From the time humans began to organize into political collectives, states have imitated the best practices of one another: the latest in military weaponry, industrial processes, regulatory policy, even entire organs of state, such as central banks. This deliberate imitation – and the resulting crossnational convergence that results from it – has been a recurring feature of the international system. Today this crossnational borrowing can range from simple copying of new stand-alone technologies to more complex forms such as nuclear proliferation and emulation of industrial policy. In the 1980s much public discourse in the United States focused on the need to adopt Japanese corporate governance, production-line practices, and even Japan's education policy. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the Japanese were busy xeroxing U.S. securities regulations. A century earlier, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, France, and a number of other countries emulated, to varying degrees, Prussia's famed Imperial Army. These countries avidly copied Prussia's general staff, field regulations, armaments, conscription system, even its uniforms and marshal music. In some cases this foreign military influence proved superficial and fleeting, in others more lasting. The occasional tourist today in downtown Santiago, Chile may witness a military parade and identify vestiges of this past in the Chilean army's goose-stepping and spiked helmets. Meiji Japan's voracious copying of Western practices is the most familiar and notable historical case of large-scale, sustained crossnational borrowing.