Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order

Debating Worlds is a survey of modern global narratives, comprising nine sweeping chapters by political scientists and historians. The introduction, authored by the editors, opens by observing that the seeming global convergence toward liberal capitalist democracy has splintered into a “narrative plurality” (2). Understanding the world order, then, requires us to map these “narratives of the global” (16) that have jostled for discursive influence over the past two centuries.Most of the narratives explored in the first half of the book are supranational. In chapter 1, Duncan Bell surveys ideas of an “Anglosphere” (28) of English-speaking peoples. Emerging in the Victorian era under in the racialized discourse of Anglo-Saxonism, it mutated over the twentieth century in the context of empire through ideas of imperial federation and Greater Britain, and it dealt with America's rise through notions of Anglo-American union. The twentieth century saw successor proposals that “placed the British-American connection at the core of the global order” (41). Anglo narratives have since floundered but been revived in altered forms as evidenced during Brexit. Michael Cox examines the rise and fall of the Soviet Union in chapter 2, explaining its multigenerational appeal. The key was the Soviet narrative's ability to accommodate ideological shifts (from Marxism to Stalin's Leninism) and subsequently the ways in which it both sent shivers down conservative spines in the West while also straightening the backs of postcolonial leaders in Asia and Africa. The crisis under Gorbachev was thus fundamentally a narrative one: “Without a positive story to tell itself and the world, the USSR simply could not go on” (73). In chapter 3, Cemil Aydin undermines claims of a historic schism (83) between Islam and the West. Pan-Islamism was a counternarrative to the “racialized Eurocentric imperial world order” (83) asserting civilizational equality and modernity. This response enabled an auto-critique of religiously sanctioned patriarchy, and also a new (untrue) history of “an eternal Muslim world-Christian West conflict” (89). Over the twentieth century, in concert with Pan-Asianism and Pan-Africanism, Pan-Islamic narratives helped “decolonize the world” by puncturing the West's “master narrative” (110). Chapter 5, by Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael C. Williams, excavates the philosophical core of Western radical conservatives’ response to globalization since the 1970s. The narrative of the “New Right” (143) begins with a history of Western modernity whose arc reveals “decline, error, and destruction” (146). Combating it and resuscitating Western culture and civilization, the discourse contends, requires a “revolutionary traditionalism” (150) to overturn the social dislocation caused by globalization and targeting the right enemies—the social system of “liberal managerialism,” its credentialed cosmopolitan agents, and their clients (migrants and minorities).In contrast to these chapters, others narrow the aperture to focus on specific countries and their narratives of distinctiveness (often expressed as civilizational singularity). Kei Koga and Saori N. Katada argue in chapter 4 that Japan's self-narrative mirrors its place in the global hierarchy. It is reflected in four historical phases: (1) an assimilation narrative post–Meiji Restoration; (2) a uniqueness narrative through the 1930s and 1940s; (3) assimilation again postwar; and (4) a return to uniqueness during Japanese economic success, in the 1970s to 1990s. The narrative pendulums between being a “model student” (136) of Western modernity when it is a “small power” (118) and asserting uniqueness when perceived as a major one (118). Rana Mitter asserts in chapter 6 that since the beginning of this century China has engaged in a narrative repositioning of itself as a global actor. The discursive recalibration involves revisionist historical narratives emphasizing China's global role and arguments about China as a civilizational state with normative commitments: to international noninterference; to being a “developmental mentor” (179); and to rejecting the Washington consensus. At the center of it is a dismissal of both Western hegemony and the belief that liberal democracy is history's destination. Itty Abraham, in chapter 7, clarifies that the narrative of India as a civilizational state is a reaction to British colonizers describing India as civilizationally inferior. This engendered two narrative postures—a defensive (and often Hindu) “Indic territorial” one and a more open “Asian cosmopolitan” one (186). Indian foreign policy, Abraham suggests, has ever since flowed from a combination of these. Since the Sino-Indian War of 1962, “the cosmopolitan legacy of civilizational thinking had been replaced by the Indic vision” with India as a “Hindu homeland eventually becoming national common sense” (199).Departing somewhat from the political and cultural narratives that preceded them, the final two chapters address disciplinary discourses—economic and scientific. Chapter 8 sees Jeremy Adelman revealing the arc of development as a way of addressing inequality and justice from the 1890s to the 1960s. Countering the dominant capitalist narrative of market integration leading to global convergence, development argued that it often did the opposite. Adelman tracks this sentiment from the disenchantment with the integration/convergence narrative in the early twentieth century to its deterioration during the interwar war period, to the emergence of a global movement for redistributive justice post–World War II. Daniel Deudney in chapter 9 explores arguably the most impactful modern narrative of all, scientific-technological modernity (STM). Deudney focuses on the powerful challenge faced by STM since the mid-twentieth century—a hinge moment when humans first became capable of their own extinction through nuclear or climatological annihilation. This led to a potentially fateful fracture within STM discourse itself: between accelerationists and those who warn that it risks disaster. In this narrative contest, Deudney argues, the political spectrum of left to right won't suffice. More analytical purchase might be found by categorizing ideas according to their view of “overall human prospect, the value of technology, and human relations to nature” (259). It is in the battle between these visions that humanity's future will be determined.In the conclusion, Karoline Postel-Vinay uses the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a lens through which to understand the legacy of a once dominant liberal internationalist narrative, now contesting globally with non-Western, resentment-fueled civilizational narratives.Debating Worlds is a stimulating book that appeals to a cross-disciplinary scholarly audience and succeeds in offering a map of global narratives. Regardless of whether the collection enables us to navigate toward the plural and universal future the editors hope for, it certainly offers a clear-eyed diagnosis of our present narrative condition. Running through these case studies is the necessity for all community narratives to contain a history that justifies their identity—readily apparent in the fights over community/national history waged in political campaigns and public spheres over the world today, whether in Ukraine, India, or the United States.