Moral Multipolarity and the Behavioural Architecture of Trust: How Asian States Contest Western Selective Legitimacy

Abstract

Asian states invoke the language of multipolarity to very different ends, yet we still lack a clear account of the mechanisms that would let their legitimacy claims take hold. This article asks how Asian states create, maintain, and mobilise legitimacy under Western accusations of selective moralism — and through which mechanisms such claims might become behaviourally consequential. It pursues three objectives. The first is theoretical: to specify the micro-foundations that constructivist accounts of civilisational contestation tend to leave unopened, and to be explicit about what behavioural political economy adds beyond them — not as a rival to constructivism but as the mechanism layer beneath it, treating legitimacy as an asset that is invested in, accumulated, and depreciated. The second is a structured plausibility probe: through focused comparison across official discourse, foreign-policy doctrine, and secondary indicators for China, Iran, and Indonesia — with the Gulf Cooperation Council states as a deliberately divergent comparator — it maps the channels through which these states supply alternative legitimacy: civilisational framing, procedural sovereignty signalling, and selective reciprocity. The third is applied: it converts the framework into testable hypotheses about audience uptake and draws out implications for governance, security, and education. The central finding is bounded on purpose. The evidence demonstrates the supply of legitimacy claims and the configuration of channels across cases; on discourse data alone it does not, and cannot, demonstrate uptake — acceptance or behavioural compliance. Those mechanisms are therefore advanced as falsifiable hypotheses awaiting survey and experimental test. The contribution is a comparative framework that separates legitimacy supply from uptake and specifies how each could be measured.