The Evolution of Global Governance

Ancient and classical imperialism was mainly a matter of one state conquering ad­jacent states and extracting tribute. The Aztec, Incan, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires are all examples.

Why did some states succeed at conquest while others failed and collapsed? Gerhard Lenski^[303] performed a factor analysis of cross-cultural data that examined the intensity ofwarfare among polities. Lenski found that crucial advantages tended to accrue to polities that had larger populations, and hence greater military man­power, better weapons, and higher sociopolitical complexity. Efficient bureaucratic organization also facilitated the appropriation of resources. Most importantly, ac­cording to Lenski, the strongest cause was technological advantages, especially more efficient subsistence technologies.^[304]

In a similar vein, Jared Diamond^[305] lists crucial factors that made a particular polity more likely to be able to defeat others:

• A large, dense population, so that the polity was relatively immune to epidemic diseases;

• A location within a continent oriented horizontally to the equator, so that the polity included large areas of temperate climate, rapid species spreading, and rapid cultural diffusion;^[306]

• Suitable indigenous candidates for domestication of flora and fauna, so that the polity featured, in the form of extensive food surpluses and storage, an abundance of energy-efficiency;

• Sedentariness and internal stratification;

• Relatively efficient, basic technologies of production, transportation, and com­munication, which in turn led to more proximate factors including the wide spread of epidemic diseases, the use of horses, steel weapons, gunpowder, guns, and oceangoing ships; and deployment of complex political organization and writing.

Using historical data on Asian and North African empires from ancient Sumer to Sung China, Sergey Nefedov^[307] demonstrates the interplay between geograph­ical conditions (including ecological carrying capacity and abrupt oscillations of it), demographic cycles (reckoning with epidemics as well as growth or con­traction phases), and a wide range of other factors—including social structural transformations (accounting for bureaucracy, army structure, and balancing of powers between the state, elites, and commoners), cultural diffusion, fundamental technological and military innovations, revolutions, wars, and empires—in order to predict the cycles and crises of polities. As with Lenski, the principal factor in Nefedov's theory is technology—meaning fundamental innovations that increase the production of food and thus extend ecological capacity. Military innovations in weaponry or tactics, as well as new forms of social organization such as tax reforms or state bureaucracies, were also important factors. These innovations generated competitive advantages and the capability to expand territorially at expense of neighbors.^[308]

Certain developments eventually set the stage for human rights as an ideology that would increasingly moderate class relations within polities, and moderate both warfare and cooperation among polities. Although state power itself was a key to the success of the empires and tributary states, they also needed to overcome the resist­ance of the conquered populations in order to effectively gather resources. World religions that separated kinship from membership in a moral community emerged in the peripheral and semiperipheral regions of the world empires, and were eventually taken over by the imperial centers.^[309] These religions (Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam) located the agency for incorporation into the moral community at the level of the individual, rather than through kin ties. These world religions constituted both the conquerors and the conquered as members of the same moral community. This reduced resistance but it also provided a vocabu­lary for conquered peoples to make claims on the emperor.