How will the third phase of the transition to modernity unfold? One way of approaching this question is through the five possible pathways for the human species set up in Chapter 1. From that perspective, there is an emerging dialectic between the ongoing push for species empowerment that has defined humankind’s path for thousands of years, and the danger that path raises of species suicide, replacement or regression. There is not much point in dwelling on the options and scenarios for species suicide, extinction or replacement. The first two simply end the story. The third might well divide opinion on whether species replacement is part of the problem or part of the solution. Replacement could come in various forms, with no way of predicting which. It is anyway beyond my capacities to work out what the material capabilities and social sensibilities of a superior intelligence to ours might be. That leaves the option of exploring how humankind might try to stay on the path of empowerment, while adapting to the mounting environmental constraints it now faces.

This chapter provides a focused comparison of two key partners at the core of the US world order: Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK). While Japan has maintained parliamentary institutions in a democratic regime to this day, the ROK experienced a transition from a personalist autocracy led by charismatic and powerful rulers to a presidential democracy. None of these two core allies ever strayed too far from US foreign policy positions. Nonetheless, the institutional settings that structured the domestic politics in Japan and the ROK made a difference in shaping their relations with the United States. In Japan, the more flexible processes of leadership change under parliamentary institutions opened up pathways for potential successors to present themselves as the solution that would restore the alignment between the foreign policy preferences of the United States and Japan respectively. In the ROK, presidential institutions created more rigid mechanisms of leadership turnover. Those arrangements allowed the ROK leaders to take positions to which the US patron grudgingly acquiesced for lack of better alternatives.

According to bargaining models of war, war reveals private information about resolve and power, to which decision-makers respond rationally by increasing or lowering their reservation price for settling. Germany during World War I presents a puzzle for this baseline rationalist expectation, and theoretical accounts offer three reasons by which leaders in a losing situation might nevertheless rationally continue to fight. If others cannot be expected to abide by any peace settlement, a commitment problem arises that makes fighting on rational. Even exploring diplomatic settlement could reveal private information about a lack of resolve. Self-interested leaders fearing that defeat will result in domestic turmoil, revolution, and the loss of their elite prerogatives might have incentives to “gamble for resurrection.” I argue instead that are all more parsimoniously accounted for through a focus on morality, the expression of the ethics of German nationalists. The nationalist understanding of adversaries as lacking ethical restraint generates the perception of a commitment problem that makes anything else than victory unacceptable. Even peace overtures are dangerous. The German right scorned demands for further democratization during the war as selfish class politics, a betrayal indicating that the country was not unified enough for this existential struggle.

German insistence on a highly subjective understanding of fair treatment in early twentieth-century world politics is often mistaken for wanton status-seeking. I disentangle status-seeking from fairness-seeking by identifying where pure status-seeking versus fairness-seeking arguments diverge: the degree to which state actors demand exclusive rights and privileges. Feeling unjustly rewarded for its great power position, Wilhelmines leaders provoked two crises over the status of Morocco. However, at first, it did not seek any special advantages for Germany. Instead Germany sought the moral high ground by forcing the convocation of an international conference to settle the question of Western countries’ rights more generally. In the second crisis, Germany once again reacted strongly to increasing French influence in Morocco without the compensation that France had offered to other countries. I supplement these case studies with two survey experiments conducted in another suspected status-seeker, contemporary Russia. Respondents respond to status as unfair rather than a threat to Russian status, prefer a more inclusive organization that admits Russia but also other countries who deserve to be included by virtue of their GDP, and even indicate a willingness to exclude Russia when (manipulated) fairness dictates.

Chapter 3 has set out a sufficiently full sketch of CAPE society to provide a good sense of what the nineteenth-century turn towards modernity was a transition from. The questions to be answered in this second part of the book are two. First, what was that transition to? In other words, what is ‘modernity’? And second, what was the nature of the transition itself? It is clear that the CAPE era ended. But it is less clear that modernity has properly or fully begun. Are we still within a transition period somehow parallel to that between the hunter-gatherer and CAPE eras? Or has history accelerated so much that the transition was very quick, perhaps only a few decades, and we are now fully into the modern era? What did the shift out of the CAPE era towards the modern one involve, both materially and in terms of social structure? How did this shift unfold over the last two-plus centuries, and where are we now? This sets up for Part III, which looks at where this unfolding seems to be heading.

In this chapter, with Caleb Pomeroy, I take a number of theories from moral and social psychology grounded in evolutionary claims and show that they illuminate critical components of international relations and foreign policy behavior. First, it is almost impossible to talk about threat and harm without invoking morality. Second, state leaders and the public will use moral judgments as a basis, indeed the most important factor, for assessing international threat, just as research shows they do at the interpersonal level. We test the first claim using a word embeddings analysis of several large textual corpora. Whether it be speeches before the United Nations or private deliberations of American foreign policy officials, when policymakers and politicians talk about harm and threat, they simultaneously use words indicating judgments about immorality in the same way that everyday citizens do. The second claim rests on Fiske’s “warmth-competence” model, which identifies moral characteristics as the most important criteria by which we form our impressions of others. An original survey experiment on the Russian public shows we do the same with nation-states. We buttress these findings by analyzing two observational surveys of Chinese respondents and another three survey experiments with Russian and American respondents.

Evolutionary psychologists have long maintained that humans’ moral sense is essential to their success as a species and part of what makes humans unique among animals. Moral systems have functional roots, helping individual organisms survive, thrive, and pass on their genetic material. It is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have an ethical sense. Evolutionary theorists identify moral condemnation and binding morality as crucial for the emergence of other-regarding, altruistic behavior that makes liberal morality possible in the first place. When others harm us, or even third parties, we condemn, passing moral judgments and sometimes retaliating; we do not speak evil but speak of evil. Moral condemnation encouraged the development of moral conscience to avoid the outrage of, and often violent group punishment by, those who were wronged. This internalized sense of right and wrong in turn acted as a credible signal of cooperativeness that unwittingly and unconsciously paid material dividends. Group favoritism, also thought to have evolutionary origins, is moral in nature as well. Those early humans who felt obligated to contribute to the collective defense against common threats in an extremely dangerous environment could prosper enough to offset the competing incentives to free-ride within the group.

The two chapters in this section serve as the prelude to the discussion of the transition towards modernity that occupies the bulk of the book. In order to understand modernity, it is necessary to understand the cumulative building of global society over the two eras that preceded it: what each did and did not contribute to the one that followed it. Without understanding the material conditions and social structures of each era, it is not possible to get a clear view of the transitions between them, what got carried forward and what not, and what the changes were. These two eras are, of course, interesting in themselves when viewed in this perspective, but the immediate purpose of analysing them here is to set up the historical flows that led to, and into, the transition towards modernity. A second purpose is to lay the groundwork for the comparative study of eras, though that is only lightly followed-through in this book.

In the Conclusions to Chapter 3, working with the advantage of hindsight, I focused on the end of the CAPE era, its successful, if tenuous, connecting up of the whole planet by trade, and the precursors of its transition towards a new era of modernity. I looked in particular at the leading role of merchants and commerce in realising dreams of universality beyond the reach of any empire or religion, albeit mainly in the economic sector and not in the political and societal ones. I posited that the great achievement of the CAPE era was to achieve the first conscious globalisation, but that given the limits of technology and energy resources, this could only be done thinly. That pointed forward to the intensification of globalisation as the likely next step for humankind after the CAPE era. The four chapters in Part II could easily be read as fulfilling that expectation. Especially in material terms, globalisation was hugely intensified. The social picture is much more mixed, but can also be read as intensifying globalisation. It is absolutely clear that by the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, the CAPE era was over. The question is how to read what followed it: as the opening of a third era, modernity, or as the opening of a period of transition between the CAPE era and an emergent modernity?

The chapter sets out the material conditions of the transition from the CAPE era to modernity, seeing a transition from the limited energy sources and materials of the CAPE era, to the more or less unlimited energy sources and materials that came into play during the nineteenth century. It looks in detail at the technological developments of the transition period since the early nineteenth century, and at the huge increases in interaction capacity and powers of destruction that these enabled. In material terms, the circumstances of humankind were transformed, but with the costs that the carrying capacity of the planet was overburdened, and humankind put itself at risk of committing species suicide.

Explanations for Germany’s aggressive and bellicose foreign policy during the Wilhelmine period often point to efforts by entrenched elites to distract from the country’s stunted democratic development by generating international threats to unify the country. These accounts fail to come to terms with the moral revolution occurring in Germany at the time – the rise of nationalism. The identification of the group as the nation, and the understanding that the nation’s welfare is the leader’s primary concern, required a revolution in the basis of authority, one which implied that the emperor owed loyalty to the people. The nationalist right began to question the indecisive policy of the Wilhelmine regime in a way that was previously ethically sanctioned, condemning the emperor in particular for a lack of will and resolve during the second Moroccan crisis. In a dangerous world, this amounted to moral castigation. I supplement this chapter with a survey experiment conducted on the American public. For those who hold dangerous world beliefs, four virtues generally thought to indicate “competence” – disciplined and hardworking, strong-willed and determined, tough and strong, and persistent and resolute – are actually used as moral benchmarks, particularly for leaders.

This chapter takes the approach of quantitative analysis to test the book’s theory: It shows that there is a systematic connection between the domestic institutions and the US ability to attend to its double tasks of maintaining friendly relations while fostering good governance and more respect of human rights. The chapter shows that partner nations with domestic political institutions that allow for more open and competitive political processes of leadership turnover have closer foreign policy alignment with the United States, experience fewer coups, enjoy better governance, and have more respect for human rights than the ones that do not. That is the case both among democracies and autocracies: in parliamentary democracies more than in presidential democracies; in autocracies with multiparty legislatures than in autocracies with personalist leaders or single-party legislatures.