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This article confronts a puzzle regarding revisionist powers: How to make sense of states whose behavior combines “post-colonial” critique of Western hegemony with “post-imperial” projects at home and in near abroads? Answers to this question are often informed by realist notions of great power competition that tend to read revisionist critique of the West as either epiphenomenal or due to intrinsic enmity. This piece proposes an alternative—the “capitulations syndrome”—which is developed via the Ottoman/Turkish experience and the literature on ontological insecurity. The syndrome combines “moral injury” at subordination to the West with attempts to elevate a state's status within Western-dominated international society. Anxieties produced by this paradox are managed via state narratives that celebrate select glories and traumas. This results in an exceptionalist sense of national “Self” that—when confronted—can lead to outrage at “Others” of the state story. The syndrome, I argue, both shapes broad imaginaries and is instrumentalized by policymakers. Thus, calls for global justice vis-à-vis Western hegemony can coexist with hegemonic projects nearer home. Identifying a series of family resemblances with China and Iran, I conclude by underscoring the article's main contributions: (1) its empirical study of the (post-)Ottoman experience as a case of revisionist former empires, (2) its analytical tool—the capitulations syndrome—with which to read comparative patterns, and (3) its epistemological corrective to international relations’ blindspot regarding actors with both “post-colonial” and “post-imperial” features. This hybrid condition enables revisionist former empires to invoke post-colonial solidarities in pursuit of post-imperial projects.

This article develops a timely new model for EU foreign policy by advancing the call for a ‘decentring agenda’, focused on the challenge of inclusive ‘reconstruction’. It does so by first staking out an ontological space at the intersection of empirical multiplexity and normative pluriversality. Within this space, it proposes an ethically informed methodological tool: the contrapuntal negotiation of dissonant perspectives on common governance challenges. It then suggests ways to reconstruct analytical and policy‐making processes and outcomes on the basis of mutuality and local empowerment. Using three scales of ‘contrapuntality’ (micro, meso and macro) to read key empirical sites at the intersection of the EU's internal and external policies (migration, religious and neighbourhood governance), it argues that by decentring in these and further arenas, the EU can seek to become a more reflexive global actor in sync with the ethical and practical demands of our multiplex world.

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