Order Transition, Common Culture and Exceptional Worldviews

Clark’s notion of the “morality” of global legitimacy (2005) and Gilpin’s “ideological … values common to a set of states” (1981:34), which underpin an order, are both premised on and derived from the assumption of US hegemony. This understanding of a “common culture” reflects the ideological “taken-for-granted nature” of American unipolarity, common to a large majority of writings in IR theory. It is also a result of a development that, originating in the 1970s (i.e. Carter’s universal human rights ideology) and the 1980s (i.e. the reality and ideology of the Information Age), left the United States in a position, especially since 1991, both to globalize its domestic political system and structure international arrangements according to its domestic values. Or, as Kurth put it, “[b]y the 1990s…the United States had become the core state, the civilizational state, for the new global civilization” (2010:64).