In the Throes and Thrall of Empires: The Fractious State of Current Geopolitical Relations

Like many scholars who, over the course of long careers, have focused on various dimensions of international law—in my case, principally international trade law and the institutional dimensions of economic and social development in developing countries—it is difficult not to be depressed about the current fractious state of geopolitical relations. In the brief comments that follow, I focus on two controversial sets of issues that bridge these two domains: whether economic interdependence yields a peace dividend, and whether we can hope to escape the enduring mythology of the imperial civilizing mission, which I believe are central to current geopolitical fault lines. I close with some speculative thoughts on the relationship between these two questions and potential responses to them. As Paul Romer remarked on receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018 for his pathbreaking work on endogenous growth theory, “[o]nce one starts to think about [questions such as these], it is hard to think about anything else.”