23-05-2025
What came before the UN?: In Egypt, China, ancient bids to administer the world
We've been trying to work around borders more or less since we first invented them. Often, this wish came from a drive for power. Ancient kingdoms, over and over, imagined they would 'rule everything under the heavens'.
A bid to prosper and endure drove such campaigns too, since prospering and enduring have always been difficult to do alone. Here are three of the earliest attempts at a unified world order.
A first effort: Akkadian Empire, Mesopotamia (2300 BCE)
This is the earliest known multinational empire. At its peak, it consisted of a range of city-states that stretched from parts of Iran in the east to the Levant (modern-day Syria and Israel) in the west, and from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey in the north to parts of the Arabian desert.
Called the Akkadian Empire, it was set up by King Sargon (2334-2279 BCE), who ascended the throne in an unusual way.
Unlike his predecessors, he did not claim to represent the gods. Instead, he projected himself as a self-made leader. In a sense, he had to. He was not born of 'royal' blood.
In fact, it was said, in the contemporary lore about him, that Sargon was an orphan who was set adrift in a reed basket along the Euphrates, before being discovered and raised by a gardener. (Isn't it interesting how so many of our legends and myths echo and back and forth through time?)
He was, at some point, appointed cup-bearer to the Mesopotamian king Ur-Zababa. He rose, over time, to the position of general in his army. Then he overthrew his king.
Using anti-incumbency to his benefit, he spread word that he was as distanced from the lineage of kings as could be, and could do things differently as a result, and usher in a golden age.
As kingdom after kingdom pledged fealty to what was now becoming the Mesopotamian Empire, he conducted military campaigns as shows of strength, and to annex the unwilling. Sargon's sons Rimush and Manishtushu held the vast kingdom together after his death.
The empire grew to be so vast that it is believed to have birthed one of the earliest bureaucracies. Hundreds of surviving seals and tablets show how the administrators documented state affairs, preserved blueprints of major structures, drew maps of canals, and kept meticulous accounts of livestock, fish, barley, cloth, gems and beer.
All-in-all, it lasted about a century. Most records attribute the fall to in-fighting between the Sumerian city-states, and the lack of a dominant central leader.
Gains and loss: Ancient Egypt (2613-1425 BCE)
The key to this majestic empire lay in a single word: maat.
In Ancient Egyptian belief, this was a term for cosmic order and a state of harmony between gods and the world. It was the Egyptian king Sneferu (2613–2589 BCE) who first associated maat with politics.
Governance, in this period, became linked to the welfare of the soul. Pharaohs, their ministers and bureaucrats prioritised the building of temples, offerings to gods, and the expansion and protection of the borders.
That last bit soon took on a dominant role. Egypt began a phase of furious annexation, until the kingdom stretched from Nubia (parts of Egypt and Sudan along the Nile Valley) into the Sinai Peninsula, encompassing Syria and the Euphrates.
These borders would fluctuate, under successive pharaohs. Yet, for all its grandeur, this land would eventually come to be ruled by a succession of foreign powers for over 2,500 years, starting with the Assyrians from Ancient Mesopotamia in the 7th century BCE, followed by the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and the British.
When Gamal Abdel Nasser took over as the second President of Egypt in 1954, he was the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since the pharaohs. (The first president of the modern republic was Mohamed Naguib, originally of Sudan.)
All under heaven: China, 221 BCE-220 CE
In China, an ambitious king united warring kingdoms in 221 BCE by promoting the Chinese ideal of tianxia, literally, 'all under heaven'.
As Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) crafted the first Chinese imperial dynasty, he had a little help from the long-gone-but-rather-immortal Confucius (who lived in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE).
Closely linked to the idea of tianxia was an idea that philosopher had espoused, called Da Tong, or the Great Unity. This belief system envisioned a world government that ruled not by force but by attraction. This would be a government so selfless in its service to the people that the world would simply coalesce around it.
Using this ideal of 'stability in unity' as a propaganda tool, the Qin launched massive military campaigns to expand into parts of Central Asia and Vietnam.
The Qin dynasty was followed by the Han, which ruled for over 400 years, from 206 BCE to 220 CE. They continued the military expansion, eventually dividing the empire into inner and outer realms. Inner territories came under direct control of the Son of Heaven, the emperor. The outer realms were controlled via tributes and alliances.
Bonus: The Perpetual Peace doctrine of Immanuel Kant (1795)
In his essay Perpetual Peace, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a radical idea: a federation of free, self-governing republics bound not by conquest but by a shared commitment to autonomy and peace.
Kant was 71 at the time. Europe was living through the bloody horrors of the French Revolution (1789-99), and the wars that followed between Revolutionary France and the monarchies of Austria and Prussia.
Against this violent backdrop, Kant imagined a world in which peace wasn't just a pause to war but a permanent condition that nations committed to uphold.
The six 'preliminary articles' he laid out were a mix of prescience and idealism. In order for there to be peace, he said, diplomacy would need to be transparent; standing armies should be gradually abolished; national debt should not be raised in order to fund wars; states must not interfere in each other's internal affairs; acts of hostility that destroy trust must be banned; and peace treaties must be designed to end wars permanently, not merely defer them.
Some of these ideas remain at the heart of international relations, and are echoed in the framework of the United Nations. What they run up against, of course, is a world underpinned by ancient fears and insecurities.
As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, more than a century before Kant: The natural state of man is war.
