of capitalist commercial trade is still advancing, and the colonialist imperial struggle for hegemony is still continuing, but a new political order began to lay the foundation on the basis of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, that is, the international law order based on the equality of sovereign states, thus pushing the Westphalian system from European public law to international law. In this sense, the rise of the United States has always had two sides in global politics, on the one hand, inheriting in reality the legacy of colonialism in the old European order, and on the other hand, opposing European colonialism in concept. Whether it is the territorial expansion of the United States to the west or the annexation of Mexican territory through war and the expansion of power into Latin America, it has always been accompanied by military violence, so the United States calls itself a "dangerous country" ¹³. Americans have always lived in war, most recently two world wars, the Cold War, the "war on terror" since the end of the Cold War, and today's threat of war against China's rise. In his farewell speech, Eisenhower once proposed to be wary of the "military-industrial complex" of the United States, which is just a copy of the "military-financial state" in European history. In this sense, on the one hand, the world imperial order created by the United States inherits the legacy of the colonial imperial order in European history, which has always been based on the European Christian civilization order as the basis of its ideology; on the other hand, the American imperial order contains a very strong revolutionary nature, which actually stems from the republican and cosmopolitan heritage in European history, that is, the establishment of a world empire with republican democratic political principles, so as to achieve permanent peace. This intellectual legacy also profoundly influenced the communist trend in Europe. It can be said that it was Wilson's cosmopolitan idea of permanent peace and Lenin's communist ideal that together destroyed the colonialist system established in old Europe and thus promoted the national liberation movement, and the result of the joint cooperation of these two political forces was the United Nations system established after the Second World War.
Thus, after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union rose, the entire European colonialist system collapsed, and the United Nations system based on the equality of sovereign states was established. However, in the "Cold War", both the Soviet Union and the United States abandoned the United Nations system and turned to the pattern of imperial hegemony in European history. But both the Soviet Empire and the American Empire at least claimed to be based on the legal principle of equality of sovereign states, based on political ideas and interests. As a result, the ally system became a replica of the colonial system. If the colonial system was a form of direct control, the system of allies must be constructed with the help of the rules of international law. For example, the United States has controlled the global economy through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Petrodollar Agreement, the Wassenaar Agreement, and various free trade area agreements, and through NATO, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and various military garrison agreements signed with many countries and regions, it has brought Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other countries under the control of its imperial system as "vassal states.", which is called the "alliance system." The difference is that under the planned economic system, the Soviet Union's control of its allies can only be controlled by means of violence and direct political domination, and its approach is more primitive and crude. This kind of imperial rule is contrary to its professed political principles and is easily resisted and resisted. However, in the global capitalist system, the control of the United States over its allies certainly has direct military and political domination, but it is more indirectly controlled through the "invisible hand" of economy, finance, law and ideology, so that its imperial color is relatively weak, and the means of imperial rule are more modern and refined.
Therefore, when we call this soviet model of direct control "empire", this indirect control model of the United States is often called "hegemony", that is, a domination based on approval and consent. Compared with the "empire" of the Soviet Union, "hegemony" is a positive word. After World War II, the United States never shied away from the hegemonic order it established, and even proudly called it "liberal hegemonic order" or "liberal Leviathan" ¹⁴. It was not until after 9/11 that the United States dominated almost the entire world that it revealed its true face as a world empire. The international political science circles criticize the "unilateral action" of the United States precisely because the United States has abandoned the United Nations system and even the system of allies, interpreting the aggression of invading other sovereign countries as a security law enforcement action within the world empire. In fact, the United States did not shy away from its intention to build a "new Roman Empire" to rule the world. Backed by global military violence, the world empire constructed by the United States ostensibly retains the legal form of sovereign states, but maintains control over the global trade-technology-financial system through various treaty systems and the U.S. domestic legal system, thus using this economic and legal control power to turn other countries into their "quasi-colonies" or "vassal states".
3. Cultural sphere: The historical end ideology of the Christian-English-human rights mutual promotion
Political order implies domination, and the solidity of political domination requires laying the foundation of legitimacy. In Weber's theory, pure violent domination can only have "power", and only the domination of ideological legitimacy has "authority" ¹⁵. Therefore, the construction of the imperial order has always taken the construction of the cultural and educational system as the highest state. The classical imperial order often required religious ideas to justify it. Christianity allowed the collapsing Roman Empire to last for thousands of years, thus evolving into a Roman-Christian Empire. However, with the great geographical discoveries and the rise of the sovereign states of Europe, the struggle for secular and religious power has become increasingly fierce. The European Christian imperial order was challenged by these secular sovereign states, the most intense and enduring of which was the systematic rebellion of Protestant states against the Roman Catholic order triggered by the Reformation. The Protestant Revolution was originally a revolution within the Christian Empire, but it not only destroyed the order of the Christian Empire in Europe for thousands of years, but also opened a new imperial era, an imperial era formed on the basis of Protestantism and based on the liberal and scientific Enlightenment ideas to lay the foundation of legitimacy and authority. Since then, not only has the European Christian imperial order declined, but any classical regional civilizational imperial order based on religion as a legitimate authority also collapsed.
It can be said that a series of major global historical events such as global capitalist commercial trade, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of modern sovereign states and colonial empires have jointly destroyed the global regional civilized imperial order and integrated the fragments of these empires into a new imperial order, which is the "free trade" world imperial order built by the British Empire in the 19th century at its peak. We call this imperial order a "world empire" not only because it connects global economic and social life based on maritime trade and technological developments, and only a few inland areas have not been integrated into this global economic order, but these places are only some insignificant islands in the entire era of economic globalization; more importantly, the basis of the legitimacy of the world empire has gained universal recognition — modern "civilizations" based on scientific rationality, industrialization, liberal democracy, and pre-modern societies. "Barbarism" is a stark contrast, and this division between civilization and barbarism is potentially religious and racist, thus branding the Christian (Protestant)-white race supremacy, which is the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) presented in the construction of the United States. It was under the influence of this cultural and religious order that the ancient regional civilization empires of the East were subjected to external shocks from European empires, but more importantly, a cultural and educational revolution that challenged the legitimacy of the imperial order broke out within it.
Although the modern order has emerged in the form of fierce anti-tradition, the emergence of the modern order in the West undoubtedly has its historical and cultural roots, and this root is the Protestant revolution of Christianity. The Protestant Revolution completely shattered the bond between the other world and the world on the other side, threw man into a meaningless materialized world, forced man to look at the world around him with an "exorcism" eye, and saw the world with a calm, non-emotional, scientific eye, so that the world became an object of objectification to be conquered by mankind and served by mankind. This concept has given birth to modern science and technology, but it has also led to the continuous conquest of the world by human beings since the Industrial Revolution, and the contrast is that the ancient regional civilization empire is limited to religious "civilization" and restricts the development of science and the application of technology, resulting in becoming a "stagnant empire". In the same way, it is in the Protestant conception that there is the concept of human rights in which God created mankind so that all men are equal, that there are natural rights, the social contract, constitutional democracy, and all other ideas about the authority of the legitimacy of human political life.
It is precisely under this Protestant concept that the United States regards the founding of its country as the establishment of a "city on a mountaintop", and it has become its historical mission to promote the values of Christianity to the whole world and establish a free and equal regime for all. Thus, the establishment of a world empire is a "manifest destiny," just as the imperial poet Joseph Kipling saw imperial expansion as the "white man's burden" that brought barbarians into the civilized world. This notion of the legitimacy of the political order was popularized with the global expansion of European empires, especially in the transition from the British Empire to the American Empire, which together defeated the French, German, and Soviet Empires, effectively associating this ideology with the global spread of the English language and culminating in the end of the Cold War. Since then, freedom and human rights have become the so-called "universal values", English has become the international common language, Christianity has become the spiritual pillar of the modern concept of freedom and democracy, and "color revolutions" and humanitarian intervention based on the concept of human rights have become the reasons for the expansion of world empires, so that world empires are often called "human rights empires" or "democratic empires". From the perspective of the construction of world empires, the question of the legitimacy of political rule has been resolved at the philosophical level, forming an ideology of "end of history"; the so-called "clash of civilizations" has always been at the "political" level and cannot rise to the philosophical level. Therefore, the political concepts of "the end of history" and "clash of civilizations" jointly serve the "inside" and "outside" of the world empire constructed by the United States: the "end of history" has been achieved inside the empire, and there is a "clash of civilizations" outside the empire; it can be said that the construction of the world empire is promoted to achieve the "end of history" through the "clash of civilizations".
Note in this article
(1) Politico Magazine, “Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How”(March 19, 2020), Politico website.
(2) Stehen Walt, Joseph Nye, Jr., and Nicholas Bcerns, et al.,“How the World Will Look after the Coronavirus Pandemic”(March 20, 2020), Foreign Policy.
(3) John Darwin, After Tamerlane: A History of Global Empires Since 1405, translated by Huang Zhongxian, CITIC Press, 2021.
(4) Qiang Shigong, "The Internal Logic of Super-Large Political Entities: "Empire" and World Order", Culture Perspectives, No. 2, 2019.
(5) [United States] Emmanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (Volume 1), translated by Yu Laiyin et al., Higher Education Press, 1998, p. 462.
(6) [De] Gund Frank: Silver Capital, translated by Liu Beicheng, Sichuan People's Publishing House, 2017.
(7) [French] Fernand Braudel: The Dynamics of Capitalism, translated by Yang Qi, Life, Reading, And Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, 1997.
(8) [de] Carl Schmitt: The Law of the Earth, translated by Liu Yi and Zhang Chenguo, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2017.
(9) [de] Clausewitz: On War, translated Chinese academy of military sciences of the People's Liberation Army, The Commercial Press, 1997.
(10) [English] Anthony Giddens: Nation-State and Violence, translated by Hu Zongze and Zhao Litao, Life, Reading, Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore, 1998.
(11) [Us] Hans Morgenthau, Interstate Politics: Power Struggle and Peace, Peking University Press, 2006, p. 55.
(12) John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson,“The Imperialism of Free Trade”, The Economic History Review, New Series, 1953, 6 (1), pp.1-15.
(13) [United States] Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nations: America's World Status from Its Origins to the Early 20th Century, translated by Yuan Shengyu et al., Social Sciences Academic Press, 2016.
(14) John Ikenbury, Liberal Leviathan: The Origin, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, translated by Zhao Minghao, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2013.
(15) [De] Weber: Academia and Politics, translated by Qian Yongxiang et al., Guangxi Normal University Press, 2004, pp. 197-201.
(16) See Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of the Concept of Empire, translated by Du Fuxiang et al., Social Sciences Academic Press, 2020, Chapter 6.
*Disclaimer: This article only represents the personal views of the author and does not represent the position of this official account
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