Introduction

What in the world happened so that over the course of human history not only did institutionalized cross-border relations between polities become common practice, but in global modernity a thing called the ‘international political system’ was eventually established – a system of global reach, that is to say, within which struggles over collectively binding decisions are played out? This is a system with a remarkable internal complexity that includes a myriad of actors, rules, traditions and mythologies, many of which date back to premodern times. It is also a system in which the specific type of hierarchical (imperial and colonial) relationship that dominated international politics when it took its modern shape during the nineteenth century has continued to play the same prominent role up until the present. Drawing from historically oriented scholarship in international relations (IR) and global historical sociology – while being theoretically anchored in the world society approaches of modern systems theory – this chapter studies some central dynamics that have shaped the evolution of international politics and its imperial underpinnings. This approach allows for a better understanding of what happened after the modern international political system became firmly established as a distinct and recognizable social field rather than one based on conventional IR theories. However, this system and its field-specific power constellations are anything but static. They were the result of social evolution and have been subject to ongoing transformations ever since. Accounting for these changes from a theoretical perspective and showing how they are linked to the field-specific power relationships being played out in this system is the main conceptual concern of this chapter.

Change and transformation is understood here as a process of social evolution. According to Luhmannian systems theory (Luhmann, 1995a, 2012/13; Andersen, 2003), social evolution is triggered by communicative variations in a given social field. While such fields are integrated in larger contexts such as world society as a whole, systems theory also stresses the relative autonomy of evolution in a given social field or system. International politics, it is argued in what follows, is such a field. Starting out from the aforementioned observation that the modern international political system stabilized as a social form in the course of the nineteenth century, the chapter then proceeds to argue that an increasing external and internal differentiation of this system is, from a theoretical vantage point, a core feature of its ongoing evolution.