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International societies in pre-modern East Asia: a preliminary framework
Abstract
Bringing together some of the most innovative scholars in both the English School of international relations and East Asian studies, this volume investigates whether or not significant and distinct international social structures exist at the regional level represented by 'East Asia', and what this can tell us about international society both regionally and globally. The book's main finding is that the regional dispute over how its states and peoples should relate to the Western-dominated global international society makes the existence of East Asian international society essentially contested. While this regional-global social dynamic is present in many regions, it is particularly strong in East Asia. This book will appeal to audiences interested in developing English School theory, the study of East Asian international relations and comparative regionalism.
Buzan and Acharya challenge the discipline of International Relations to reimagine itself in the light of the thinking about, and practice of, international relations and world order from premodern India, China and the Islamic world. This prequel to their 2019 book, The Making of Global International Relations, takes the story back from the two-century tale of modern IR, to reveal the deep global history of the discipline. It shows the multiple origins and meanings of many concepts thought of as only modern and Western. It opens pathways for the rest of the world into this most Eurocentric of disciplines, encouraging them to bring their own histories, concepts and theories with them. The authors have written this book with the hope of inspiring others to extend these pathways by bringing in a wider array of cultures, and exploring how they thought about and acted in worlds composed of multiple, independent, collective actors.
The term ‘Indo-Pacific’ has now entered the strategic lexicon to refer to strategic Asia. In contrast to the dominant themes in the scholarly literature that emphasise its ‘newness’ and conceive it as a maritime space, I argue that Asia's three sub-regions (South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia) and two oceans (Indian and Western Pacific) have constituted a single strategic system for the past two centuries (with the notable exception of the last three decades of the Cold War). Importantly, future regional order in this ‘larger Asia’ will emerge from the interdependence of continental and maritime power. Approaching International Relations as an historical social science, I construct a new historical narrative to explain region (trans)formation. This larger strategic Asia that first emerged around the time of the ‘great divergence’ between the West and the rest was created by a rising Britain through its Indian base. While Cold War geopolitics ‘split’ Asia into smaller sub-regions, the rise of China and India is reversing this split. The contemporary re-emergence of the Indo-Pacific allows the United States to create a regional distribution of power and a regional distribution of status (through discourse) that favours the United States in an increasingly multipolar region.
This chapter looks at English School (ES) theory as a way of understanding China and its rise. It focuses both on where ES theory fits well enough with China to provide an interesting perspective, and on where 'Chinese characteristics' put China outside the standard ES framing and raise theoretical challenges to it. The first section briefly reviews the ES literature on China. The second section places China within the normative structure of contemporary global international society by looking at how China relates to the primary institutions that define that society. The third section explores two challenges that 'Chinese characteristics' pose for how the ES thinks about international society: hierarchy and 'face'. The Conclusions assess the strengths and weaknesses of ES theory in relation to understanding the rise of China.
In diesem Kapitel wenden wir uns der internationalen Konflikt- und Kooperationslandschaft derjenigen Weltregion zu, die gelegentlich als pazifisches Asien bezeichnet wird und aus den – vielfach miteinander wechselwirkenden – Teilregionen (Nord-)Ost- und Südost-Asien besteht. Zusammen umfassen sie rund ein Drittel der Weltbevölkerung, verteilt auf 16 Staaten und Territorien (vgl. Übersicht 5.1). Mit der VR China und Japan gehören dazu die heute zweit- und drittgrößte Wirtschaftsnation der Welt, die ökonomische Dynamik der Region war und ist Gegenstand sowohl der globalen Berichterstattung wie der wissenschaftlichen Analyse (und Kontroverse über ihre Erklärung). Dies sind jedoch Fragestellungen der international vergleichenden politischen Ökonomie bzw. der Entwicklungsforschung, die uns hier nur insoweit beschäftigen werden, wie sie mit intraregionalen Beziehungen zu tun haben. Wie in den vorausgegangenen Kapiteln sind solche, konflikthafter Natur wie kooperativ, der zentrale Gegenstand des vorliegenden Kapitels.
This essay conducts a critical investigation of the existence or not of international society at the regional level in East Asia as a critique of the excessive universalism of the existing English School theorization of international society. Through a purposeful engagement with the English School theory, it looks at how primary institutions of the Westphalian society of states such as sovereignty and the imperialism are historically imposed upon and resisted by East Asian states in dismantling the traditional regional order. It considers the way in which East Asian states creatively accept, interpret, engage in and practise certain primary institutions of Western-global international society, sovereignty and the market in particular, on their own terms in the postcolonial context. Variations in interpretation and practice of these two primary institutions, it argues, amount to East Asian regional contestations to Western-global international society through localization of norms. It also examines the pec...
Scholars of International Relations (IR) increasingly realise that their discipline, including its theories and methods, often neglects voices and experiences outside of the West. But how do we address this problem and move the discipline forward? While some question whether ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ (or ‘post-Western’) are useful labels, there are also other perspectives, including those who believe in the adequacy of existing theories and approaches, those who argue for particular national ‘schools’ of IR, and those who dismiss recent efforts to broaden IR theory as ‘mimicry’ in terms of their epistemological underpinnings. After reviewing these debates, this article identifies some avenues for further research with a view to bringing out the global heritage of IR. These include, among other things, paying greater attention to the genealogy of international systems, the diversity of regionalisms and regional worlds, the integration of area studies with IR, people-centric approaches to IR, security and development, and the agency role of non-Western ideas and actors in building global order. I also argue for broadening the epistemology of IR theory with the help of non-Western philosophies such as Buddhism. While the study of IR remains dominated by Western perspectives and contributions, it is possible to build different and alternative theories which originate from non-Western contexts and experiences.
Applying the new economics of organization and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross‐national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies. Building on a distinction between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, it explores the impact of these variations on economic performance and many spheres of policy‐making, including macroeconomic policy, social policy, vocational training, legal decision‐making, and international economic negotiations. The volume examines the institutional complementarities across spheres of the political economy, including labour markets, markets for corporate finance, the system of skill formation, and inter‐firm collaboration on research and development that reinforce national equilibria and give rise to comparative institutional advantages, notably in the sphere of innovation where LMEs are better placed to sponsor radical innovation and CMEs to sponsor incremental innovation. By linking managerial strategy to national institutions, the volume builds a firm‐centred comparative political economy that can be used to assess the response of firms and governments to the pressures associated with globalization. Its new perspectives on the welfare state emphasize the role of business interests and of economic systems built on general or specific skills in the development of social policy. It explores the relationship between national legal systems, as well as systems of standards setting, and the political economy. The analysis has many implications for economic policy‐making, at national and international levels, in the global age.
Edward Keene argues that the conventional idea of an 'anarchical society' of equal and independent sovereign states is an inadequate description of order in modern world politics. International political and legal order has always been dedicated to two distinct goals: to try to promote the toleration of different ways of life, while advocating the adoption of one specific way, that it labels 'civilization'. The nineteenth-century solution to this contradiction was to restrict the promotion of civilization to the world beyond Europe. That discriminatory way of thinking has now broken down, with the result that a single, global order is supposed to apply to everyone, but opinion is still very much divided as to what the ultimate purpose of this global order should be, and how its political and legal structure should be organised.
The conventional view of international society has it that it is interested only in co-existence and order amongst states. This creates a puzzle. When the historical record is examined, we discover that international society has repeatedly signed up to normative principles that go well beyond this purpose. When it has done so, it has built new normative constraints into international legitimacy, and this is most conspicuously so when it has espoused broadly humanitarian principles. This suggests that the norms adopted by international society might have been encouraged from the distinct constituency of world society. The book traces a series of historical case studies which issued in international affirmation of such principles: slave-trade abolition in 1815; the public conscience in 1899; social justice (but not racial equality) in 1919; human rights in 1945; and democracy as the only acceptable form of state in 1990. In each case, evidence is presented of world-society actors (transnational movements, advocacy networks, and INGOs) making the political running for a new principle, often in alliance with a leading state. At the same time, world society has mounted a normative case, and this can be seen as a degree of normative integration between international and world society. Collectively, the book contributes to the growing IR literature on the role of norms, and especially that written from a broadly English School or constructivist perspective.
In this 2004 book, Barry Buzan offers an extensive critique and reappraisal of the English school approach to International Relations. Starting on the neglected concept of world society and bringing together the international society tradition and the Wendtian mode of constructivism, Buzan offers a new theoretical framework that can be used to address globalisation as a complex political interplay among state and non-state actors. This approach forces English school theory to confront neglected questions about both its basic concepts and assumptions, and about the constitution of society in terms of what values are shared, how and why they are shared, and by whom. Buzan highlights the idea of primary institutions as the central contribution of English school theory and shows how this both differentiates English school theory from realism and neoliberal institutionalism, and how it can be used to generate distinctive comparative and historical accounts of international society.
The book analyses and evaluates the development role and impact of the state in East Asia, in both capitalist (South Korea and Taiwan) and socialist (China) contexts. It makes use of new research data on the mechanisms and impact of state intervention in East Asian development and presents an original theory, taking issue with the conventional view that East Asian development reflects the power of market forces.
The balance of power has been a central concept in the theory and practice of international relations for the past five hundred years. It has also played a key role in some of the most important attempts to develop a theory of international politics in the contemporary study of international relations. In this 2007 book, Richard Little establishes a framework that treats the balance of power as a metaphor, a myth and a model. He then uses this framework to reassess four major texts that use the balance of power to promote a theoretical understanding of international relations: Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (1948), Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society (1977), Kenneth N. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979) and John J. Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). These reassessments allow the author to develop a more comprehensive model of the balance of power.
The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and methodological discussion, of such questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history.
This 2003 book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the global state system has been populated by one dominant power and several other important powers, none of which should rightly be characterised as a ‘peer competitor’ of the United States (Ikenberry 2002). The United States is the sole global power with the capacity to exert decisive influence across different regions of the world, diplomatically, economically and militarily. Its military spending far exceeds that of any other state or combination of states, and its military technology grants it effective control of the global commons (Posen 2003). The US economy, measured in terms of gross domestic product, remains more than twice as large as that of any other individual nation-state (Economist 2006b: 26). The European Union is collectively an economic peer of the United States, but lacks the degree of coherence and coordination in foreign and defence policy required for global power projection. In terms of material capabilities we live, at least for now, in a unipolar system. As the United States has learned with difficulty in recent years, however, even a unipolar state cannot be everywhere, much less control events or simply dictate international outcomes. A unipolar state, just like any other state, does not always get what it wants and is forced to make choices and set priorities.
The article discusses the pressures that influence China's interactions with the world in terms of three spatial dimensions. The three dimensions that can help achieve a comprehensive and coherent picture of China's position are those of a single-region state, a multi-regional power and a global presence.
Can international legitimacy operate even in a deformed balance of power, and when there is only one dominant state? Conventionally, hegemony has been perceived as a threat to international society. But how then is international order to be maintained, if this still requires a managerial role on the part of the great powers? IR theory has not taken that problem sufficiently seriously. This study makes a sharp distinction between primacy, denoting merely a form of material power, and hegemony, understood as a legitimate practice, and as giving rise to a form of social power. Adopting an English School approach, the author suggests hegemony be considered as one potential institution of international society, and hence as one possible mechanism of international order. The book reviews some relevant historical cases (the Concert of Europe, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana) and argues that, instead of one model of hegemony, these represent several different variants: importantly, each displays its own distinctive legitimacy dynamics. Once these are appreciated, they can help us identify the possible institutional forms of hegemony in contemporary international society. This is done through three cases, examining in turn US policy on the UN Security Council, in East Asia, and on climate change. The overall argument challenges the limited post-Cold War debate about primacy, and the equally simplistic projections about the future distribution of power to which it gives rise. In doing so, it offers a major rethinking of the concept of hegemony in international relations.
In their three thousand years of interaction, China and Vietnam have been through a full range of relationships. Throughout all these fluctuations the one constant has been that China is always the larger power, and Vietnam the smaller. Yet China has rarely been able to dominate Vietnam, and the relationship is shaped by its asymmetry. The Sino-Vietnamese relationship provides the perfect ground for developing and exploring the effects of asymmetry on international relations. Womack develops his theory in conjunction with an original analysis of the interaction between China and Vietnam from the Bronze Age to the present.
For over sixty years the United States has been the largest economy and most powerful country in the world. However, there is growing speculation that this era of hegemony is under threat as it faces huge trade deficits, a weaker currency, and stretched military resources. America's Global Advantage argues that, despite these difficulties, the US will maintain its privileged position. In this original and important contribution to a central subject in International Relations, Carla Norrlof challenges the prevailing wisdom that other states benefit more from US hegemony than the United States itself. By analyzing America's structural advantages in trade, money, and security, and the ways in which these advantages reinforce one another, Norrlof shows how and why America benefits from being the dominant power in the world. Contrary to predictions of American decline, she argues that American hegemony will endure for the foreseeable future.
John Hobson challenges the ethnocentric bias of mainstream accounts of the “Rise of the West” that assume that Europeans have pioneered their own development, and that the East has been a passive by-stander. Describing the rise of what he calls the “Oriental West”, Hobson argues that Europe first assimilated many Eastern inventions, and then appropriated Eastern resources through imperialism. Hobson's book thus propels the hitherto marginalized Eastern peoples to the forefront of the story of progressive world history. © Cambridge University Press, 2009 and John M. Hobson 2004. All rights reserved.
The Eurocentric conventional wisdom holds that the West is unique in having a multi-state system in international relations and liberal democracy in state-society relations. At the same time, the Sinocentric perspective believes that China is destined to have authoritarian rule under a unified empire. In fact, China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656-221 BC) was once a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. Both cases witnessed the prevalence of war, formation of alliances, development of the centralized bureaucracy, emergence of citizenship rights, and expansion of international trade. This book examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes. This historical comparison of China and Europe challenges the presumption that Europe was destined to enjoy checks and balances while China was preordained to suffer under a coercive universal status. © Victoria Tin-bor Hui 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This book provides an introduction to the analysis of global political order - how patterns of governance and institutionalization in world politics have already changed; what the most important challenges are; and what the way forward might look like. The first section develops three analytical frameworks: a world of sovereign states capable of only limited cooperation; a world of ever-denser international institutions embodying the idea of an international community; and a world in which global governance moves beyond the state and into the realms of markets, civil society, and networks. Part II examines five of the most important issues facing contemporary international society: nationalism and the politics of identity; human rights and democracy; war, violence, and collective security; the ecological challenge; and the management of economic globalization in a highly unequal world. Part III considers the idea of an emerging multi-regional system; and the picture of global order built around US empire. The conclusion looks at the normative implications. If international society has indeed been changing in the ways discussed in this book, what ought we to do? And, still more crucially, who is the 'we' that is to be at the centre of this drive to create a morally better world? This book is concerned with the fate of international society in an era of globalization and the ability of the inherited society of sovereign states to provide a practically viable and normatively acceptable framework for global political order. It lays particular emphasis on the different forms of global inequality and the problems of legitimacy that these create, and on the challenges posed by cultural diversity and value conflict.
At the end of the Cold War the People's Republic of China found itself in an international crisis, facing severe problems in both domestic politics and foreign policy. Nearly two decades later, Yong Deng provides an original account of China's remarkable rise from the periphery to the center stage of the post-Cold War world. Deng examines how the once beleaguered country has adapted to, and proactively realigned, the international hierarchy, great-power politics, and its regional and global environment in order to carve out an international path within the globalized world. Creatively engaging with mainstream international relations theories and drawing extensively from original Chinese material, this is a well-grounded assessment of the promises and challenges of China's struggle to manage the interlacing of its domestic and international transitions and the interactive process between its rise and evolving world politics.
This paper presents two competing views on China's growth experience over the past three decades. For the sake of illustrative ease and brevity I label these two opposing views as the Beijing Consensus and the Washington Consensus. The Beijing Consensus interprets China's economic growth as a function of innovations in the state sector, including close financial controls, state ownership of firms, and political controls in favor of economic growth. The Washington Consensus views China's experience much the same as growth experiences elsewhere-that is, as a result of financial liberalization, private entrepreneurship, and political opening. Contrary to the established views among China scholars, this paper argues that the Washington Consensus view fits with the Chinese growth experience better.
East Asia has experienced a drastic decline in incidences of warfare and has had exceptionally low levels of battle deaths
after 1979. However, East Asian peace had already begun in 1967 inside ASEAN. Is it possible that East Asian peace began in
ASEAN and spread to the rest of East Asia? This is the question that this article aims to tackle by showing the association
between a reasonable and plausible explanation, the ASEAN Way, and East Asian peace after 1979. The argument about the role
of the ASEAN approach in the pacification of East Asia is based on an examination of the patterns of frequency of conflicts,
numbers of battle deaths and conflict termination. In this kind of examination, it seems that the recipes for peace in East
Asia after 1979 are similar to those of ASEAN after 1967, and that their relationship to conflicts was also very similar.
Empire is back. Once upon a time, in the era of decolonization, empires seemed like remnants of a past that would soon disappear. No more. Now, both as a reality of modern geopolitics and as a subject of academic study, empires are flourishing as never before. Although the current global power with the greatest imperial pretensions is now facing increasing difficulties in subduing resistance in one of its remote frontiers, and the American public at home would just as soon forget about this adventure in delusion, the question of the suitability of the United States for an imperial role will not soon disappear. Furthermore, China's sustained rise to the ranks of a great world power has begun to raise questions about whether China, too, will take on an imperial role, as it needs to guarantee supplies of energy for its booming economy and engage in geopolitical competition with its rivals. Like many other empires, China has also had difficulty in gaining the allegiance of the peoples on its frontiers.
More than economics, more than politics, a nation's culture will determine its fate. So says the man who built Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. Lee is not optimistic that other nations can replicate East Asia's staggering growth. He is critical of the social breakdown that he sees in America: "The expansion of the rights of the individual has come at the expense of orderly society." East Asia is changing in the face of rapid growth, but Lee doubts that American-style individualism will ever catch on there. While critical of American social order, Lee strongly supports America's role as a balancer in East Asia. If it withdraws, other powers--notably Japan--would go their own way. And that would unsettle the region's peace.
This article attempts to locate and understand the place of Third World states in the international system both in terms of their collective impact on the system as the "intruder" element into the Eurocentric system of states and in terms of their role as individual new sovereign states trying to adjust to an international order that can only be defined as an "anarchical society." Often the dual pressures generated by these two roles can make conflicting demands on these states' decision-making centers, which themselves are under severe internal strain due to the lack of "unconditional legitimacy" for both Third World state-structures and the regimes that preside over them. It is argued that an expanded definition of the concept of "security" is essential for the construction of any paradigm that would have sufficient power to explain why Third World states behave as they do within the international system. It is also argued that the present difficulties they face in adjusting to the system of sovereign states is analogous to the growing pains of adolescence rather than to the schizophrenia of the demented.
The concept of face is clarified and distinguihed from other closely related constructs: authority, standards of behavior, personality, status, dignity, honor, and prestige. The claim to face may rest on the basis of status, whether ascribed or achieved, and on personal or nonpersonal factors; it may also vary according to the group with which a person is interacting. Basic differences are found between the processes involved in gaining versus losing face. While it is not a necessity for one to strive to gain face, losing face is a serious matter which will, in varying degrees, affect one's ability to function effectively in society. Face is lost when the individual, either through his action or that of people closely related to him, fails to meet essential requirements placed upon him by virtue of the social position he occupies. In contrast to the ideology of individualism, the question of face frequently arises beyond the realm of individual responsibility and subjective volition. Reciprocity is inherent in face behavior, wherein a mutually restrictive, even coercive, power is exerted upon each member of the social network. It is argued that face behavior is universal and that face should be utilized as a construct of central importance in the social sciences.
How have different cultures and peoples constructed their political communities and organized their international life in history? In which ways has order been differently conceptualized and pursued through a diverse range of institutional practices in different cultural and world historical contexts, and why? What were world orders like before the rise of capitalism and the expansion of Europe and the imposition of the Westphalian model? How is it possible to explain why different international societies, as we understand them today, have created different fundamental institutions and adopted radically different institutional designs in their pursuit of peace and cooperation across space and time? Why is it important to consider the transformation of international orders beyond European history in theorizing International Relations? From where does the current global order emerge in deep world historical terms? These are among a number of key questions raised in collective critical reflections on and re-evaluation of the theorizing enterprise within the discipline of International Relations (IR). They are questions that have been explored and interrogated during the last two decades as part of our efforts to understand the still unfolding systemic transformation of international relations. The search for answers to these questions marks a discernible turn in the studies of IR to History. Ostensibly, this historical turn in IR theorizing is a critique of the Realist claim of ‘timeless wisdom’ and, more broadly, of the failure of mainstream IR theories to take history seriously. It is an expression of dissatisfaction with universalizing IR theories. Contemporary IR is said to be ‘historophobic’, as ‘it views historical analysis as superfluous, or exogenous, to
Why have some developing countries industrialized and become more prosperous rapidly while others have not? Focusing on South Korea, Brazil, India, and Nigeria, this study compares the characteristics of fairly functioning states and explains why states in some parts of the developing world are more effective. It emphasizes the role of colonialism in leaving behind more or less effective states, and the relationship of these states with business and labor in helping explain comparative success in promoting economic progress.
This article argues that in the post-Cold War strategic transition in East Asia, ASEAN has helped to create a minimalist normative bargain among the great powers in the region. The regional norms propagated through the 'ASEAN way', emphasizing sovereignty, non-intervention, consensus, inclusion, and informality were extremely important in the initial stages of bringing the great powers especially China and the United States to the table in the immediate post-Cold War period. During this time, ASEAN helped to institutionalize power relations legitimizing the role of the great powers as well as the 'voice' of smaller states in regional security management. But the process of institutionalizing great power relations contains further steps, and what ASEAN has achieved is well short of the kind of sustained cooperation on the part of the great powers that is so necessary to the creation of a new stable regional society of states. Moreover, ASEAN has provided the great powers with a minimalist normative position from which to resist the more difficult processes of negotiating common understanding on key strategic norms. At the same time, ASEAN's model of 'comfortable' regionalism allows the great powers to treat regional institutions as instruments of so-called 'soft' balancing, more than as sites for negotiating and institutionalizing regional 'rules of the game' that would contribute to a sustainable modus vivendi among the great powers. As such, ASEAN's role is limited in, and limiting of, the great power bargain that must underpin the negotiation of the new regional order. This is a task that the regional great powers (the United States, China, and Japan) must themselves undertake.
KE sex in Victorian England, it has been said, race is a taboo subject in contemporary polite society. Conflicts or attitudes that to the simpleminded might appear to be self-evidently racial are explained away as class-based, or as difficulties attending immigration, or as responses to special local circumstances. Certainly, race relations are not an area in which political reputations are easily made, and outspokenness on the subject seems to be the preserve of those who have little to lose, their having either departed the scene or not yet arrived at it. Yet beneath this wish to talk about something else, and perhaps in part explaining it, lurk the largest of claims for the factor of race in politics, and the direst of forebodings about the future of race relations. As early as 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois was already expressing the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of 'the colour-line', and this has been a theme of pan-African congresses to the present day. A recent British prime minister, not noted for his proneness to exaggerate, is reported as having said 'I believe the greatest danger ahead of us is that the world might be divided on racial lines. I see no danger, not even the nuclear bomb, which could be so catastrophic as that." These instincts of politicians are fortified by academic analysis. John Rex, one of the most prominent writers in Britain on race relations, has gone so far as to predict that 'for the next few centuries the problems which will preoccupy men politically more than any other will be problems which they subjectively define as problems of race'.2 Hugh Tinker, in one of the very few works on race in international politics, concludes that 'Today, transcending everything (including even the nuclear threat) there is the confrontation between the races .3 No doubt the rioting that took place in Britain in the summer of 1981 is taken by writers of this persuasion to be bitter evidence in support of their view of the place of race in society. This paper is confined to an assessment of the place of race in international relations, in so far as it is possible to distinguish, in this regard, domestic from international politics. In any event, it may be argued that it is to the history of international relations, during the imperial
Why has the literature on Asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in Korea? How can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in Korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999? Politics is central to the answer. In this book the author makes two arguments. First, both Korea and the Philippines experienced significant corruption throughout the post-independence era. Second, political - not economic - considerations dominated policy making in both countries. Focusing on the exchange of favors for bribes between state and business, the author argues that politics drove policy choices, that bureaucrats were not autonomous from political interference in setting policy, and that business and political elites wrestled with each other over who would reap the rents to be had. Even in Korea, corruption was far greater than the conventional wisdom allows.
How should the United States respond to China’s rise? What are China’s longterm strategic goals? What are the implications of U.S.-China strategic interactions for world order? Three recent works—Aaron Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy, Hugh White’s The China Choice, and Yan Xuetong’s Ancient Chinese Political Thought, Modern Chinese Power—grapple with these questions in authoritative and revealing ways. This review essay examines the answers provided by these authors, with the aim of clarifying the different underlying assumptions that led them to their conclusions. Four themes are found to be especially pertinent. These are the assumptions the authors hold about the existing distribution of power, China’s strategic objectives, the role of economic interdependence in Asia, and the relationship between democracy and political legitimacy. The way the authors parse these themes—which ones they bracket or admit into their analysis, and how they weigh and combine them—helps to reveal the underlying bases of their and, by implication, our policy preferences. The essay concludes by suggesting that contrary to the view of some, time has something to offer both sides. And if those opportunities are properly understood by the United States and China, the prospects for peaceful competition and coevolution improve.
Charles A. Kupchan is Associate Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The author would like to thank participants in seminars at the following institutions for their thoughtful comments: Hebrew University, Columbia University, University of California at San Diego, Council on Foreign Relations, Georgetown University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Okazaki Institute (Tokyo), the American Center (Tokyo), and the Danish Institute of International Affairs (Copenhagen). The critiques of Michael Barnett, Richard Betts, Albert Fishlow, Gary Hufbauer, Clifford Kupchan, Joseph Lepgold, Gideon Rose, Peter Trubowitz, Ole Waever, Fareed Zakaria, and the reviewers of International Security were particularly helpful. For research assistance, I would like to thank Jason Davidson, Delphine Park, and Mira Sucharov.
1. See, for example, John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-56.
2. For general analysis of the secular processes through which the locus of preponderant power changes over time, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981). During the second half of the twentieth century, U.S. economic output has fallen from roughly one-half to one-quarter of gross world product. See Jeffrey Frankel, Regional Trading Blocs in the World Economic System (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997), p. 6.
3. Even if American hegemony lasts for decades more, debate about crafting a posthegemonic order should take place now, while U.S. preponderance is still sufficient to maintain the status quo. It is far more prudent to put in place the foundation of a durable order by design than simply to wait until current arrangements unravel. Many analysts agree that U.S. preponderance will not last, but few have given thought to how the prospect of decline should affect U.S. grand strategy. One exception is Christopher Layne. Layne calls for a U.S. grand strategy of offshore balancing to conserve U.S. resources and to help protect the United States from getting dragged into distant conflicts. He fails to address, however, how to promote peace as the United States withdraws from existing commitments. Instead, he makes the case that the United States should simply stand aloof from the regional conflicts likely to emerge in the wake of an American retrenchment. See Layne, "From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America's Future Grand Strategy," International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1997), pp. 86-124.
4. On the democratic peace, see Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1169. On the declining utility of warfare, see Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
5. See, for example, Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911).
6. Important critiques of the democratic peace hypothesis have been collected in two edited volumes: Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); and Miriam Fendius Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
7. On the greater stability of bipolarity, see Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Summer 1964), pp. 881-909; and Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future." For arguments in favor of multipolarity, see Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer, "Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability," World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (April 1964), pp. 390-406. For general discussion of polarity and stability, see Stephen Van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Winter 1990/91), pp. 5-57; and Michael Mastanduno, "Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 49-88.
8. See the exchange between John Mearsheimer and his critics in "Promises...
This paper examines the impact of increasing intra-state conflict in the Asia Pacific on domestic, regional and international security. It focuses on secessionist conflicts and self-determination disputes in South-East Asia and the South Pacific. It looks at the reasons behind the increase in such internal conflicts, including the proliferation of weak, ethnically diverse states; the impacts of modernization and democratization; and changing international norms in relation to the creation of new states. Finally, it examines the way that intra-state conflict impacts upon the international security agenda via the involvement of distant actors; the internationalization of domestic disputes; cross-border movements of arms and people; increasing threats to maritime transport; and the potential for increased superpower competition in the region.
Neoliberal economists say that growth is easy, provided the state does not obstruct the natural growth-inducing processes of a capitalist economy. They point to the success of South Korea and Taiwan as evidence that this proposition also holds for quite poor economies. Using chapters of Helen Hughes's edited volume by way of illustration, this article shows that the neoliberals ignore so much contrary evidence as to suggest that the neoliberal paradigm has entered a degenerative stage, like classical economics in the years before Keynes's breakthrough and like much Marxist writing of the 1970s.
Two recent books about East Asia offer ways forward. The one by Alice Amsden argues that Korea has done better than other developing countries because it has created a more powerful synergy between a state that aggressively steers market competition and large, diversified business groups whose firms focus strategically on production processes at the shop floor. In conditions of “late development” this synergy is the key to success. Stephan Haggard's book accepts the core economic mechanism of the neoliberals but argues that the choice between sensible export-oriented policies, as in East Asia, or unsensible secondary import-substitution policies, as in Latin America, is determined by a complex conjunction of international pressures, domestic coalitions, political institutions, and ideas.
Both books make important contributions to the debate. But they are weakened by not situating the experience of their case studies within an account of trends in the world system and by not addressing the question of what prevented massive “government failure” in market interventions in the East Asian cases. The last part of this paper takes a short step in this direction.