Sovereignty, hegemony, and peace in Western Europe and in East Asia

Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan wrote in volume seven of this journal that 'the main ideas in this discipline (of international relations) are deeply rooted in the particularities and peculiarities of European history, the rise of the West to world power, and the imposition of its own political structure onto the rest of the world.' Taking this claim as the starting point the intention of this article is to see where international relations theory over-generalizes and how it could learn from the alternative experience of East Asia. The main focus of the critique will be on two central ideas: first, the idea that unrestricted state sovereignty is necessarily a problem and a security dilemma in international relations; and second, the idea that there is a need for global hierarchy and hegemony in order to tackle the security dilemma. The article uses qualitative scholarship on the dynamics and structures of peace as the point of departure and then assesses the plausibility of these ideas quantitatively using two data sets, the Correlates of War and the PRIO/Uppsala data set (1946-2008).