thinking theoretically about asian ir - koç...

58 Samuel S. Kim

51. Selden, "China, Japan and the Regional Political Economy of East Asia," 313. 52. Robert Legvold, "Sino-Soviet Relations: The American Factor," in China, the

United States, and the Soviet Union: Tripolarity and Policy Making in the Cold War, ed. Robert S. Ross (Armonk, NY; M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 87.

53. Kang, "Hierarchy in Asian International Relations," 174. 54. Cohen, East Asia at the Center, 480. 55. Harold James, A German Identity, 1770-1990 (New York: Routledge, 1989). 56. For a cogent analysis challenging the applicability of power-transition balance of

power theory in today's Asia, see Steve Chan, Looking for Balance: China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

57. See David Shambaugh, ed.. Power Shift: China and Asia's New Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); David M. Lampton, The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might. Money, and Minds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Samuel S. Kim, "China and Globalization: Confronting Myriad Challenges and Opportunities," Asian Perspective 33, no. 3 (2009): 41-80.

58. Amitav Acharya, "Will Asia's Past Be Its Future?," International Security 28, no. 3 (Winter 2003/2004): 164. See also Amitav Acharya, "How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism," International Organization 58 (Spring 2004): 239-75; Samuel S. Kim, "Regionalization and Regionalism in East Asia," Journal of East Asian Studies 4, no. 1 (January-April 2004): 39-67; and Kent E. Calder and Francis Fukuyama, eds., East Asian Multilateralism: Prospects for Regional Stability (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

59. Kim, "Regionalization and Regionalism in East Asia," 43. 60. For the text of the speech, see UN Doc. A/60/PV.5, September 15, 2005, 19-20. 61. Kim, "China and Globalization," 54-56. 62. Gilbert Rozman, ed., East Asian National Identities: Common Roots and Chinese

Exceptionalism (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012). 63. Jae Ho Chung, "East Asia Responds to the Rise of China: Patterns and Variations,"

Pacific Affairs 82, no. 4 (Winter 2009/2010): 659. 64. Robert Jervis, "The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past?," Interna

tional Security 16, no. 3 (Winter 1991/92): 39-45.

\

Chapter Three

Thinking Theoretically about Asian IR AMITAV ACHARYA

Any discussion of theoretical perspectives on the international relations (IR) in Asia confronts the paradox that much of the available literature on the subject had, until quite recently, remained largely atheoretical. Whether from within or outside the region, many analysts of Asia were largely unconvinced that theory was either necessary or useful for studying Asian international relations.' Although interest in it is growing in the region, particularly in China,^ where efforts to develop a "Chinese School" of IR are gathering steam, theory is still seen as too abstract or too divorced from the day-to-day concerns of governments and peoples to merit serious and sustained pursuit.

Moreover, theory is criticized by many in Asia as too "Western." Thus, even among those writers on Asian IR who are theoretically oriented, disagreement persists as to whether IR theory is relevant to studying Asia given its origin in, and close association with, Western historical traditions, intellectual discourses, and foreign policy practices. International relations theory, like the discipline itself, remains, an "American social science," to quote Stanley Hoffman.'

The recent advances made by the "English School" and continental European Constructivism have not made IR theory "universal ; indeed, they have further entrenched and broadened the Western theoretical dominance. The question of how relevant IR theory is to the study of Asian security has evoked strikingly different responses. On the one hand, David Kang has seized upon the non-realization of Realist warnings of post-war Asia being "ripe for rivaky" to critique not just Realism, but Western IR theory in general, for "getting Asia wrong."'' In analyzing Asian regionalism, Peter Katzenstein comments, "Theories based on Western, and especially West

59

60 Amitav Acharya

European experience, have been of little use in making sense of Asian regionalism."^ Although Katzenstein's remarks specifically concern the study of Asian regionalism, they can be applied to Asian IR in general. And it is a view widely shared among Asian scholars. On the other side, John Hcenberry and Michael Mastanduno defend the relevance of Western theoretical frameworks in studying the international relations of Asia. David Shambaugh's introduction to this volume also illustrates the partial applicabihty of various IR theories—^but the impossibihty of any single one—to explain international relations in the region. While intra-Asian relationships might have had some distinctive features historically, this distinctiveness had been diluted by the progressive integration of the region into the modem international system. The international relations of Asia have acquired the behavioral norms and attributes associated with the modern interstate system that originated in Europe and still retains many of the features of the Westphalian model. Hence, the core concepts of international relations theory such as hegemony, the distribution of power, international regimes, and political identity are as relevant in the Asian context as anywhere else.®

To this observer, this debate is a healthy caveat, rather than a debilitating constraint, on analyzing Asian international relations with the help of an admittedly Western theoretical literature. To be sure, theoretical paradigms developed from the Western experience do not adequately capture the full range of ideas and relationships that drive international relations in Asia. But IR theories and approaches—Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, and analytic eclecticism—are relevant and useful in analyzing Asian IR, provided they do not encourage a selection bias in favor of those phenomena (ideas, events, trends, and relationships) that fit with them and against those that do not. IR scholars should feel free to identify and study phenomena that are either ignored or given scarce attention by these perspectives. They should also develop concepts and insights from the Asian context and experience not just to study Asian developments and dynamics, but also other parts of the world. In other words. Western IR theory, despite its ethnocentrism, is not to be dismissed or expunged from Asian classrooms or seminars, but universalized with the infusion of Asian histories, personahties, philosophies, trajectories, and practices.

To do so, one must look beyond the contributions of those who write in an overtly theoretical fashion, explicitly employing theoretical jargon and making references to the theoretical literature of IR. A good deal of empirical or policy-relevant work may be regarded as theoretical for analytical purposes because it, like the speeches and writings of policy makers, reflects mental or social constructs that side with different paradigms of international relations.' To ignore these in any discussion of theory would be to miss out on a large

Thinking Theoretically about Asian IR 61

and important dimension of the debate on, and analysis of, Asian IR. In the sections that follow, I examine three major perspectives on Asian international relations: Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism, along with some reflections on the merits of "analytical eclecticism"' (see table 3.1).

None of these theories are coherent, singular entities. Each contains a range of perspectives and variations, some of which overlap with those of the others, although this complexity is seldom acknowledged in academic

Table 3.1. Three Perspectives on International Relations

Realism Liberalism Constructivism

Main Actors

Primary Goals of States

States

Pursuit of national interest; power maximization (offensive Realism); survival and security (defensive Realism)

States, multinational corporations, and international organizations

Cooperation and coordination to achieve collective goals; world peace

States, transnational knowledge communities, and moral entrepreneurs

Community building through interactions and shared normative frameworks

Preferred International Order

Primary Mode of Interaction between Units

A balance of power system underpinned by self-help and alliances to maintain international order

Strategic interaction backed by causal ideas and military and economic power

A collective security system underpinned by free trade, liberal democracy, and institutions

Two-level (domestic and international) bargaining backed by causal ideas; trade and other forms of functional institutionalization

Global and regional security communities forged through shared norms and collective identity

Socialization through principled ideas and institutions

A Major Variation Neo-Realism: distribution of power decides outcome

Neo-Liberal Critical institutionalism: Constructivism: international system challenges the state-anarchic, but centric institutions created by Constructivism of states in their self- Wendt interest do constrain anarchy

62 Amitav Acharya

debates. Using even these broad categories is not that simple because most writings on Asian IR are generated by area specialists, who are unlikely to pigeonhole themselves into Realist, Liberal, and Constructivist slots. So theorizing Asian IR necessarily involves generalizing from a thin conceptual base and making arbitrary judgments about who and what belongs where.

Although theories of IR are built around a set of assumptions and arguments that are broad in scope and supposed to apply to every region, in reality, theoretical debates about the intemational relations of regions often develop around issues and arguments peculiar to the region. Asia is no exception. Hence in discussing the three theoretical perspectives in the context of Asia, I identify and discuss those arguments and metaphors that have dominated both academic and policy debates (see table 3.2).

This chapter looks primarily at intemational relations and regional order, rather than the foreign pohcy of Asian states. It is not intended as a survey of the hterature on Asian intemational relations. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring the relationship between theoretical constmcts and empirical developments in Asian intemational relations. Theory does not exist in a vacuum. Both at the global level and in the region, theoretical work responds to major events and changes occurring within and outside (at the global level) the region. In the last section of this chapter I make some general observations about the prospects for developing an Asian universalism in intemational relations theory as a counter to both Westem dominance and Asian exceptionalism. A final aspect of this chapter is that it is oriented more toward security studies than intemational pohtical economy. This to some extent reflects the state of the study of Asian intemational relations, in which the work on security studies exceeds that on intemational political economy (IPE).

REALISM

Reahsts take the intemational system to be in anarchy (no authority above the state), in which states, as the main actors in intemational relations, are guided mainly by considerations of power and the national interest. Intemational relations is seen as a zero\um game in which states are more concemed with their relative gains rather than absolute gains (how much one gains vis-a-vis another is more important than the fact that everybody may gain something). The relentless competition for power and influence makes conflict inevitable and cooperation rare and superficial; intemational institutions operate on the margins of great power whims and caprice. Intemational order, never permanent, is maintained by manipulating the balance of power.

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62 Amitav Acharya

debates. Using even these broad categories is not that simple because most writings on Asian IR are generated by area specialists, who are unlikely to pigeonhole themselves into Realist, Liberal, and Constructivist slots. So theorizing Asian IR necessarily involves generalizing from a thin conceptual base and making arbitrary judgments about who and what belongs where.

Although theories of IR are built around a set of assumptions and arguments that are broad in scope and supposed to apply to every region, in reality, theoretical debates about the intemational relations of regions often develop around issues and arguments peculiar to the region. Asia is no exception. Hence in discussing the three theoretical perspectives in the context of Asia, I identify and discuss those arguments and metaphors that have dominated both academic and policy debates (see table 3.2).

This chapter looks primarily at intemational relations and regional order, rather than the foreign pohcy of Asian states. It is not intended as a survey of the hterature on Asian intemational relations. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring the relationship between theoretical constmcts and empirical developments in Asian intemational relations. Theory does not exist in a vacuum. Both at the global level and in the region, theoretical work responds to major events and changes occurring within and outside (at the global level) the region. In the last section of this chapter I make some general observations about the prospects for developing an Asian universalism in intemational relations theory as a counter to both Westem dominance and Asian exceptionalism. A final aspect of this chapter is that it is oriented more toward security studies than intemational pohtical economy. This to some extent reflects the state of the study of Asian intemational relations, in which the work on security studies exceeds that on intemational political economy (IPE).

REALISM

Reahsts take the intemational system to be in anarchy (no authority above the state), in which states, as the main actors in intemational relations, are guided mainly by considerations of power and the national interest. Intemational relations is seen as a zero\um game in which states are more concemed with their relative gains rather than absolute gains (how much one gains vis-a-vis another is more important than the fact that everybody may gain something). The relentless competition for power and influence makes conflict inevitable and cooperation rare and superficial; intemational institutions operate on the margins of great power whims and caprice. Intemational order, never permanent, is maintained by manipulating the balance of power.

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64 Amitav Acharya

with power defined primarily in economic and military terms. A later version of ReaUsm, developed by Kenneth Waltz and called "neo-Realism," stresses the importance of the structural properties of the international system, especially the distribution of power, in shaping conflict and order, thereby downplaying the impact of human nature (emphasized by classical Realists) or domestic politics in international relations. More recently, intra-Realist debates have revealed differences between "offensive Realists" and "defensive Reahsts." Offensive Realists such as Mearsheimer argue that states are power maximizers: going for "all they can get" with "hegemony as their ultimate goal." Defensive Realists, such as Robert Jervis or Jack Snyder, maintain that states are generally satisfied with the status quo if their own security is not challenged, and thus they concentrate on maintaining the balance of power.

Whether academic or poUcy oriented. Realists view the balance of power as the key force shaping Asia's post-war international relations, with the United States as chief regional balancer.® A major proponent of this view is Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's senior statesman. Lee ascribes not only Asian stability, but also its robust economic growth during the "miracle years," to the US military presence in the region.'" In his view, the US presence and intervention in Indochina secured the region against Chinese and Soviet expansion and gave the Asian states time to develop their economies." In the wake of the communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, Seni Pramoj, the leader of Thailand's Democrat Party, described the US role as the regional balancer in somewhat different terms: "We have cock fights in Thailand, but sometimes we put a sheet of glass between the fighting cocks. They can peck at each other without hurting each other. Iq the cold war between Moscow and Peking, the glass between the antagonists can be Washington."'^

Until the end of the Cold War, Realist arguments about Asian IR were closer to classical Realism than the neo-Realism developed by Kenneth Waltz, which stresses the causal impact of the distribution of power. This has changed with the end of the Cold War, which spelled the end of bipolarity. Thus, a new Realist argument about Asian international relations is the view that the end of bipolarity spells disorder and even doom for the region. For neo-Realists, bipolarity is a more stable international system than multipolar-ity, both in terms of the durability of the system itself and the balance between conflict and order that preWs within the system.

The end of the Cold War would witness the "decompression" of conflicts held in check under bipolar management.'"* Hence, Realism paints a dark picture of Asia's post-Cold War order. In policy debates, the favorite Realist clich6 in the initial post-Cold War years was the "power vacuum" created by superpower retrenchment, as could be foreseen from the withdrawal of Soviet


naval facilities in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, and the dismantling of the US naval and air bases in the Philippines.

Questions about a vacuum of power inevitably beg the question of who is to fill it. Initially, Realist prognosis favored a multipolar contest featuring a rising China, a remilitarized (thanks partly to US retrenchment) Japan, and India (whose potential as an emerging power was yet to be recognized). But with the persistence of China's double-digit economic growth matched by double-digit annual increases in its defense spending, it was the rise of China that became the focal point of Realist anxieties (delight?) about Asian insecurity.

From a "power transition theory" perspective. Realists foresaw an inevitable confrontation between the status quo power (the United States) and its rising power challenger (China). But paving the way for such a confrontation was the logic of offensive Realism, which sees an inevitable tendency in rising powers toward regional expansionism. John Mearsheimer likened the rise of China to that of the United States in the nineteenth century, where the aspiring hegemon went on a spree of acquiring adjacent territories and imposed a sphere of influence (Monroe Doctrine) in the wider neighborhood.'^ Expansionism occurs not because rising powers are hardwired into an expansionist mode, but because anarchy induces a concern for survival even among the most powerful actors. In other words, great powers suffer from survival anxieties no less than weak states, and it is this concern for survival that drives them toward regional hegemony. The result is the paradoxical logic of "expand to survive."

Since a balance of power is likely to be either unstable (if multipolarity emerges) or absent (if Chinese hegemony materializes), is there a role for multilateral institutions as alternative sources of stability? During the Cold War, Reahsts paid little attention to Asian regional institutions or dialogues, of which there were but a few: an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) preoccupied with the Cambodia conflict, a severely anemic South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and some loose economic frameworks such as the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC). But with the end of the Cold War accompanied by a refocusing of ASEAN toward wider regional security issues and the emergence of new regional institutions such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC, 1989) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF, 1994), Realism came under challenge from "institutionalist" perspectives, that is, those who argued that regional norms and institutions, rather than just the balance of power system, have helped to keep the peace in Cold War Asia and would play a more important role in the region's post-Cold War order. Realists responded to this challenge by targeting Asian regional institutions. Their main preoccupation

66 Amitav Acharya

is no longer just to higMight the crucial need for a stable balance of power system, but also to expose the limitations of regional institutions.

Reahsts dismiss the capacity of regional institutions in Asia to act as a force for peace. For them, regional order rests on bilateralism (especially the US hub-and-spoke system), rather than multilateralism. During the Cold War, Reahst scholar Michael Leifer famously described Asian regional security institutions as "adjuncts" to the balance of power.'® While institutions may be effective where great powers drive them (e.g., NATO), Asian institutions are fatally flawed because they are created and maintained by weak powers. One concession made to Asian institutions by their Realist critics is to accord them a role in smoothing the rough edges of balance of power geopolitics, an argument consistent with the English School perspective. Since weak powers are structurally incapable of maintaining order and achieving security and prosperity on their own terms and within their own means (there can be no such thing as a "regional solution to regional problems"), the best way to manage the security dilemma is to keep all the relevant great powers involved in the regional arena so that they can balance each other's influence.

Such involvement cannot be automatic, however; it has to be contrived, and this is where regional institutions play their useful role as arenas for strategic engagement. Instead of great powers creating institutions and setting their agenda, as would be normal in a Realist world, weak powers may sometimes create and employ institutions with a view to engaging those powers that are crucial to an equilibrium of power."

But this limited role of regional institutions notwithstanding, Reahsts generally find Asia's international relations to be fraught with uncertainty and danger of conflict due to the absence of conditions in Asia that ensure a multipolar peace in Europe. In a famous essay, Aaron Friedberg argued that the factors that might mitigate anarchy in Europe resulting from the disappearance of bipolar stability are noticeably absent in Asia, thereby rendering the region "ripe for rivalry."'® These mitigating factors include not only strong regional institutions like the EU, but also economic interdependence and shared democratic political systems. Some Realists, like Friedberg, have found Asian economic interdependence to be thin relative to what exists in Europe and the interdependence ibetween Asia and the West. Others—like Barry Buzan, the late Gerald Segal, and Robert Gilpin—argue that economic interdependence cannot keep peace and may even cause more strife than order." Ironically, Realists see economic interdependence within Asia to be either scarce or destabilizing, or both at the same time.

In terms of its contributions, Realism can take credit for an analytical and poUcy consistency in highlighting the role of the balance of power in regional


order. This view has been maintained both during the heydays of US hegemony in the 1950s and 1960s, through the course of its relative dechne in the post-Vietnam years, and in the post-Cold War "unipolar moment." In China, Realism was the one Western theory of IR that broke the monopoly of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist thought. This would later pave the way for other perspectives on international relations, including Liberalism and Constructivism. Realism also gave a certain underlying conceptual coherence to a great deal of atheoretical or policy writings on Asian international relations.

During the Cold War, Realism was arguably the dominant perspective on the international relations of Asia. This was true not just of the academic realm, but also in the policy world. Although it is difficult to find evidence for the chche that Asians are instinctively wedded to a Realist worldview and approach, Asian policy makers (with the exception of some of those who fought against colonial rule, India's Jawaharlal Nehru in particular), tended to be ReaUst (even Nehru claimed not to have been a "starry-eyed ideahst").^" Even in communist China, Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations enjoyed a huge popularity in classrooms, matching or exceeding the appeal of Marx or Mao. The same was true of Nehruvian India, where the indigenous idealism Gandhi and Nehru inspired scarcely formed part of IR teaching and learning.

But, more recently. Realist perspectives on Asian IR have come under attack. The predictions of Realists about Asia's post-Cold War insecurity have yet to materialize.^' Moreover, Realism's causal emphasis on US military presence as the chief factor behind Asia's stability and prosperity ignores the role of other forces, including Asian regional norms and institutions, economic growth, and domestic politics. In a similar vein. Realism's argument that the Cold War bipolarity generated regional stability can be questioned. China's preeminent Realist scholar of international relations, Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University, argues that while Cold War bipolarity might have prevented war between the superpowers, it permitted numerous regional conflicts causing massive death and destruction:

The history of East Asia does not support the argument that the balanced strengths between China and the United States can prevent limited conventional wars in East Asia. During the Cold War, the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union did prevent them from attacking each other directly in this region, but it failed to prevent wars between their allies or wars between one of them and the allies of the other, such as the Korean War in the 1950s. Hence, even if a balance of power existed between China and the United States after the Cold War, we would still not be sure it had the function of preventing limited conventional wars in this region.^^

68 Amitav Acharya

The ReaUst explanation of Asia's Cold War stability, while having the virtue of consistency, actually contradicts a key element of its foundational logic, which sees power balancing as a universal and unexceptionable law of intemational politics (even if Reahsts disagree whether it is an automatic law of nature or has to be contrived). The notion of balance of power in Asia as understood from a Realist perspective is actually a fig leaf for US primacy, or even preponderance. Hence, what should be anathema for a classical Realist^—the discernible absence of balancing against a hegemonic power—has acquired the status of an almost normative argument about Asian regional order in Realist writings on Asia. This contradiction cannot be explained by simply viewing the United States as a benign power which can escape the logic of balancing. If Realism is trae to one of its foundational logics, then any power (benign or otherwise) seeking hegemony should have invited a countervailing coalition. The fact that the United States has not triggered such a coalition is a puzzle that has not been adequately explained. Adding a qualifier to their causal logic (benign powers are less likely to be balanced against than mahgn ones) only lends itself to the charge, raised powerfully by John Vasquez, of ReaUsm as a "degenerative" theoretical paradigm.^

Nonetheless, Realists would see the recent case of Chinese "assertiveness" in the South China Sea and East China Sea as vindication of their arguments about the coming instability in Asia. The scenario of a Chinese Monroe Doctrine over Asia as imagined by the offensive Realists may appear closer to realization with China's growing miUtary prowess, its 2009 publication of a new map claiming much of the South China Sea, its foot-dragging in concluding a binding code of conduct for the South China Sea with ASEAN, and its coercive tactics against Vietnam and the Philippines (which are parties to the South China Sea territorial disputes). And Resists would see the advent of the US "pivot" (also known as "rebalancing") strategy as proof that power balancing, rather than institutional engagement, would be the predominant force shaping the intemational order of Asia. This argument is bolstered by the view held by many in China that the US pivot is a form of "containment" of China. Whether these ReaUst claims are exaggerated or not, oil whether Chinese assertiveness is really anything new,^' they certainly menc careful examination and need to be judged gainst the mitigating forces that Liberal and Constmctivist perspectives clainr to find in Asia today.

LIBERALISM

Traditional Liberalism rests on three pillars:

1. Commercial Liberalism, or the view that economic interdependence, especially free trade, reduces the prospect of war by increasing its costs to the parties.


2. RepubUcan Liberalism, or the "democratic peace" argument, which assumes that Liberal democracies are more peaceful than autocracies, or at least seldom fight one another.

3. Liberal institutionalism, which focuses on the contribution of intemational organizations in fostering collective security, managing conflict, and promoting cooperation.

A modem variant of Liberal institutionahsm is neo-Liberal institutionalism. Unlike classical Liberalism, which took a benign view of human nature, neo-Liberal institutionalism accepts the Realist premise that the intemational system is anarchic and that states are the primary, if not the only, actors in intemational relations. But it disagrees with neo-ReaUsm's dismissal of international institutions. Neo-Liberals maintain that intemational institutions, broadly defined—including regimes and formal organizations—can regulate state behavior and promote cooperation by reducing transaction costs, faciU-tating information' sharing, preventing cheating, and providing avenues for peaceful resolution of conflicts.

While ReaUsm as a theory of intemational relations is preoccupied with issues of security and order, Liberalism is more concemed with the nature and dynamics of the intemational political economy. Liberal perspectives on Asia's intemational relations are no exception. For Liberals, the foundations of the post-war intemational relations of Asia were laid not by the region's distinctive geography or culture, or by security threats facing the region, but rather by the post-World War n intemational economic system under American hegemony. The United States was central to the creation of intemational institutions such as the Intemational Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which played a cmcial role in diffusing the norms of economic Liberalism. In Asia, the United States served as a benign hegemon providing the collective goods of security against coinmunist expansion and free access to its vast market by Asia's early industrializers, even at a cost to itself (in terms of incurring huge deficits). The outcome was rapid economic growth in a number of Asian economies, which created "performance legitimacy" for the region's autocratic mlers, thereby stabilizing their domestic politics. At the same time, the region witnessed a growing interdependence resulting from the pursuit of market-driven and market-friendly economic growth strategies, which furthered the prospects for regional stability and security.

Liberal conceptions of the intemational relations of Asia have particularly stressed the role of expanding interdependence as a force for peace.^® The interdependence argument was advanced with ever more vigor with the end of the Cold War and the rise of Chinese economic power. Liberals, both West-em and Asian (including many of them within China itself), came to view it

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as a crucial factor in making China's rise peaceful. Yet the argument also invited much criticism, especially, as noted earher, from Reahsts, who often take the failure of European economic interdependence to prevent the First World War as a severe indictment of the "if goods do not cross borders, soldiers wiU" logic. Defending against such charges. Liberals stress differences between nineteenth-century and contemporary patterns of economic interdependence. The former was based on trade and exchange, while the latter is rooted in trans-national production, which is more "costly to break" and which has a deeper and more durable impact on national pohtical and security autonomy.

The argument about economic interdependence in Asia as a force for peace is tested by the recent escalation of the Sino-Japanese rivahy over issues such as the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea and visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese leaders, despite nearly $350 billion worth of bilateral trade (in 2012) between the two countries.^' On the other hand, there is a clearer sense that economic interdependence in the more important dyad, US-China, would be far costlier for either side to break. That interdependence is underpinned not only by over half a trilhon US dollars in bilateral trade (rising from US$5 bilhon in 1981 to US$536 bilhon in 2012), but also by China holding some US$1.3 trillion worth of US debt (in bonds and notes, July 2013 figures), amounting to a third of China's 3.5 trilhon worth of foreign reserves.^®

The second strand of Liberalism—democratic peace theory—has found very little expression in writings on Asian IR. This need not be surprising since historically Asia has had few democracies to test the claims of this theory meaningfully. Moreover, Asia's democracies tend to be of the "illiberal variety," making it more plausible for us to speak of an "illiberal peace" in the region (especially in Southeast Asia), whereby a group of authoritarian and senu-authoritanan states avoid conflict by focusing on economic growth, performance legitimacy, and sovereignty-preserving regional institutions. Critics of democratic peace in the West, such as Jack Snyder and Ed Mansfield, have also questioned the normative claims of democratic peace by highlighting the danger of war associated with democratic transitions. In Asia, the Liberal/democratic peace argumenl^has found more critics than adherents, but in general it has not been an important part of the debate over the region's intemational relations.

The neglect is as unfortunate as the criticism of democratic peace is misplaced. Contrary to a popular perception, democratic transitions in Asia have never led to interstate war and only occasionally to serious domestic instability. The case of Indonesia post-Suharto might be an exception to the latter.


but didn't more people die in the transition to authoritarian mle in that country in the 1960s than from it? In South Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand, democratic transitions have not caused serious intemal sfrife or interstate conflict. On the contrary, it might be argued that such transitions have often yielded a "cooperative peace dividend," whereby the new democratic govemments have pursued cooperative strategies toward their traditional rivals. Examples include Thailand's "battlefields to marketplaces" pohcy in the late 1980s that helped to break the stalemate in the Cambodia conflict, Kim Dae Jung's Sunshine Policy, and Indonesia's ASEAN Security Community initiative. Pakistan's democratic breakdown under Musharraf might have led to improved prospects for peace with India, but this was induced by a strong extemal element, the 9/11 attacks and the US-led war on terror. Democratization fueled demands for Taiwanese independence, thereby challenging East Asian stability, but democratization has also created populist countervailing pressures on Taiwan's pro-independence govemments from going over the brink in inviting a Chinese military response. At the very least, there is not much evidence from Asia to support the critics' view that democratic transitions intensify the danger of war, or even domestic strife.

The impact of the third element of the Liberal paradigm. Liberal institutionalism, on Asian IR discourses is both easier and harder to estabhsh. On the one hand, the growth of regional institutions in Asia allows greater space to Liberal conceptions of order-building through institutions. But the Liberal understanding of how institutions come about and preserve order overlaps considerably with social Constmctivist approaches. Indeed, institutionahsm (the study of the role of intemational institutions) is no longer a purely Liberal preserve; in Asia at least, it has been appropriated by Constmctivists who have both deepened and broadened the understandings of what institutions are and how they impact on Asia's intemational relations.

Classical Liberal institutionalism was identified with both collective security and, to a lesser extent, regional integration theory, which was closely derived from early West European integration during the 1950s and 1960s. But neither type of Liberal institutionahsm has had a regional application in Asia, where there has been no collective security (even if one stretches the term to include collective defense) or supranational institutions. The newest Liberal institutionalism, neo-Liberal institutionalism, narrowed the scope of investigation into institutional dynamics (how institutions affect state behavior) considerably. It shared the Reahst conception of anarchy while disagreeing with Realism on the importance of institutions as agents of cooperation and change. But it gave an overly utihtarian slant to the performance of institutions. Institutions may (but not always or necessarily) induce cooperation because they can increase information flows, reduce transaction costs, and

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prevent cheating. But institutions are not really transformative; their end product may be an intemational regime rather than a security community where the prospect of war is unthinkable. In Asia, APEC has been the one regime/institution that neo-Liberals have been most attracted to. But even there, and certainly in the case of the more ASEAN-centric institutions (e.g., ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Fomm, ASEAN -I- 3, and the East Asia Summit), Constmctivism (with its stress on the culture- and identity-derived notion of the "ASEAN Way") has been a more popular mode of analysis than neo-Liberalism or classical Liberalism (collective security and regional integration).

In general, then. Liberal perspectives have made little impact on the study of Asia's intemational relations. This need not have been, or remain, the case. Liberalism is more notable as a causal theory of peace, just as Realism focuses on the causes of war. In a traditionally Realist-dominated field of Asian intemational relations, and with the region's domestic politics landscape marked by a durable (if changing) authoritarian pattern. Liberal conceptions of peace and democracy have found few adherents. But as noted above, the criticisms of Liberal notions of interdependence and democracy on the one hand and peace and stability on the other are often rooted in misplaced historical analogies and selective empirical evidence. Liberalism has a brighter future in the analysis of Asia's intemational relations as the region's historical (post-World War II) combination of economic nationalism, security bilaterahsm, and pohtical authoritarianism unravels and gives way to a more complex picture where economic Liberalism, security multilateralism, and democratic pohtics acquire force as determinants of regional order and form the basis of an "Asian universalism" in IR theory.

The Liberal perspective on Asian security has taken a new tum with growing attention to the role of "rising powers" and the renewed debate over "American dechne" in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that centrally featured the United States. John Dcenberry has argued that despite the US decline, the "American-led Liberal hegemonic order" would persist. This argument has special resonance for A^ia, because it is this reason that is the locus of the global power shift. Dcenberry suggests that the rising powers, like China and India, that are potential challengers to US hegemony, have benefited so much from the Liberal order, including the free trade regime and intemational institutions, that they would refrain from revisionism and would be co-opted into that order.^' Yet this optimism is questionable. Rising powers such as China and India were not really "present at the creation" of the Liberal order; indeed until their economic reforms (China's since 1979 and India's since the early 1990s), they pretty much stayed out of or even opposed it. Second, both India and China are uncomfortable with some of


the new norms of Liberal intemationahsm that challenge state sovereignty especially humanitanan intervention and the responsibility to protect. Third' both countries, along with other emerging powers such as Brazil, desire a retorm of the existing institutions created and maintained by the Liberal hegemonic order with a view to acquiring a greater voice in their decision making. Until these refonns are earned out, resistance, rather than co-option may^be a more likely element of their attitude toward existing global mstitu-

CONSTRUCTIVISM

For Constmctivists, international relations is shaped not just by material forces such as power and wealth, but also by subjective and intersubjective factors—mcludmg ideas, nomis, history, culture, and identity. Constmctivism takes a sociological, rather than "strategic interaction," view of international relations. The interests and identities of states are not pre-ordained or given but emerge and change through a process of mutual interactions and sociahzation. Conditions such as anarchy and power politics are not penna-nent or 'organic" features of intemational relations, but are socially con-stmcted. State interests and identities are in important part constituted by these social stmctures rather than given exogenously to the system by human nature or domestic pohtics. Norms, once established, have a life of their own-they create and redefine state interests and approaches. For Constmctivists' intemational institutions exert a deep impact on the behavior of states; they not only regulate state behavior but also constitute state identities. Through interaction and sociahzation, states may develop a "collective identity" that would enable Aem to overcome power pohtics and the security dilemma.

Constmctivism is stmgghng to acquire the status of a "theory" of intemational relations comparable to Realism or Liberalism. Some critics view it as a social theory that has no basis in IR. Constmctivists are also accused of acfang middle-range theory and not pursuing serious empirical research

(although this cnticism would be increasingly hard to sustain as more empirical studies emerge employing a Constmctivist framework); some Constmctivists themselves acknowledge that, like rational choice theory, it is more of a method than a theory per se.'"

But Consttuctivism has helped to answer a number of key puzzles about Asian secunty order. While Constmctivism is essentially a post-Cold War theory, it has been employed to explain key puzzles of Asian intemational relatwns during the Cold War period. Constmctivists stress the role of collective identities in the foundation of Asia's post-war intemational relations. In

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an important contribution, Chris Hemmer and Peter Katzenstein explain the puzzle of "why there is no NATO in Asia" by examining the differing perceptions of collective identity held by US policy makers in relation to Europe and Asia.'' American policy makers in the early post-war period "saw their potential Asian alhes ... as part of an alien and, in important ways, inferior community."'^ This was in marked contrast to their perception of "their potential European alhes [who were seen] as relatively equal members of a shared community." Because the United States recognized a greater sense of a transatlantic community than a transpacific one, Europe rather than Asia was seen as a more desirable arena for multilateral engagement—hence there was no Asian NATO. While this explanation stresses the collective identity of an extemal actor, another Constmctivist perspective highlights the normative concerns of Asian actors themselves, especially Asia's nationalist leaders, who delegitimized collective defense by viewing it as a form of great power intervention through thek interactions in the early post-war period, culminating in the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955."

Constmctivism also explains why a different form of regionahsm was possible in Asia, one that was more reflective of the normative and cultural beliefs of the Asian states and their collective identities as newly independent states seeking national and regional autonomy. This explains the origins and evolution of ASEAN, Asia's first viable regional grouping. ASEAN's estab-hshment in 1967, Constmctivists argue, cannot be explained from a Reahst perspective, in the absence of a common extemal threat perception, or from a Liberal one, which would assume substantial interdependence among its members. Neither of these conditions marked the relationship among ASEAN's founding members at its birth. Instead, regionalism in Southeast Asia was a product of ideational forces, such as shared norms, and socialization in search of a common identity. Shared norms—including nonintervention, equality of states, and avoidance of membership in great power mihtary pacts—were influential in shaping a dehberately weak and relatively non-institutionalized form of regionalism that came to be known as the "ASEAN Way."

Regional institutions have thus been at the core of Constmctivist understanding of Asia's post-war international relations. It is through Asian institutions that Constmctivists have attempted to project and test their notions about the role of ideas (for example, common and cooperative security); identity ("Asian Way," "ASEAN Way," "Asia-Pacific Way"); and socialization.''* The influence of Constmctivism is especially visible in attempts to differentiate between European and Asian regionahsm—stressing the formal, legalistic, and bureaucratic nature of the former and the informal, consensual.


and process-centric conception of the latter. That the European-derived criteria should not be used to judge the performance and effectiveness of Asian institutions has been a key element in Constructivist arguments about Asian regionalism."

Apart from conceptualizing the distinctive nature and performance of Asian regional institutions, which are either dismissed (by Reahsts) or inadequately captured (by neo-Liberal or rationahst institutionahsm), Constmctivists have also stepped into the debate over Asia's emerging and future security order by frontally challenging the "ripe for rivahy" scenario proposed famously and controversially by Aaron Friedberg.'® David Kang, noting that Realist scenarios such as Friedberg's have failed to materialize, calls for examining Asian security from the perspective of Asia's own history and culture. He raises the notion of a hierarchical regional system in Asia at the time of China's imperial dominance and the tributary system. Asia was peaceful when China was powerful; now, with the (re-)emergence of China as a regional and global power, Asia could acquire stability through band-wagoning with China (which in his view is occurring)." While for Mearsheimer, Europe's "back to the future" means heightened disorder of the type that accompanied the rise of Germany in the late nineteenth century, for Kang, Asia's "back to the future" implies a retum to hierarchy and stabihty under Chinese preeminence.

Kang's thesis presents one of the most powerful Constructivist challenges to the Reahst orthodoxy in Asian IR. But his argument has been controversial, even among Constmctivists," who have questioned its claim about the peaceful nature of the old tributary system, whether China's neighbors are actually bandwagoning with China, and the structural differences between Asian regional systems during the tributary system^—especially the absence of other contenders for hegemony that can now be found in the United States, Russia, Japan, and India, and the continuing importance of sovereignty to both China and its neighbors that militates against hierarchy (see Samuel Kim's chapter in this volume).

Constmctivism has acquired a substantial following among not only West-em but also Asian scholars of Asian IR." A key factor behind this is the growing interest in the study of Asian regionalism with the proliferation of regional institutions and dialogues in Asia in the post-Cold War period. In China, aside from regional institutions, local discourses about China's "peaceful rise" play an important role behind the emergence of Constmctivism as the most popular IR theory among younger-generation academics. Constmctivism has given an alternative theoretical platform to Chinese scholars wary of Realist (power transition) perspectives from the West (as well as

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Other parts of Asia), which see the rise of China as a major threat to intemational stability.

Constmctivism has advanced the understanding of Asia's international relations in important ways. Their focus on the role of ideational forces— such as culture, norms, and identity—enriches our understanding of the sources and determinants of Asian regional order compared to a purely materialistic perspective. Second, Constmctivists have challenged the uncritical acceptance of the balance of power system posited by Reahst and neo-Realist scholars as the basis of Asian regional order by giving greater play to the possibihty of change and transformation driven by socialization. Third, Constmctivist writings have introduced greater theoretical diversity and opened space for debate in the field and have helped to hnk the insights of the traditional area studies approach to Southeast Asia to the larger domain of intemational relations theory.""

Moreover, perhaps more so than Realism and Liberalism, Constmctivist writings drawing upon the Asian experience have challenged and enriched the wider theoretical literature on Constmctivism. Kang's invocation of hierarchy as a defining feature of Asia's once and future interstate relations may be debatable (especially insofar as the future is concemed), but there is httle question that it poses a frontal challenge to Realism and Liberahsm by pointing to altematives to the Westphalian model. Another example can be found in the hterature on norms, a central part of Constmctivist theory. The first-wave hterature on norm diffusion was essentially about "moral cosmopolitanism" of Westem transnational advocates, which transformed "bad" local ideas and practices in the non-Westem world. These writings paid little attention to the agency of norm-takers, mainly non-Westem actors, who were relegated to being the "passive recipients" of global norms. But the experience of the diffusion of ideas and norms from an Asian backdrop (classical and modem) suggests that local actors do not simply act as passive recipients but as active players in norm diffusion, and they not only contest, modify, and localize global norms, but also universalize locally constmcted norms. These insights have had a major impact on Constmctivist theory and have been applied to explain norm diffusion globally and in other regions of the world.""

But the growing visibility of Constmctivism in Asian IR has invited criticism of the "new Constmctivist orthodoxy." Despite having begun as a dissenting view, side by side with other critical perspectives on intemational relations, Constmctivism is now bracketed as a "mainstream" perspective. This is ironic, because Constmctivism is also dismissed by some as a fad, a passing fancy of a handful of intellectuals, which will fade into obscurity as the optimism generated by the end of the Cold War dissipates. Equally unconvincing are accusations leveled against Constmctivism for uncritically emulating their rationahst foes, of normative determinism (too much emphasis


on norms at the expense of material forces), and unreformed state-centrism (ignoring the role of civil society actors). While critics see the degree of Constmctivist optimism about Asia's future to be as misconceived as Realist pessimism, in reality, Constmctivist optimism has been more guarded than what the critics portray. More serious are the criticisms of Constmctivism's tendency to ignore domestic pohtics (how domestic interactions change identity and interests) and its self-serving moral cosmopolitanism (bias toward "universal" ideas and global norm entrepreneurs at the expense of preexisting local beliefs and local agents). Constmctivist perspectives on Asian intemational relations have been criticized on the ground that Asian regional institutions have yet to, and are unlikely ever to, become more than "talk shops." These criticisms are not new but have acquired greater force in recent years over signs of Chinese assertiveness and other developments. For example, ARF is yet to move beyond a confidence-building stage to a more action-oriented preventive diplomacy role. The entry of the United States into the EAS m 2011 creates the danger of it being undermined by US-China competition. The unity of ASEAN shows signs of being frayed by intramural conflicts, such as the armed clashes in 2011 between Thai and Cambodian forces near the Preah Viehar Temple, and differences over how to deal with Chinese territorial claims. The latter was evident in July 2012 when the meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers in Cambodia failed for the first time to issue a joint communique owing to disagreements over the South China Sea conflict. These episodes suggest that sociahzation in Asia remains incomplete, and that while Asian institutions as claimed by the Constmctivists may be regarded as distinctive, the "ASEAN Way" may no longer work and may need to be reinvented or replaced with a more institutionahzed and legahstic form of regional cooperation.

ANALYTICAL ECLECTICISM

It is quite obvious that the lines separating the three theoretical perspectives on Asian intemational relations have never been neat. As David Shambaugh's introduction to this volume reminds us, "no single IR theory explains all." This brings us to the question of what Katzenstein and Sil have called "analytic eclecticism.""^ The usefulness of analytic eclecticism lies in producing middle-range theoretical arguments as well as in addressing "problems of wide scope that, in contrast to more narrowly parsed research puzzles designed to test theories or fill in gaps within research traditions, incorporate more of the complexity and messiness of particular real-world situations.""' This is especially relevant to the analyses of "mixed scenarios" of conflict

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and cooperation, which is perhaps more apt for Asia than the extremes of "ripe for rivahy" and "security community." I would add that such eclecticism is needed not just between theoretical paradigms but also within them (intraparadigm and interparadigm). Prospects for Asia's future cannot be ascertained from tightly held paradigmatic frameworks, but from synthesis between and within them.

This chapter has suggested a considerable overlap between Liberalism and Constructivism (which in tum has significant English School foundations), especially when it comes to the study of Asian regional institutions and to countering Realist pessimism about Asia's future intemational order. But the Realist-favored notion of balance of power can also be seen as having its basis in normative and social foundations, as evident in notions such as "soft balancing" or "institutional balancing."

The idea of a Consociational Security Order developed by this author represents an example of the application of analytical eclecticism to Asian security."" "A consociational security order (CSO) is a relationship of mutual accommodation among unequal and culturally diverse groups that preserves each group's relative autonomy and prevents the hegemony of any particular group/s.""^ The emergence of a CSO depends on four conditions: interdependence, equilibrium, elite restraint, and institutions and norms. First, interdependence among states helps to offset the centrifugal elements of cultural difference and animosity within consociations and contributes to the imperative of common survival and well-being. This view accords with Liberal theory, which has for long pointed to the pacific effects of economic interdependence. Second, stabihty in a consociation comes from equilibrium. Unlike offensive Reahsts who argue that states go for "all they can get," with hegemony as their ultimate goal, defensive Reahsts maintain that states are generally satisfied with the status quo if their own security is not challenged and thus concentrate on maintaining a balance of power. Groups in a CSO engage in coalitional politics to deny hegemony to any particular group. This assumption echoes defensive Realism. Third, a CSO relies on institutions, although consociational institutions promote the softer norms of cooperative security rather than the conventional forms of collective security or collective defense. CoUective security and collective defense systems are usuaUy geared to deterring and punishing aggression ("security against" an adversary) and require hard power or mihtary action that only the great powers can provide. By contrast, cooperative security stresses reassurance ("security with" a competitor or adversary) and relies primarily on conflict management (both within a consociation and with outsiders), confidence-building measures, and political-diplomatic norms. FinaUy, a CSO reUes on "elite restraint," which borrows from both Liberal institutionahsm and Constmctivism, which argue


that institutions and norms induce strategic restraint and promote cooperative behavior.

Thus defined, the conditions or the stabihty mechanisms of a CSO draw from multiple theoretical lenses: defensive Realism (balance of power). Liberalism (especially economic interdependence and institutions), and Constmctivism (socialization and cooperative security norms), thereby creating an eclectic framework for the study of the Asian security order. The stabihty mechanisms of a CSO can be mutually reinforcing. Balancing prevents hegemonic orders, whether that of a single power, duopolies, or concerts. Elite restraint fosters shared leadership in multilateral institutions. These, along with interdependence, encourage "soft balancing" and discourage outright containment approaches that might aggravate the security dilemma and rivalries. These mechanisms do not make war "unthinkable," but they do inhibit actors from engaging in behavior that might lead to a system collapse. Competition is controlled, and outright war is avoided for the sake of common survival.

The CSO framework offers a novel and dynamic approach to conflict and stability in Asia. Going beyond existing perspectives that rely on single theoretical lenses, it captures a wider range of determinants of Asia's security. It emphasizes the regional context of the implications of China's rise instead of focusing on great power (especially US-China) relationships, as in many existing perspectives on the issue. It represents a mixed scenario of conflict and stabihty, presenting an altemative between the extremes of anarchy that represent Europe's past as Asia's future on the one hand and a security community that renders war unthinkable on the other (Europe's present as Asia's future). While not necessarily predictive, it offers an analytic device for evaluating trends and directions in Asian security by identifying the conditions— interdependence, equilibrium, institutions, and elite restraint—that can produce order (understood as the absence of system-destroying war rather than of small-scale conflicts), and their absence, disorder. While no single condition is sufficient by itself to ensure order, together they may go a long way in preventing catastrophic conflict in Asia.

While the debate between Reahst "pessimism" and Liberal/Constmctivist "optimism" about the future of Asia's security order remains far from settled, it should not be forgotten that debates over Asian intemational relations can also be intraparadigmatic, such as the Kang-Acharya Constmctivist debate and between offensive and defensive Realists. Moreover, the debate over Asia's future security order is less about whether it will feature some type of cooperative mechanism (rather than approximating a pure Hobbesian anarchy) than which type of cooperation/accommodation (concert, community, soft balancing, or hierarchy) will be feasible. And in this context, while

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traditional conceptions of regional order in Asia revolved around the relationship of competition and accommodation among the great powers, how the great powers relate to weaker states has become especially crucial for a region in which the weaker states drive regional cooperation and institution building.

CONCLUSION: FROM EXCEPTIONALISM TO UNIVERSALISM

IR theory is increasingly used in classrooms and writings on Asian IR in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, and to a lesser extent Southeast and South Asia. It should be noted that a good deal of "theory" that might be helpful in broadening the scope of IR remains "hidden" due to language barriers, lack of resources in Asian institutions, and the dominance of Westem scholarly and policy outlets. But this is changing with the infusion of new scholarship and the broadening intellectual parameters of theoretical discourses.

As elsewhere and in other points of history, theoretical arguments and claims about Asian IR closely approximate shifts in global and regional international relations. The growing popularity of Liberalism and Constmctivism in Asian IR is thus closely related to the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new regional institutions in Asia. While events drive theoretical shifts, to some extent theories have offered rationahzation of event-driven policy perspectives and approaches. Thus, Sino-US tensions over Taiwan and other East Asian security issues have given a fresh impetus for Reahst pessimism, while the end of the Cambodia conflict, the South China Sea Code of Conduct, and the emergence of the ARF and East Asia Summit (EAS) have given a fillip to Liberal and Constmctivist optimism.

What next in the theoretical evolution of Asian IR studies? Realism retains a dominant, if no longer hegemonic, position. Realist arguments such as "power transition," "back to the future," "ripe for rivalry," and "offensive Reahsm" have often provided the starting point of debate over Asia's emerging and future intemational order. But newer approaches, especially Liberal and Constmctivist perspectives, are enriching academic and policy debates on Asian IR. Realism, especially eri^pirical Realism (i.e., academic and policy writings that reflect the philosophical assumptions of Realism without being self-consciously framed in theoretical jargon), will remain important, but so will Constmctivism. While Constmctivism has been criticized as a fad, it is likely to retain a central place in writings on Asian IR because its focus on issues of culture and identity resonate well with Asian thinkers and writers. And Liberal perspectives, such as democratic peace and institutions, which


have been neglected thus far, might assume greater prominence, but perhaps not as a justification for the persistence of the American-led Liberal Hegemonic Order.

More importantly, with the growing interest in theorizing Asia's intemational relations, the debate over the relevance of Westem theory to analyze Asia has intensified. Perspectives that view IR theory as a fundamentally ethnocentric enterprise that does a poor job of analyzing Asian IR are becoming commonplace in Asian writings on the region's IR. And this view is shared by a number of leading Westem scholars. This debate has also led to a search for an "Asian IR theory," akin to the English School or the Copenhagen School. But there is little movement in the direction of an Asian IR theory in the regional sense. This is not surprising, given Asia's sub-regional and national differences."® There is a great scope for national perspectives, even in a highly contested manner."' For example, many Chinese scholars are attempting to develop a "Chinese School of IR," derived either from Chinese historical practices, such as the Warring States Period and the tributary system, or from the metaphysical Chinese worldview."'

An equally vocal group of Chinese scholars rejects this approach, insisting that IR theory must have a universal frame. According to this group, attempts to develop IR theory should be guided by "scientific" universalism, rather than cultural specificity."® Going by this immensely helpful and exciting debate, the chahenge, then, is to broaden the horizons of existing IR theory by including the Asian experience, rather than either to reject IR theory or to develop a Chinese or Asian School that will better capture and explain China's or Asia's unique historical experience, but have httle relevance elsewhere, even though such universalism would still require deeper investigations into Asian history.

There is thus a growing space for an Asian universalism in IR theory. I use the term "Asian universalism" since it is in direct juxtaposition to the Asian exceptionalism found in the extreme form in the notion of Asian values, an Asian conception of human rights, and Asian democracy, or in a more moderate strain in claims about an Asian form of capitalism, or an Asian mode of globalization. Asian exceptionalism, especially in its extreme form, refers to the tendency to view Asia as a unique and relatively homogenous entity that rejects ideas, such as human rights and democracy, that lay a claim to universality but which are in reality constmcted and exported by the West. Such ideas are to be contested because of theur lack of fit with local cultural, historical, and pohtical realities in Asia. Asian universalism by contrast refers to the fit, often constmcted by local idea entrepreneurs, between extemal and Asian ideas and practices with a view to giving a wider dissemination to the latter. This involves the simultaneous reconstmction of outside ideas in

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accordance with local behefs and practices and the transmission and diffusion of preexisting and localized forms of knowledge beyond the region. Whereas Asian exceptionalism is relevant only in analyzing and explaining local pattems of IR, Asian universalism would use local knowledge to understand and explain both local and foreign IR.

The impetus for Asian universalism comes from several sources. The first is a historical shift from economic nationalism, security bilateralism, and authoritarian politics in the post-war period to economic interdependence, security multilaterahsm, and democratic politics of the post-Cold War era. This shift is far from linear, but it is occurring and having a substantial impact on studies of Asian IR. This need not be seen as a purely or mainly Liberal trend, as it would be mediated by local historical, cultural, and ideational frameworks that have their roots in local conceptions of power politics, utUi-tarianism, and normative transformation. This shift challenges the distinction between Asian and universal knowledge claims and expands the scope for grafting outside theoretical concepts onto Asian local discourses.

The region also abounds in historical forms of local knowledge with a universal reach. Examples include the ideas of Asian thinkers such as Rabindra-nath Tagore's critique of nationalism, Nehm's neutralism and non-alignment, and Gandhi's satyagraha.'" There are many Japanese writings that were developed either in association with, or in reaction against, Westem concepts of nationalism, intemationahsm, and intemational order.®' Although some of these Indian and Japanese contributions were either critiques of Westem ideas (like nationahsm) or were borrowed forms of Westem ideas (such as Gandhi's borrowing of passive resistance), they were sufficiendy infused widi local content to be deemed a form of local knowledge. Moreover, the outcome of this interaction between Westem and Asian ideas was constitutive in the sense that it redefined both the Westem ideas and the local identities. And while the localization of Westem ideas might have been originally intended for domestic or regional audiences, the resulting concepts and practices did possess a wider conceptual frame to have relevance beyond Asia.

Such ideas deserve a place alongside existing theories of IR. Historical pattems of interstate and intercivihzational relations in Asia, including the tributary system, also have their place if they can be conceptualized in a manner that would extend their analytical utility and normative purpose (present in any theory) beyond Chma or East Asia.'^

Asian practices of intemational relations are another rich source of Asian universalism in IR dieory." Asian regionalism, which manages the balance of power and expands die potential for a regional community, also provides a good potential avenue for such universalism. Instead of drawing a sharp


distinction between what is European and what is Asian, theoretical perspectives on Asian regionahsm should explore commonahties that are quite substantial and would constitute the core of a universal corpus of knowledge about regionalism in world politics.®"

A final word of this chapter concems the question whether die theoretical writings on Asia would challenge or enrich the broader corpus of IR theory, which has been derived from Westem or transatlantic ideas, experiences, and writings. As stated, I am not a fan of Asian exceptionalism. Nor do I think theories derived from Asia would entirely displace the existing corpus of IR theory. But I also do not think existing IR theories are sufficient, as Ikenberry and Mastanduno have argued, with minor adjustments, to explain the major developments in the intemational relations of Asia. And I am more confident than Johnston®® appears to be about the possibihty of Asia offering a robust challenge to many deeply held assumptions of the three mainstream IR theories, namely, Realism, Liberalism, and Constmctivism. Johnston sets the bar too high by holding that for theoretical contributions to IR focusing on Asia (whether by Asians or non-Asians) to succeed, they would need to "resolve major controversies, lead to breakthroughs, and drive theory development." He is not sure if this will ever happen. While I cannot be certain if Asia can resolve major controversies (especially those that originally emerged in Westem contexts, often with limited relevance for Asia), I could see the possibihty of theoretical contributions to IR focusing on Asia in time producing breakthroughs and driving theory development, especially by offering new concepts and approaches drawing on Asian ideas, history, and practice.®® This is already evident in works on Asian regionahsm, conceptualizations of historical interstate systems (Kang), and the aforementioned work on norm diffusion.

While the distinctive aspects of Asia's history, ideas, and approaches will condition the way Westem theoretical ideas are understood and make their impact, elements of the former will find theur way into a wider arena, influencing global discourses about intemational order in the twenty-first century. The challenge for theoretical writings on Asian IR is to reflect on and conceptualize this dynamic, whereby scholars do not stop at testing Westem concepts and theories in the Asian context, but generalize from the latter in order to enrich a hitherto Westem-centric IR theory.®'

NOTES

I wish to thank Muthiah Alagappa, David Shambaugh, and Michael Yahuda for their helpful suggestions for this chapter.

84 Amitav Acharya

1. In this chapter, I use the term theory broadly, focusing on grand theories that have paradigmatic status, such as Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. The term theory has many different meanings. The American understanding of theory tends to have a social-scientific bias, whereby the general assumptions of a theory must be translated into causal propositions that can be rigorously tested and yield some measure of prediction. Europeans view theory more loosely as any attempt to systematically organize data, structure questions, and establish a coherent and rigorous set of interrelated concepts and categories. Writings on Asian IR remain atheoretical in either sense, but more so in terms of the American understanding than the European one. For further discussion, see Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, "Why Is There No Non-Westem IR Theory: An Introduction," Intemational Relations of the Asia-Pacific 7 (October 2007): 287-312. The special issue also explores the reasons for the lack of interest in theory in the Asian IR literature, one of the main factors being the dominance of area specialists in the field.

2. In visits to China, the author found widespread evidence of a major growth of interest in theory among Chinese scholars of intemational relations. This is true not only of universities such as Beijing, Tsinghua, and Fudan, but also of think tanks such as the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which publishes the leading IR journal of China: World Economics and Politics. It is published in Chinese. Tsinghua University's Instimte of Intemational Studies has also launched an English-language journal published by Oxford University Press, titled Chinese Journal of Intemational Relations. For an up-to-date survey of the IR field in China today, see David Shambaugh, "Intemational Relations Studies in China: History, Trends, and Prospects, Intemational Relations of the Asia-Pacific 11, no. 3 (September 2011): 339-72.

3. Stanley Hoffmann, "An American Social Science: Intemational Relations," Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977): 41-60; Ole Waever, "The Sociology of a Not So Intemational Discipline: American and European Developments in Intemational Relations, Intemational Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 687—727; Robert A. Crawford and Darryl S. L. Jar-vis, eds., Intemational Relations—Still an American Social Science? Toward Diversity in Intemational Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

4. David C. Kang, "Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks," Intemational Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 57-85.

5. Peter J. Katzenstein, "Introduction: Asian Regionalism in Comparative Perspective," in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5.

6. G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno, "The United States and Stability in East Asia," in Intemational Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 421-22.

7. Stephen M. Walt, "Intemational Relations: One World, Many Theories," Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998): 29-46. \

8. This leaves out critical IR theories such as Marxism, post-modem/post-structural, post-colonial, and feminist perspectives. Some argue that critical theories have been concemed mostly with critiquing their "mainstream" rivals, especially Realism and Liberalism, and have made little attempt to offer an altemative conception or trajectory of regional order. But the insights of critical perspectives are especially crucial in understanding and analyzing the impact of globalization on Asian IR, the limitations and abuses of the sovereign state system and the national security paradigm, and Asia's uneven and


unjust development trajectory. An important recent book applying critical theories of IR to Asia is Anthony Burke and Matt McDonald, eds.. Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Critical IR theory includes, among others, post-modernism, post-structaralism, Marxism/neo-Marxism, Gramscian approaches, feminism, and post-colonialism, often in some combination (e.g., post-colonial feminism).

9. For two well-known perspectives, see Paul Dibb, Towards a New Balance of Power in Asia, Adelphi Paper 295 (London: Intemational Institute for Strategic Studies, 1995); Michael Leifer, The ASEAN Regional Fomm, Adelphi Paper 302 (London: Intemational Instimte for Strategic Studies, 1996).

10. Lee has repeatedly asserted his faith in the balance of power, a typical example being his comments in Canberra in 2007 that "the golden strand [in Australia-Singapore relations] is our common strategic view that the present strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific, with the U.S. as the preeminent power, provides stability and security that enables all to develop and grow in peace." See "S'pore and Australia Share Common Strategic View: MM," Straits Times, March 29, 2007, http;//app.mfa.gov.sg/pr/read_content.asp? View, 6860 (accessed January 25, 2008). "MM" refers to "Minister Mentor."

11. For a theoretical discussion of Lee's views, see Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, "Betwixt Balance and Community: America, ASEAN, and the Security of Southeast Asia," Intemational Relations of the Asia-Pacific 5, no. 2 (2005). For a recent restatement of Lee's position, see "Excerpts from an Interview with Lee Kuan Yew," International Herald Tribune, August 29, 2007, http://www.iht.eom/articles/2007/08/29/asia/lee-ex cerpts.php?page= 1 (accessed September 23, 2007).

12. "Toward a New Balance of Power," Time, September 22, 1975, http://www.time .com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,917875,00.html (accessed September 23, 2007).

13. Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Stability of the Bipolar World," Daedalus 93 (Summer 1964): 907; Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of Intemational Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 171; John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Fumre: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," Intemational Security 15, no. 1 (Summer 1990): 5-55. A contrary view that stresses the stabilizing potential of multipolarity is Karl W. Deutsch and J. David Singer, "Multipolar Power Systems and Intemational Stability," World Politics 16, no. 3 (April 1964): 390-406.

14. For a discussion and rebuttal of this view in the context of the Third World, see Amitav Acharya, "Beyond Anarchy; Third World Instability and Intemational Order after the Cold War," in International Relations Theory and the Third World, ed. Stephanie Neumann (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 159-211.

15. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 41.

16. Leifer, The ASEAN Regional Forum, 53-54. For a critique of Leifer's view, see Amitav Acharya, "Do Norms and Identity Matter? Community and Power in Southeast Asia's Regional Order," Pacific Review 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 95-118.

17. This shows that Realism is not a homogenous theory as its critics sometimes portray and that important differences exist among Realists insofar as the nature and purpose of intemational institutions are concemed. It also shows a disjuncture between disciplinary neo-Realist theory and Realist perspectives on Asian institutions. Mearsheimer, a neo-Realist (but not an Asian specialist), viewed intemational institutions as pawns in the hands of great powers. John J. Mearsheimer, "The False Promise of Intemational Institutions," Intemational Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994-1995): 5-49. Michael Leifer took a

86 Amitav Acharya

more nuanced view. While institutions were not able to take care of the fundamental security of nations, great power intervention in Asia was not inevitable, but only occurred when there was a conjunction between great power interests and disputes between or within ASEAN states. Institutions could play a role in the management of regional order if regional actors purposively used institutions to engage different great powers so that none acquired overriding influence. For example, following the end of the Cold War, Leifer saw the ARF as the means for locking China into a network of constraining multilateral arrangements that would in tum "serve the purpose of the balance of power by means other than alliance." See Michael Leifer, "The Truth about the Balance of Power, in The Evolving Pacific Power Structure, ed. Derek DaCunha (Singapore; Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1996), 51.1 am grateful to Michael Yahuda for pointing to this aspect of Leifer's writings. This acceptance that multilateral arrangements can be "constraining" has much in common with institutionalist scholars like Keohane and Martin. Robert O. Keohane and Lisa Martin, "The Promise of Institutionalist Theory," Intemational Security 20, no. 1 (1995): 42; Ralf Emmers, Cooperative Security and the Balance of Power in ASEAN and ARF (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

18. Aaron Friedberg, "Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia," Intemational Security 18, no. 3 (Winter 1993/1994): 5-33; Aaron L. Friedberg, Europe's Past, Asia's Future?, SAIS Policy Forum Series 3 (Washington, DC: Nitze School of Advanced Intemational Studies, John Hopkins University, 1998).

19. Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal, "Rethinking East Asian Security," Survival 36, no. 2 (Summer 1994); 3-21; Robert Gilpin, "Sources of American-Japanese Economic Conflict," in Intemational Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (New York; Columbia University Press, 2003), 299-322.

20. See Amitav Acharya, "Why Is There No NATO in Asia? The Normative Origins of Asian Multilateralism" (Working Paper 05-05, Weatherhead Center for Intemational Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2005).

21. Muthiah Alagappa, "Introduction," in Asian Security Order: Normative and Instrumental Features, ed. Muthiah Alagappa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

22. Xuetong Yan, "Decade of Peace in East Asia," East Asia: An Intemational Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 31. This view sets limits to Realist optimism found in Robert Ross's "The Geography of the Peace; East Asia in the Twenty-First Century," Intemational Security 23, no. 4 (Spring 1999); 81-118. Ross argues that a geopolitical balance between the United States as the dominant maritime power and China as the leading continental power would preserve stability in post-Cold War East Asia.

23. Although not for Gilpin and others who would attribute intemational stability to the role of a hegemonic power and consider the absence of balancing against such a power as an indicator of stability. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). \

24. John Vasquez, "Realism and the Study of Peace and War," in Realism and Institutionalism in Intemational Studies, ed. Michael Breecher and Frank P. Harvey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 79-94; John Vasquez and Collin Elman, eds.. Realism and the Balancing of Power: A New Debate (Upper Saddle River, NJ; Prentice Hall, 2003).

25. Alastair Iain Johnston, "How New and Assertive Is China's New Assertiveness?," Intemational Security 37, no. 4 (2013); 7-48.


26. Ming Wan, "Economic Interdependence and Economic Cooperation," in Asian Security Order: Normative and Instrumental Features, ed. Muthiah Alagappa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Benjamin E. Goldsmith, "A Liberal Peace in Asia?," Journal of Peace Research 44, no. 1 (2007): 5-27. Goldsmith finds weak empirical support for the pacific effects of democracy and intemational institutions, but evidence for the pacific effects of interdependence is "robust." For further Asian case studies, see Ashley J. Tellis and Michael Wills, eds.. Strategic Asia, 2006—07: Trade, Interdependence, and Security (Seattle, WA; National Bureau of Asia Research, 2006).

27. "China Becomes Japan's Largest Trading Partner for Five Consecutive Years," People's Daily Online, February 21, 2012, http://english.people.com.cn/90778/7735801.ht (accessed September 14, 2013).

28. Wayne M. Morrison, "China-U.S. Trade Issues," CRS Report for Congress, 7-5700 (Washington, DC; Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, July 17, 2013), 2; "China's US Treasury Holdings Hit Record $1.3 Trillion," July 17, 2013, http;//rt.com/ business/china-federal-debt-record-207 (accessed September 14, 2013).

29. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

30. Jeffrey Checkel, "The Constmctivist TUm in International Relations Theory," World Politics 50, no. 2 (January 1998); 324-48.

31. Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein, "Why Is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism," International Organization 56, no. 3 (Summer 2002); 575-607. They reject not only the power disparity explanation, but also neo-Liberal explanations that would see alliance design as a function of differing calculations about what would be the most efficient institotional response to the threat at hand. Europe and Asia differed in this respect: the threat in Europe was a massive cross-border Soviet invasion, while the threat in Asia was insurgency and intemal conflict. For other explanations (Realist, Liberal, and mixed) of this puzzle, see Donald Crone, "Does Hegemony Matter? The Reorganization of the Pacific Political Economy," World Politics 45, no. 4 (July 1993): 501-25; John S. Duffield, "Why Is There No APTO? Why Is There No OSCAP: Asia Pacific Security Institutions in Comparative Perspective," Contemporary Security Policy 22, no. 2 (August 2001): 69-95; and Galia Press-Bamathan, Organizing the World: The United States and Regional Cooperation in Asia and Europe (New York: Routledge, 2003).

32. Hemmer and Katzenstein, "Why Is There No NATO in Asia?," 575. 33. Acharya, "Why Is There No NATO in Asia?" 34. Amitav Acharya, "Ideas, Identity and Institution-Building: From the 'ASEAN

Way' to the 'Asia-Pacific Way'?" Pacific Review 10, no. 3 (1997); 319-46. Amitav Acharya, "How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism," Intemational Organization 58, no. 2 (Spring 2004); 239-75; Tobias Ingo Nischalke, "Insights from ASEAN's Foreign Policy Cooperation; The 'ASEAN Way,' a Real Spirit or a Phantom?," Contemporary Southeast Asia 22, no. I (April 2000): 89-112; Jiirgen Haacke, ASEAN's Diplomatic and Security Culture: Origins, Developments and Prospects (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); Nikolas Busse, "Constructivism and Southeast Asian Security," Pacific Review 12, no. 1 (1999): 39-60; Kamamlzaman Askandar, "ASEAN and Conflict Management: The Formative Years of 1967-1976," Pacifica Review (Melboume) 6, no. 2 (1994); 57-69; Amitav Acharya,

88 Amitav Acharya

"Regional Institutions and Asian Security Order: Norms, Power and Prospects for Peaceful Change," in Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features, ed. Muthiah Alagappa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 210-40.

35. Katzenstein, "Introduction; Asian Regionalism in Comparative Perspective"; Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston, eds.. Crafting Cooperation: Regional Intemational Institutions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

36. Thomas C. Berger, "Set for Stability? Prospects for Conflict and Cooperation in East Asia," Review of Intemational Studies 26, no. 3 (July 2000): 405-28; Thomas C. Berger, "Power and Purpose in Pacific East Asia: A Constructivist Interpretation," in Intemational Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 387-420.

37. Kang, "Getting Asia Wrong"; David Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power and Order in East Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

38. Acharya, "Will Asia's Past Be Its Future?" These criticisms from Constructivist scholars suggest that the latter are not a homogenous orthodoxy as some critics allege.

39. In the words of a Malaysian scholar, "Thinking in the Constructivist vein has been about the best gift made available to scholars and leaders in the region." See Azhari Karim, "ASEAN: Association to Community: Constructed in the Image of Malaysia's Global Diplomacy," in Malaysia's Foreign Policy: Continuity and Change, ed. Abdul Razak Baginda (Singapore: Marshal Cavendish Editions, 2007), 113.

40. Acharya, "Do Norms and Identity Matter?"; Amitav Acharya and Richard Stubbs, "Theorizing Southeast Asian Relations: An Introduction," in "Theorizing Southeast Asian Relations: Emerging Debates," ed. Acharya and Stubbs, Pacific Review 19, no. 2 (June 2006): 125-34.

41. Amitav Acharya, "How Ideas Spread"; Amitav Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Amitav Acharya, "Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism and Rule Making in the Third World," Intemational Studies Quarterly 55 (2011): 95-123; Amitav Acharya, Civilizations in Embrace: The Spread of Ideas and the Transformation of Power (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013).

42. Peter J. Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, "Rethinking Asian Security: A Case for Analytical Eclecticism," in Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power and Efficiency, ed. J. J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson (Stanford, CA:-Stanford University Press, 2004), 1-33; Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

43. Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein, "Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across Research Traditions," Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (June 2010): 411-31.

44. Amitav Acharya, "Power Shif^or Paradigm Shift? China's Rise and Asia's Emerging Security Order," Intemational Studies Quarterly (2013): 1-16.

45. Acharya, "Power Shift or Paradigm Shift?," 2. 46. Acharya and Buzan, "Why Is There No Non-Westem IR Theory: An Introduction." 47. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, "Conclusion: On the Possibility of a Non-

Westem IR Theory in Asia," in "Why Is There No Non-Westem IR Theory: Reflections On and From Asia," 427-28.


48. Qin Yaqing, "Why Is There No Chinese Intemational Relations Theory?" in "Why Is There No Non-Westem IR Theory?," 313-40.

49. Interviews with Chinese scholars: Tang Shiping, formerly of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, September 8, 2007; Qin Yaqing, vice president of China Foreign Affairs University; Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University; Chu Sulong, director of the Institute of Security Studies at Tsinghua University; and Wang Zhengyi, professor of Intemational Political Economy, Beijing University, all during September 10-13, 2007.

50. For a review of Indian ideas that might be of theoretical significance, see Navnita Chadha Behera, "Re-Imagining IR in India," in "Why Is There No Non-Westem IR Theory?" See also George Modelski, "Foreign Policy and Intemational System in the Ancient Hindu World," American Political Science Review 58, no. 3 (September 1964): 549-60.

51. Takashi Inoguchi, "Why Are There No Non-Westem Theories of International Relations? The Case of Japan," in "Why Is There No Non-Westem IR Theory?" In this essay, Inoguchi highlights the theoretical work of three pre-1945 Japanese writers: Nishida Kitaro, a constmctivist with Japanese characteristics"; Tabata Shigejiro, a normative international law theorist placing popular sovereignty (as with Samuel von Pufendorf) before Grotian state sovereignty; and Hirano Yoshitaro, a social democratic internationalist.

52. One notable such attempt is Victoria Hui, "Towards a Dynamic Theory of Intemational Politics: Insights from Comparing Ancient China and Early Modem Europe," International Organization 58 (Winter 2004): 174-205.

53. Muthiah Alagappa, ed., Asian Security Practice: Material and Ideational Influences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

54. Amitav Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter: Norms, Power and Institutions in Asian Regionalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

55. Alastair Iain Johnston, "What (If Anything) Does East Asia Tell Us about Intemational Relations Theory?," Annual Review of Political Science 15 (2012): 53-78.

56. More on this in Amitav Acharya, "Intemational Relations Theory and the Rise of Asia," in Oxford Handbook of Intemational Relations of Asia, ed. Rosemary Foot, Saadia Pekkanen, and John Ravenhill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

57. In his study of cultural globalization, Aijun Appadurai calls this process "repatriation" of knowledge. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Why is there no non-Westerninternational relations theory?An introductionAmitav Acharya1 and Barry Buzan2

1Department of Politics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK and2Department of International Relations, London School ofEconomics and Political Science, London, UK

Abstract

In Section 1, we outline the conceptual framework, rationale, and objectives of

the Special Issue. Next, we clarify what we mean by ‘international relation

theory (IRT)’, which would serve as the basis for organizing the case studies.

We then examine several possible explanations of the absence of non-Western

IRT, such as the belief that Western IRT has discovered the right path to under-

standing international relations so as to preclude the need for other voices, the

hegemonic status of Western IRT that discourages theoretical formulations by

others, the ‘hidden’ nature of IRT in Asia, lack of resources and local conditions

that discriminate against the production of IR theory, and the time lag

between the West and Asia in developing theoretical writings. This is followed

by our suggestions about the possible Asian Sources for IRT, including the writ-

ings of classical political, military, and religious figures, thinking, and foreign

policy approach of leaders, the work of Asian scholars who have applied

Western IRT to local contexts, and finally, generalizations of Asian experiences

to develop concepts which can be used more widely.

1 Introduction

More than 40 years ago, in a provocative essay that has since become a classic inthe field, Wight (1966, p. 20) addressed the question of ‘why is there no inter-national theory’. In this special issue of IRAP, we consider a more specific

Received 16 May 2006; Accepted 27 June 2007

International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Vol. 7 No. 3# The author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press in association with the

Japan Association of International Relations; all rights reserved.For permissions, please email: [email protected]

International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Volume 7 (2007) 287–312doi:10.1093/irap/lcm012 Advance Access published on 7 August 2007

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question than Wight’s, but inspired by it. We start with the premise that there isnow a substantial body of theory about international relations (IRs), but thatalmost all of it is produced by and for the West, and rests on an assumption thatWestern history is world history. The puzzle for us is that the almost exclusivelyWestern sources of international relations theory (IRT) conspicuously fail to cor-respond to the now global distribution of its subjects. Regardless of whether onethinks that the whole world is now playing the game of states, or theWestphalian model is riven by a core-periphery distinction, or the globalizationis an emergent new structure, the fact remains that everyone is now caught up ininternational relations and many actors in the periphery have a lot more inde-pendence than was the case before decolonization. Some non-Western states areplausibly bidding for great power standing. Given these conditions, our questionis ‘why is there no non-Western international theory’. We are as intrigued by theapparent absence of theory in the non-West as Wight was by what he consideredto be the absence of international theory in general. However, our investigationinto this puzzle follows a broader line of enquiry. Wight’s central message wasthat the satisfaction with an existing political condition identified with thepursuit of progress and the good life within the state inhibited the need for devel-oping a theory about what was regarded as the repetitious melodrama ofrelations among states. If so, then one may find a ready-made explanation forwhy non-Western IRT, or what there is of it, remains ‘scattered, unsystematic,and mostly inaccessible’. Today, the contemporary equivalent of ‘good life’ ininternational relations – democratic peace, interdependence and integration, andinstitutionalized orderliness, as well as the ‘normal relationships and calculableresults’ – is found mostly in the West, while the non-West remains the realm ofsurvival (Goldgeier and McFaul, 1992). Wight maintained that ‘what for politi-cal theory is the extreme case (as revolution, or civil war) is for internationaltheory the regular case’. One might say with little exaggeration that what inWight’s view was the extreme case for political theory, has now become extremeonly for the international relations of the core states found in the West, while forthe non-West, it remains the stuff of everyday life.

However, the absence of non-Western IRT deserves a more complex expla-nation than the simple acknowledgement of the conflictual anarchy of thenon-West. Indeed, we do not accept Wight’s observation that IRT, in contrastto political theory, is or should be about survival only. We acknowledge thepossibility of progress and transformation both in the West and in thenon-West. Our explanations for the apparent absence of a non-Western IRTfocus not on the total lack of good life in the non-West, but on ideational andperceptual forces, which fuel, in varying mixtures, both Gramscian hegemo-nies, and ethnocentrism and the politics of exclusion (Acharya, 2000). Someof these explanations are located within the West, some within the non-West,and some in the interaction between the two. These explanations have much

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to do with what Wæver (1998) has called the ‘sociology’ of the discipline,which reinforces material variables such as disparities in power and wealth.

In this special issue, we set out to investigate why there is no non-WesternIRT and what might be done to mitigate this situation. We focus on Asia, bothbecause it is the site of the only contemporary non-Western concentration ofpower and wealth even remotely comparable to the West and because it has itsown long history of international relations that is quite distinct from that of theWest. History matters to IRT, because as we will show below, even a shortreflection on Western IRT quickly exposes that much of it is conspicuouslydrawn from the model provided by modern European history. We are acutelyaware that we are excluding the Middle East, whose history has an equal claimto standing as a distinctive source of IR practice, and via Islam, also somethinking about the structure of international relations in terms of the interplaybetween the Dar al Islam (realm of Islam) and the Dar al Harb (realm of war).We also exclude Africa, whose history of state traditions was often tied into theMiddle East and Europe, and whose non-state history perhaps has less immedi-ate relevance to IRT (although this perception too may be part of what needsto be rectified). We make these exclusions on the grounds that our expertisedoes not lie in these regions, and that including them would require a muchbigger project than the resources we have to undertake. We hope others willtake up our challenge to do for these regions what we do here for Asia, andthey will find the approach adopted here useful in doing that.

Since this special issue is the opening move in what we hope will be aglobal debate, our goal is to speak to both Western and non-Western audi-ences. To the Western IRT audience, we want to introduce the non-Western IRtraditions, and that will be done partly in this introductory article but mainlyin the articles dealing with China, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia thatfollow. To the non-Western IR audience, we want to pose the challenge of whyWestern theory is so dominant, and what could and should be done aboutthis. We do this not out of antagonism for the West, or contempt for the IRTthat has been developed there, but because we think Western IRT is both toonarrow in its sources and too dominant in its influence to be good for thehealth of the wider project to understand the social world in which we live.We hold that whatever its current origins and character, IRT does not have tobe inherently and inevitably Western. In principle, it is an open domain intowhich it is not unreasonable to expect non-Westerners to make a contributionat least proportional to the degree that they are involved in its practice. Thisraises some complicated philosophical questions, on which more below.

There is, in addition, a powerful argument of Cox (1986, p. 207) that ‘Theoryis always for someone and for some purpose’. IRT likes to pose as neutral, butit is not difficult to read much of it in a Coxian light, especially those that offernot just a way of analyzing, but also a vision of what the world does look like

Why is there no non-Western international relations theory? 289

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(Realism, English School pluralists), or should look like (Liberalism, Marxism,Critical theory, and English School solidarists). In Coxian perspective,Liberalism, especially economic liberalism, can be seen as speaking for capital,whereas Realism and the English School pluralists speak for the status quogreat powers and the maintenance of their dominant role in the internationalsystem/society. Although they are presented as universal theories, and might,indeed, be accepted as such by many, all three (i.e. Liberalism, Realism, and theEnglish School pluralists) can also be seen as speaking for the West and in theinterest of sustaining its power, prosperity, and influence. Various strands ofMarxism and critical theory have sought to speak for excluded or marginalizedgroups (workers, women, and Third-World countries) and to promote improve-ment in the position of those in the periphery. From this Coxian perspective,Asian states have an interest in IRT that speaks for them and their interests.Neither China nor Japan fits comfortably into Realism or Liberalism. China istrying to avoid being treated as a threat to the status quo as its power rises, andthe moves to develop a Chinese school of IR are focused on this problem. Japanis still struggling with whether or not it should be a ‘normal’ great power, andits status as a ‘trading state’ or ‘civilian power’ is a direct contradiction ofRealist expectations. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)defies the Realist, liberal and English School logic about the sources of inter-national order, because local powers play an important role in the managementof regional order. South Korea and India perhaps fit more closely with Realistmodels, yet neither seems certain about what sort of place it wants for itself ininternational society. To the extent that IRT is constitutive of the reality that itaddresses, Asian states have a major interest in being part of the game. If we areto improve IRT as a whole, then the Western IRT needs to be challenged notjust from within, but also from outside the West.

The next section looks at what we understand by IRT. Section 3 exploresthe possible explanations for Western dominance of IRT. Section 4 surveysAsian sources for thinking about IRT. Section 5 sets up the general structurein the articles that follow.

2 What do we mean by IRT?

For the enquiry that we have in mind, we do not think it either necessary orappropriate to get engaged in the bottomless controversies about theory thatemanate from debates about the philosophy of knowledge. Neither do we wantto spend time trying to delimit the borders of IR and to engage in the debatesabout whether these should have wide or narrow limits. Given that we want tolook as widely as possible for manifestations of non-Western IR thinking. Weset wide our understanding of IR as a subject, and what counts as theory.We are happy to take a pluralist view of theory that embraces both the harder,


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positivist, rationalist, materialist and quantitative understandings on one endof the theory spectrum, and the more reflective, social, constructivist, andpostmodern on the other. In this pluralist spirit, we also include normativetheory, whose focus is not so much to explain or understand the social worldas it is, but to set out systematic ideas about how and why it can and shouldbe improved. Privileging one type of theory over others would largely defeatthe purpose of our enterprise, which is to make an initial probe to find ‘whatis out there’ in Asian thinking about IR. A broad approach to theory will giveus a much better chance of finding local produce than a narrow one, andthose who take particular views can apply their own filters to separate outwhat is of significance (or not) to them.

Given the peculiarities of IR as a subject, it is worth saying somethingabout whether IRT needs to be universal in scope (i.e. applying to the wholesystem) or can also be exceptionalist (applying to a subsystem on the groundsthat it has distinctive characteristics). The Holy Grail for social theorists is thehighest level of generalization about the largest number of events. Thatimpulse points strongly toward universalist IRTs, like Waltz’s, that claim toapply to the whole international system and to be timeless in their application[though even Waltz can be faulted here for keeping silent about the vastswaths of history in which ‘universal’ empires held sway, overwhelming hissupposedly indestructible self-reproducing logic of international anarchy(Buzan and Little, 2000)]. Yet, there is also plenty of room for exceptionalism.Perhaps, the leading example is European Studies, where the emergence of theEU has created a regional political structure that fits neither domestic norinternational political models. It is too far removed from anarchy to beWestphalian, and too distant from hierarchy to count as either an empire or adomestic political space. This post-Westphalian experiment has a reasonableclaim to be exceptional, and is theorized in terms of ‘multi-level governance’and other such specifically tailored concepts. In principle, Area Studies shouldbe a main location for subsystemic theorizing. In relation to Asia, elements ofthis are visible in the idea that East Asia may be dressed up in Westphaliancostume, but is not performing a Westphalian play. Because of its Confucianculture, East Asian states are more likely to bandwagon with power ratherthan balance against it. This line of thinking (Fairbank, 1968; Huntington,1996, pp. 229–238; Kang, 2003) projects Asia’s past into its future. It assumesthat what Fairbank labeled the ‘Chinese World Order’ – a Sinocentric andhierarchical form of international relations – has survived within the culturesof East Asia despite the superficial remaking of the Asian subsystem into aWestern-style set of sovereign states. This line of exceptionalist theorizingabout East Asia is not that well developed, and mainly emanates from the US.The problem with Area Studies is that although it might well be the rightlocation for subsystemic, and exceptionalist theorizing, Area Studies itself is


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generally dominated by disciplines that have a low interest in theorizing,effectively taking exceptionalism to be a reason not to theorize. Europe (in theform of EU studies) once again stands apart.

If all theory is for someone and for some purpose, this effectively makesuniversal theory impossible other than as a disguise for the secular interests ofthose promoting it.1 Carr’s (1946, p. 79) warning that ‘the English-speakingpeoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interestsin the guise of the general good’ captures this Coxian perspective nicely,especially given that the Anglo-American domination of IR is of more than apassing phenomenon. The result is to identify a perpetual tension in the act oftheorizing about IR, whether at the systemic or subsystemic level. Is it possibleto aspire to detached science in attempting to understand and explain how theworld works, or must all such attempts be seen as fundamentally sectional,and inevitably part of an ongoing political game to sustain or unseat the hege-monic view, and thus sustain or unseat those whose interests are served bythat view?

Taking all this into account, and regardless of how one answers the lastquestion, this project requires us to have some sense of what counts as a con-tribution to IRT. Unless we set some benchmark, it will be impossible eitherto assess the present situation or to measure progress. Since part of ourpurpose is to survey the state of the art, it seems fitting to set the criteria fairlywide in order, in the first instance, to capture as much as possible. We are alsoconscious that it would probably be impossible to construct a watertight,uncontested definition that would clearly divide theory from non-theory. Onthis basis, we will count something as a contribution to IRT if it meets at leastone of the following conditions:

† that it be substantially acknowledged by others in the IR academic commu-nity as being theory;

† that it be self-identified by its creators as being IRT even if this is notwidely acknowledged within the mainstream academic IR community;

† that regardless of what acknowledgment it receives, its construction ident-ifies it as a systematic attempt to abstract or generalize about the subjectmatter of IR.

We will also look out for what might be called ‘pre-theory’, which is to sayelements of thinking that do not necessarily add up to theory in their ownright, but which provide possible starting points for doing so. IRT is mainlythe province of academics, but we will not exclude the thinking of prac-titioners if it meets, or leans toward, our criteria.

1 We are grateful to Tang Shiping for this observation.


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3 Explanations for the dominance of the West

It is not contested that Western IR was the first in the field as a self-consciousacademic discipline attempting to understand and theorize about thedynamics of world politics. Nor is there much doubt that the main ideas inthis discipline are deeply rooted in the particularities and peculiarities ofEuropean history, the rise of the West to world power, and the imposition ofits own political structure onto the rest of the world. Taken together, these twofacts mean that non-Western attempts to develop thinking about IR, like lateindustrializers, necessarily have to make their way in an environment alreadyheavily conditioned by earlier developments. It is therefore not surprising thatnobody disputes that, although academic IR is now a global activity (albeitvery unevenly distributed, even within the West), it remains massively domi-nated by Western thinking. While this situation is not intrinsically puzzling, itis helpful to look in more detail at the reasons why. Some explanations leavelittle or no room or reason for remedial action. Others suggest that the con-dition of Western dominance is likely to be temporary.2

3.1 Western IRT has discovered the right path to understanding IR

If true, this explanation would put IRT on a par with physics, chemistry, andmathematics whose theories can reasonably claim universal standing regardlessof cultural context. This special issue would then have no point other than toexhort non-Westerners to engage themselves more in the established theoreti-cal debates. One would not expect the laws of physics, or IR, to vary justbecause they were being discussed by Asians rather than Westerners, but onemight well expect a larger body of participants to improve the quality of criti-cism, insight, and application. We think that this claim cannot be defended inany absolute sense, not least because so much of Western IRT is drawn frommodern Western history. One consequence of this ‘Westphalian straightjacket’is an over-emphasis on anarchy and an under-emphasis on the many possibili-ties for how international systems and societies could (and have) been con-structed. In pursuit of ‘scientific’ status, mainstream Western IRT has alsobeen excessively concerned with rather narrow, rational choice, views ofmotive in power politics, strategy, and economics. It is only beginning to cometo terms with the wider range of possibilities such as identity, honor, tradition,etc. There can be no doubt that Western IRT has generated significant insightsand deserves to be taken seriously by all who are interested in the subject.However, equally there can be no doubt that it is rooted in a very specific

2 In this section we have drawn heavily both on insights provided by Kanti Bajpai, and on analysesand discussions about them, in the first drafts of the articles presented at the Singapore workshopfor this project 11–12 July 2005.


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history, and that a more world historical perspective should open upadditional perspectives.

There is also the Coxian view set out above, because social theory is alwaysfor someone and for some purpose, it is to its very core, and unavoidably, apolitical enterprise. To the extent that they are accepted, theories such asbalance of power, hegemonic stability, democratic peace, or unipolarity cannothelp but construct the world they purport to describe. There may be room forargument about the balance of effects between material and social factors, butit would require a heroic commitment to pure materialism to argue that it didnot matter whether or not people accepted these ideas as true. To accept thatthe world is now unipolar, as many do, not only forecloses other ways of under-standing international order, but automatically puts the US into a unique andprivileged position. The acceptance would produce effects even if in materialterms unipolarity was not an accurate description of how things are. The con-sequential impossibility of detaching social theory from the reality it addressesmeans that it must always matter who it is that generates IRT. The extremedominance of Anglo-American voices in IRT should not be, and is not, viewedwithout suspicion, viz the quote from Carr as discussed above.

3.2 Western IRT has acquired hegemonic status in theGramscian sense

This explanation is not about whether Western IRT has found all the rightpaths to truth. It is about whether, because Western IRT has been carried bythe dominance of Western power over the last few centuries, it has acquired aGramscian hegemonic status that operates largely unconsciously in the mindsof others, and regardless of whether the theory is correct or not. Here, onewould need to take into account the intellectual impact of Western imperial-ism and the success of the powerful in imprinting their own understandingsonto the minds and practices of the non-Western world. As noted above, theprocess of decolonization left in its wake a world remodeled, sometimes badly,on the lines of the European state and its ‘anarchical society’ form of inter-national relations. The price of independence was that local elites accept thisstructure, and a good case can be made that they not only did so underduress, but absorbed and made their own a whole set of key Western ideasabout the practice of political economy, including most conspicuously andmost universally, sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism. Other Westernideas such as democracy, the market and human rights have had a more con-tested, less universal, reception, but nonetheless have become widespread andinfluential outside the West. Third-World elites have embraced the keyelements of Westphalian sovereignty and even expanded its scope. Forexample, the doctrine of non-intervention, a key subsidiary norm of


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Westphalian sovereignty, is being vigorously contested in the West, and hassuffered some erosion, but in the Third World, it has remained robust. In fact,the decline of non-intervention in the West has paralleled its rise in the ThirdWorld.

If Western IRT is hegemonic because it is right, then there is little scope fornon-Western contributions. But if it is dominant because it rode on the backof Western power, then there is both room and reason to develop anon-Western voice. Particularly significant here may be the extent to whichWestern imperialism not only overwhelmed local traditions of thought andknowledge, but also cut peoples off from their own history by drawing theirself-understanding into a Western historical frame. Perhaps, also significant isa consciousness of Western hegemony, a desire to avoid being ensnared by it,and an avoidance of engagement with theory precisely because it entails a riskof such ensnarement.

3.3 Non-Western IR theories do exist, but are hidden

There is, of course, a possibility that non-Western IRTs do exist, but that theyare hidden from the Western discourse by language barriers or by beinglocated in areas of study outside the Western-defined IR realm, or other entrydifficulties, and therefore do not circulate in the global debates. If the reasonsfor being hidden are largely cultural and/or linguistic, that may well result inlocal theories being hidden not just from the Western debate, but also fromother non-Western debates. It is far from clear, for example, that theoreticaldebates conducted, say, in Japanese, would find much if any audience inChina or India. Even in Europe, there are distinct local language IR debatesin Germany, France, and elsewhere that are only partially, and often quiteweakly, linked to the English language debates (Friedrichs, 2004). Those whoengaged in the English language debates have more than enough to readwithin that, and often lack the language skills to investigate beyond it. Thosewith the language skills are mainly located in Area Studies, an approach thatgenerally focuses on the uniqueness of the area under study, and so carries alow interest in general theory.

The reasons for being hidden may also lie in intended or unintended bar-riers to entry to the Western discourses. Is there a lack of receptiveness tonon-Western contributions arising from the ethnocentrism of Western scholar-ship, and its tendency to view the reality of others through its own experience,and to assume the superiority of its own cultural model over others (seeAcharya, 2000; for a detailed empirical exposure of the Western dominance inIRT, see Wæver, 1998; an interesting attempt to bring in a Latin-Americanperspective, see Tickner, 2003)? It is also easy for those in the Anglo-SaxonIR core to assume that English as a lingua franca must make access easier for all.


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Up to a point, there is truth in this assumption, but for those having to workin English as a second or third language, they may feel like a barrier, bothbecause of the additional work necessary to put one’s thoughts into a foreignlanguage and because of the high rejection rates in the leadingEnglish-language IR journals. The amount of time and energy such personsmay have to invest to get something published in a mainstream IR journalcould be several times what they would have to spend to publish it in theirown language. It is easy for Anglophones to forget that there are large IRcommunities in Japan, Germany, France, and elsewhere within which individ-uals can make a perfectly satisfying career.

If non-Western theory does exist, but is marginalized, then one purpose ofthis special issue is to reveal that existence, and the problem is not to createsuch theory but to get it into wider circulation. Is it the case that the contri-butions of non-Western scholars remain hidden from view because theirinability to publish in the leading journals in the field, nearly all of which areedited in the West? The themes of articles published in these journals areheavily weighted in favor of Western issues, theories, and settings, both histori-cal and contemporary. Non-Western contributors to these journals tend to berare, and those who do make it are usually based in the West. When WesternIR scholars rebel against Western dominance, they usually target Americandominance, especially its rational choice positivism. The alternatives theyidentify tend to be British and European (and to some extent Australian),rather than Asian (see, for example, Crawford and Jarvis, 2000; Smith, 2000;Ikenberry and Mastanduno, 2003). The Crawford and Jarvis volume isanother example of how extensions of IRT beyond America stop at the UKand Australia. The Ikenberry and Mastanduno volume contains only a singleAsian contributor.

3.4 Local conditions discriminate against the productionof IR theory

There are various local conditions – historical, cultural, political, and insti-tutional – that could explain why the academic environment outside the Westmight not be conducive to the generation of IRT. On the historical side, moststories about how Western IR got established as a self-conscious subject seeWorld War I as a watershed, reinforced by World War II. The unexpectedhorror, cost, destruction, and disruption of the 1914–18 war took Westerncivilization by surprise, and filled it with the fear that a renewal of all-out warmight herald the end of Western civilization. These origins meant that rightfrom the start, IR in general, and IRT in particular, was endowed with astrong problem-solving orientation. Liberalism and Realism were both, intheir different ways, responses to the problem that fear of war had become


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equal to, or greater than, fear of defeat or desire for victory. From that feargrew the need for a better understanding of peace and war and it was aroundthat goal that the field of IRwas institutionalized. It may well be true that thisparticular historical trauma is unique to the West, and shaped and motivatedthe development of its IRT in a particular way. Yet, one might argue that formuch of Asia, World War II was a not wholly dissimilar experience. And ifhistorical trauma is a necessary midwife for the birth of IRT, then the experi-ence of Western domination and decolonization should have been more thanadequate to serve. Although Western history has unique connections to thedevelopment of IRT, it is far from clear that non-Western societies lack simi-larly forceful mobilizing historical traumas.

Probing deeper, one can ask whether there are cultural differences betweenthe West and the non-West that make the former more generally inclined toapproach issues in abstract terms, and the latter less inclined. In its strongform, the idea would be that theory in general is a Western way of doingthings, with others more inclined either to empirical approaches or abstrac-tions related mainly to local affairs, and without the presumption to universal-ism typical of Western social theory. On the face of it, it seems highly unlikelythat this strong version would apply only to IRT, so any such factor should bevisible at least across the social sciences. Yet, it is undeniable that IRT hasflourished most in English-speaking countries (US, Britain, Canada, andAustralia) or in countries where English is almost universally spoken(Scandinavia and Netherlands). This fact leaves room for the idea that IR as itnow exists might be in some respects culturally specific. In its weaker version,the culture explanation would simply be that theory, especially universaltheory, is a kind of luxury that societies struggling with the immediate andpressing problems of development simply cannot afford to indulge. The focuswould all be on short-term local problem solving (perhaps typically foreignpolicy analysis for the state concerned, or at most regional level), and not onmore grandiose efforts to understand larger systems. There could also be alink between culture and the hegemony explanation. One consequence offoreign hegemony could be to induce in the local cultures a kind of radicaldemoralization and loss of confidence that would make it particularly difficultto engage in general theoretical debates. Conversely, hegemony would encou-rage exactly such theorizing from those in the dominant position.

Distinct from cultural logics, but possibly related to them, are politicalfactors that might inhibit the development of IRT. In the West, IRT has flour-ished most successfully in democracies, although the existence of more or lessIRT-free zones in substantial countries such as Spain suggests that democracyis more of a necessary than a sufficient condition. Other than in a narrow,party-line sense, one would not expect IRT to flourish in totalitarian stateswhere the government has a strong political interest in controlling how foreign


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policy and the structure of IRs are understood. The experience of the SovietUnion perhaps exemplifies the limits here. There is evidence from Europeanhistory that authoritarian states are not necessarily hostile to social theorists(e.g. Kant), but this perhaps depends on the presence of an enlighteneddespot. It is, in general, an interesting question as to whether or not undemo-cratic governments are sufficiently sensitive to IRT so as to inhibit its develop-ment within their domain. It is perhaps worth noting that the typical Westernacademic experience is that governments could not care less about IRT, paylittle or no attention to it, and certainly do not consider it a threat to theirauthority. They will occasionally pick up elements of it to adorn specific pol-icies (e.g. deterrence and democratic peace), and the general principles ofRealism are suffused through the foreign policy elite. Perhaps, the closest con-nections are possible in the US system, where it is not all that uncommon foracademic theorists (e.g. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniev Brzezinski, Joeseph Nye,and Stephen Krasner) to play significant roles in government. This connection,however, almost certainly has much less to do with their standing as theorists,and much more to do with their willingness to pursue political activism withinthe party system. As a rule, it is perhaps fair to say that the more closelylinked the study of IR is to government and foreign policy establishments, theless theoretical it is likely to be. IR and foreign policy think tanks are generallyaverse to theory, and much more interested in, and encouraging of, focusedempirical work relevant to the issues of the day. Perhaps, the one exception tothis has been in relation to strategic theory, where there was strong interplaybetween government and academic thinking about nuclear deterrence (Wæverand Buzan, 2006).

The final local condition that may discriminate against the development ofIRT is institutional. By this we mean things to do with the resourcing, work-loads, career structures, and intellectual ethos of those, mainly academics, whomight be expected to do IRT. In Western academia, research is encouraged bythe career structure: you do not get either promotion or the esteem of yourpeers without doing it. Theoretical research generally has high standing, andit is mainly easier to get to the top ranks of one’s field by doing theory thanby empirical research. Such research is, up to a point, funded, and again up toa point, time is built into the career structure for research. Other resourcessuch as information technology and libraries are generally adequate tosupport research. If all, or even, some, of these conditions are not present,then one would not expect academia to generate a theory. If research ingeneral, or theory work in particular, is not esteemed, then it will not be pro-duced. If it is esteemed, but academics have too much teaching and adminis-tration and too few resources, it will still not be produced. This institutionalexplanation might be related to the cultural one in the sense of absence of aresearch culture, but it might be more a question of inadequate resources.


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There might also be quite particular local reasons to do with how IRwas introduced into a country, who the founding leaders were, and whatthe disciplinary links were that could work against the development of IRT.In the Anglo-American IR world, IR has been most closely linked withPolitical Science, a discipline quite strongly inclined toward theorizing. But IRcan and has been linked to less theoretically inclined disciplines such asHistory, Law, and Area Studies. Links of that sort might well build atheoreti-cal or even anti-theoretical inclinations into a local IR community, whereaslinks to Sociology and Political Science would tend to encourage a moretheoretical bent.

3.5 The West has a big head start, and what we are seeingis a period of catching up

If this explanation is true, then the main problem is a question of time andresources. Where there are resources available for the study of IR, we shouldexpect to see, depending on the level of resources available, the steady unfold-ing of local developments in IRT. Where such resources are available, weshould expect to see the gap between West and non-West closing, and it mightnot be unreasonable to expect that this gap would close more or less in linewith the pace of catch-up in the wider process of modernization. One objec-tion to this line of reasoning is the same as that relating to Ayoob’s (1995)catch-up theory of the Third-World state: that it has to repeat the developmenttrajectory of the West. The difference for state development and IRT is thatthe non-West has to perform its development in the shadow of ongoingWestern domination and penetration.

These explanations are, of course, not mutually exclusive. It is not difficultto imagine, for example, a combination of Western hegemony, unconducivelocal conditions, and engagement in catch-up. Expectations of the pace ofcatch up could be frustrated by unhelpful local conditions. One aim of thearticles that follow is to weigh the balance of these explanations in specificcases, and perhaps to add others to them.

Whatever the causes of its dominance, IRT might now be thought of as sodeeply rooted in the West, and so deeply expressive of Western dominance, asto make the idea of non-Western IRT almost an oxymoron.3 There are twoobvious, and partly reciprocal, ways in which the Western dominance of IRTmanifests itself. The first is the origin of most mainstream IRT in Westernphilosophy, political theory, and/or history. Realism, Liberalism, Marxism,the English School, Constructivism, Postmodernism, globalization, and soforth all have their intellectual roots in Western thinkers ranging from Hobbes,

3 We are grateful to Jens Bartelson, Ulrik Pram Gad and Stefano Guzzini for raising this question.


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Kant, and Marx to Derrida, Habermas, and Foucoult. The second is theEurocentric framing of world history, which weaves through and around muchof this theory. If one takes the narrow view of IR, then IR theory is almost theideology of a Western state system that has been imposed, with varyingdegrees of success, on the rest of the world. Where this imposition has notbeen successful, the talk is of ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states on the margins of theinternational system/society. Where it has been successful, ideas of sover-eignty, territoriality, and nationalism, with their attendant understandings ofwhat defines ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, are so indigenized as to raise questions asto whether ‘non-Western’ is a truly meaningful idea. If one takes the widerview, a similar Western-dominated history emerges in which globalization isessentially about the imposition of a Western economic and social system ontothe rest of humankind. Here, one gets a center–periphery structure that privi-leges the ideas, rules, and practices of the core over those of the periphery(think of IMF conditionalities), albeit leaving membership of the core open tothose who can adapt (modernize and Westernize) successfully, along the linespioneered by Japan and South Korea.

How best does one grapple with the consequences of this dominance andtheir implications for what ‘non-Western IRT’ might mean? These conse-quences are complicated by the fact that much mainstream Western IRT eitherclaims or assumes that it is aimed at producing universal truths about inter-national relations. A few flecks of non-Western thinking (Sun Tzu, Kautilya)or events (the Chinese ‘Warring States’ period) are allowed in at variouspoints to help validate universalist claims. Universalist claims amplify theeffect of historical dominance (and vice versa), and sit in sustained tensionwith the Coxian and postmodern positions that all such claims are suspect atbest and impossible at worst. Here, one moves into deep and turbulent philo-sophical waters. It is probably not possible to construct a view that couldprovide a definitive answer capable of satisfying everyone. We ourselves aretorn, seeing merit in both interpretations. Theory cannot avoid interactingwith political interests, but it should not thereby be excluded from strivingtoward universal understandings. There is an important sense in which theideas within Western IRT are genuinely striving to be universal and mightclaim to have some truth on that scale. However, they can also be seen as theparticular, parochial, and Eurocentric, self-interestedly pretending to be uni-versal in order to enhance their own claims.

At the very least, this West-centrism suggests that it is possible fornon-Western societies to build understandings of IR based on their own his-tories and social theories, and even to project these in the form of universalistclaims. A good case can be made that IR is strongly, although not solely,shaped by the historical contexts through which the discipline has evolved(Holden, 2002), and as Wæver (1998) notes, even within the West ‘IR is quite


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different in different places’. There is no reason why these same forces shouldnot operate outside the West in shaping non-Western IRT. In principle, thatwould mean that the non-Western IRT could take many different forms. Itmight appear as distinctive questionings and perspectives within the generalframings provided by the Western IRT, but sourced from and inspired bynon-Western philosophical and political theories and historical sources. Or itcould appear as something completely different, which those locked intoWestern modes of thinking would have difficulty in recognizing as IR. Asnoted, Western IRT arises from quite particular framings of inside/outsideand the structures and relationships that follow. Other constructions of inside/outside than Westphalian ones are certainly possible, and that is part of thedebate between the narrow and wide ends of the spectrum within the WesternIRT. Asian history might suggest that suzerainty, with its much less rigid viewof inside/outside, is at least as interesting as anarchy as a theoretical approachto international relations. It might also lean toward favoring the societal sectoras opposed to the military, political, and economic ones, which again wouldopen up a quite different view of inside/outside.

4 Asian sources for IRT and the problem of defining‘non-Western’ IRT

What constitutes an Asian IRT? Who is Asian and who can make a contri-bution to non-Western IRT? Should there be a ‘nativistic bias’ deciding whatconstitutes Non-Western IRT? During the Singapore Workshop, this wasextensively discussed in relation to the essay on India. The question: can onlyan Indian born in India qualify to make a contribution to Indian IRT pro-voked considerable debate, with two scholars, both from India, taking oppo-site views. To be an Asian IRT, do we need to have an Asian contributorborn, educated, and working in Asia, or can it also come from an Asian withWestern citizenship based in Asia, as well as from an Asian contributor withan Asian passport based in West, or Westerner based in the West but with con-siderable expertise on Asia and who is generalizing from Asian experience? Wethink the point of reference matters, but one cannot be too limiting here. Justas Bull (an Australian) developed the English School out of European experi-ence, cannot Westerners develop or contribute to an Asian IRT out of Asianexperience? Clearly, Asian IRT would be most obviously non-Western if it wasdone by ‘clearly Asians’, but one should also allow in the ‘in-betweens’ whomay well play an important role (or if not why not?) in stimulating debate intheir home communities.

Within Asia there are some non-Western contributions that fit broadlywithin our understanding of IRT, although these almost never meet the criteriafor hard theory. Instead, they are more likely to fit within softer conceptions,


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focusing on the ideas and beliefs from classical and contemporary periods.Broadly, one could identify four major types of work that could be consideredas soft theory. What follows is a brief examination of each.

First, in parallel with Western international theory’s focus on key figuressuch as Thucydides, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Kant, etc., there are Asian classicaltraditions and the thinking of classical religious, political, and military figures,e.g. Sun Tzu, Confucius, and Kautilya, on all which some secondary ‘politicaltheory’ type literature exists (Sharma, 2001). Attempts to derive causal the-ories out of these do exist, but have been rare (see, e.g. Modelski, 1964; Hui,2004). An important aspect, although not necessarily limitation, of this typeof work is that there is not always a clear demarcation between the boundariesof what is domestic and what is ‘international’ relations. More importantly,invoking of the ideas and approaches of these classical writers is seldomdevoid of political considerations. In the heyday of the ‘East Asian Miracle’ inthe 1980s and early 1990s, for example, Confucian thought and ideas aboutcommunitarianism were frequently cited as the basis of an ‘Asian values’ per-spective, which was offered by elites in the region, as an alternative to Westernindividualist liberal values. It was also presented as the alternative conceptual-ization of an East Asian international order that could challenge the hegemo-nic ambition of the liberal mantra of ‘democratic peace’. In India, Vedic ideasabout strategy and politics have been invoked as the justification of India’sacquisition of nuclear weapons (Karnad, 2002). This is by no means unexcep-tional, however, since as many have observed, the development of internationalrelations theory often reflects the real-world developments, and as Cox remindsus, ‘theory is always for someone or some purpose’. But what may be strikingabout the invoking of Confucian and Vedic justification for a particularapproach to international relations is that they came at a time of growing wealthof power of certain nations: there has been no corresponding invoking of classi-cal ideas to explain crisis or decline of nations in Asia although Confucianismwas blamed for China’s underdevelopment and decline in the Maoist era.

A second category of work that might be called soft IRT in Asia relates tothe thinking and foreign policy approaches of Asian leaders. As a pioneer ofAsian resistance to colonialism, Gandhi’s ideas deserve particular notice.Gandhi put forth his notion of satyagraha as the basis of his non-violent resist-ance to colonialism by fusing the Western notion of ‘passive resistance’ with hisown upbringing among the pacifist Jain community in India (more on this inthe conclusion). This, in turn, influenced Nehru’s approach to world order,especially his aversion to collective defense pacts and geopolitics and his advo-cacy of non-alignment. The case of Jawaharlal Nehru is especially interestingand relevant, because Nehru was recognized both within India and in the world,as a thinker in his own right, rather than simply as a political strategist. Hisviews were influential in shaping the initial foreign policy beliefs and approaches


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of several of Asia’s fellow nationalists. Moreover, unlike other political leaders ofthe day, Nehru did engage Western Realist intellectual writings, such as those byNicholas Spykman and Walter Lippmann, and could thus be regarded as amajor contributor to the first of the so-called ‘inter-paradigm debates’ (the‘Idealist–Realist debate’) which every graduate student in IR knows about(except that he or she is hardly prescribed Nehru’s writings: Banks, 1985). In hisThe Discovery of India, he took a dim view of Nicholas Spykman’s position thatmoral beliefs and ‘values of justice, fairness, and tolerance’ could be pursued bystatesmen ‘only to the extent that they contribute to, or do not interfere with,the power objective’. Nehru also attacked Walter Lippmann’s prescription thatthe post-war world order should be organized around a number of allianceseach under a great power orbit. This was seen by Nehru as a ‘continuation ofold tradition’ of European power politics, and led him to critique Realism forsticking to the ‘empty shell of the past’ and refusing to ‘understand the hardfacts of the present’ (Nehru, 2003, p. 538). In short, for Nehru, some of the‘Realist’ solutions to the world’s problems ignored new forces sweeping theworld, including the physical and economic decline of Western colonial powersafter World War II, as well as the upsurge of nationalism and demands forfreedom in the former colonies. By ignoring these trends, ‘Realism’ was being‘more imaginative and divorced from to-day’s and to-morrow’s problems thanmuch of the so-called idealism of many people’ (Nehru, 2003, p. 539).

But Nehru was hardly alone in offering what Goldstein and Keohane (1993)would call ‘principled ideas’ about organizing international order. Mao, AungSan of Burma, Jose Rizal of the Philippines, and Sukarno of Indonesia alsooffered their own ideas about organizing international order. While a gooddeal of their thinking may be sourced to training in the West or training inWestern texts at home, they also came up with ideas and approaches indepen-dent of Western intellectual traditions and which were a response to prevailingand changing local and global circumstances. One concrete example would bethe idea of non-alignment, developed by Nehru and fellow Asian and Africanleaders in the 1950s, which though adapted from concepts of neutralism in theWest, was in many respect an independent concept. Nehru also promoted theidea of non-exclusionary regionalism, as opposed to military blocs based onthe classic European balance of power model. Aung San’s ideas offered some-thing that could be regarded as a liberal internationalist vision of internationalrelations, stressing interdependence and multilateralism rather than the isola-tionism which came to characterize Burma’s foreign policy under military rule(Aung San, 1974; Silverstein, 1972). Aung San also rejected military alliancesunder great power orbit because any ‘union or commonwealth or bloc’ thatBurma may be invited to participate must be a ‘voluntary affair’ and not be‘conceived in the narrow spirit of the classic balance of power’ (Aung San,1946). In the 1960s, Sukarno developed and propagated some ideas about


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international order, such as OLDEFOS and NEFOS (‘old established forces’and ‘new emerging forces’) which drew upon his nationalist background aswell as his quest for international leadership (Legge, 1984). Another examplewould be Mao’s three worlds theory, and his ideas about war and strategy.There is some parallel here with the influence of statesmen and generals inWestern thinking about IR, foreign policy, and strategy, e.g. Clausewitz,Bismark, Metternich, Wilson, and Lenin, in the case of whom it is hard toseparate the intellectual contribution from praxis, and where theory alwaysserved immediate policy goals.

Unlike the case of these Western practitioners, however, the analysis of thethinking and approach of Asian leaders has been mainly undertaken by bio-graphers and area specialists, rather than scholars specializing in IRT. Notmany scholars, Asian or otherwise, have taken up the challenge of interpretingand developing the writings of Asian leaders from the perspective of IRT. (Foran important exception, see Bajpai, 2003.) But this clearly belies the ‘theoreti-cal’ significance of their ideas, especially those of Asia’s nationalist leaders.

The fact that such writings and discourses have not found their way intothe core literature of IR is revealing. The fact that Nehru was a politicalleader first and an intellectual second (mostly when he was incarcerated by theBritish) cannot be the justification, since IRT has recognized the ideas andapproaches of people who were primarily politicians or diplomats, such asWoodrow Wilson, not to mention the European master strategists such asMetternich and Castlereagh. Another example would be Kissinger, although itmight be said that Kissinger was a trained academic who became a prac-titioner, whereas Nehru was a politician who became a ‘theorist’.

Despite their widely different backgrounds and circumstances, the ideasand approaches of Asia’s nationalists shared some important commonelements. First, they did not see any necessary conflict between nationalismand internationalism. On the contrary, some of these nationalists were amongthe foremost critics of nationalism as the sole basis for organizing inter-national relations. India’s radical nationalist leader Subash Chandra Bose andNobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore fall into this category (Tagore, 2002).This might have been driven partly by a desire to mobilize internationalsupport for national liberation. This ‘open nationalism’ of Asia was in somerespect distinct from the exclusionary and territorial nationalism of Europe.Although a Burmese patriot and a staunch nationalist, Aung San saw nonecessary conflict between nationalism, regionalism, and internationalism. Hebelieved that regional cooperation could compensate for Burma’s weaknessesin the defense and economic sphere. Some of these nationalists would lateradopt a realpolitik approach to foreign policy and security, partly due to theinfluence of the superpowers as the Cold War set in. The most importantaspect of this nascent internationalism of Asia was the advocacy of Asian


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unity and regionalism. Nehru was the most articulate early post-war advocateof Asian unity, which he saw as the inevitable restoration of cultural and com-mercial links across Asia that had been violently disrupted by colonialism. Heorganized the Asian Relations Conferences of 1947 and 1949, the latter beingspecifically aimed at creating international pressure on the Dutch to grantindependence to Indonesia.

It is noteworthy that many of these figures self-consciously distancedthemselves from utopianism or ‘idealism’. In critiquing nationalism in Japan,Tagore dreaded the ‘epithet’ of ‘unpractical’ that could be flung against himand which would ‘stick to my coat-tail, never to be washed away’ (Tagore,2002, p. 50). Aung San proclaimed: ‘I am an internationalist, but an interna-tionalist who does not allow himself to be swept off the firm Earth’ (AungSan, 1974). Similarly, in criticizing Lipmann’s vision of great power orbitsbalancing each other and regional defence pacts such as the Southeast AsiaTreaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO),Nehru defended himself against the charge of being a ‘starry-eyed’ idealist,leveled against him by the members of such Pacts represented at the BandungConference of Asian and African nations in 1955. Nehru derided the‘so-called realistic appreciation of the world situation’, expressed by the pactmember Turkey in defense of regional pacts on the ground that they rep-resented a more realistic response to the threat posed by Communism thanNehru’s idea of cooperation and ‘engagement’ with China and Soviet Union.Far from being a pacifist, he claimed himself to be ‘taking a realistic view’ ofthe contradictions and dangers involved in membership by the newly indepen-dent nations in such pacts, which to him represented a new form of Westerndominance at a time when colonialism was in its final death throes, and whichcould lead to Europe-like tensions and conflicts in Asia and Africa (Nehru,1955). The Bandung Conference thus could be Asia’s answer to the Idealist–Realist debate (the first of the so-called ‘inter-paradigm debates’ that graduatestudents in Western universities are obliged to read).

Outside of classical and modern political ideas about inter-state or inter-national relations, a third type of work is non-Westerners who have taken upWestern IRT: many Asian IR scholars have addressed the issue of theory byapplying Western theory to local contexts and puzzles and to assess their rel-evance. Examples include AP Rana and Kanti Bajpai in India, Chungin-Moon in Korea, Muthiah Alagappa from Malaysia (working in the USA),Takashi Inoguchi in Japan, and Yongjin Zhang from China (working in NewZealand). Considering their work as part of the development of non-WesternIRT may be problematic for two reasons, which were identified and extensivelydebated at the Singapore Workshop. The first relates to the fact that most suchscholars have received their training in the West, and have spent a considerablepart of their working life in Western institutions. Hence, can they be regarded


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as truly ‘local’ scholars and their work truly ‘indigenous’ contributions tonon-Western IRT? As noted earlier, this caused quite a bit of controversy atthe Singapore Workshop, with one group holding the view that they shouldnot, whereas another arguing that the place of training and career-buildingshould be less important than the substance of their contributions in judgingwhether their work might be regarded as non-Western IRT. As editors, we areinclined to take the latter position. But then, this raises a second issue. Whatif the work of such scholars simply apply and test Western concepts andmodels on Asia to assess their fit? Should this work have the same claim to beauthentic contributions to non-Western IRT compared to work, which is muchrarer, that makes independent generalizations from the Asian experience thatmight have transregional or universal applicability?

For example, Muthiah Alagappa suggests that ‘Asia is fertile ground todebate, test, and develop many of these [Western] concepts and competing the-ories, and to counteract the ethnocentric bias’ (Alagappa, 1998). But will theproblem of Western dominance disappear by using the Asian empirical recordprimarily to ‘test’ theories generated by Western scholars? Or will this merelyreinforce the dominance of Western theory by relegating area knowledge aslittle more than provider of ‘raw data’ to Western theory (Shea, 1997, pp.A12–A13)? As with the questions about what is IR, and is non-Western IRpossible given the universalization of the Western political model, it is prob-ably impossible to come to a definitive position on who (or what) should becounted as non-Western. To take the extreme view that Western penetration ofthe rest of the world has been so deep that only one discourse can now existwould cut the ground from under our whole enterprise. Perforce, we mustassume that the terms non-Western and Asian carry significant meaning,though we do not think it fruitful at this stage to engage in an attempt todefine the boundary with any clarity. In line with our previous arguments wewill favor a wide interpretation in order to catch as much as possible of whatmight be out there as sources for ‘Asian’ theoretical thinking about IR. Aseditors, we hesitate to take a definitive stand on this debate, lest we be accusedof gatekeeping. We might be a little partial to the second type of contribution,but leave the ultimate judgment to the scholars in the field, including thosewho have contributed to this issue. We also believe that when judging the sig-nificance of the work of Asian scholars, one could look for contributions thatmay be regarded as ‘pre-theories’ in the sense defined by Rosenau, i.e. general-ized work which begin to suggest broad and persistent patterns of behavior ofactors which may or may not have the full causal and predictive attributesassociated with American-style IRT. The diversity of opinions expressed onthe subject at the Singapore workshop is itself a healthy, and would helpdevelop the kind of critical reflections that will open the door to a greater sen-sitivity to the need for theory in studies of Asian IRs.


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An alternative pathway to ‘theory-testing’ may be found in a fourth type ofwork on IRT related to Asia. Such work studies Asian events and experiencesand develops concepts which can be used as tools of analysis of more generalpatterns in IRs and for locating Asia within the larger international systemand comparing it with other parts of the world. Some of the finest examplesof this include Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ and Scott’s ‘every dayforms of resistance’ (Mittleman, 2000; Anderson, 1983; Scott, 1985), whichhave inspired scholars of comparative politics as well as international relations(Adler, 1997). Anthropologist Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of HighlandBurma is an example from another discipline which is now used to underscorefluid notions of ethnic identity in Southeast Asia and beyond. (Leach, 1954).What distinguishes this type of work is that its authors are not turning Asiainto a mere test-bed of Western social science theory. Rather, they are identify-ing processes from an Asian (and other local) settings that could be used toexplain events and phenomena in the outside world. Other works in this cat-egory include Wolters’ ‘Mandala State’ (1982), Geertz’s ‘Negara’ (1980),Fairbank’s ‘Chinese World Order’, (1968), Huntington’s ‘Confucian inter-national systems’ (1996), and Kang’s notion of ‘hierarchy’ (2003), which mayor may not help IR scholars studying other regions of the world, but whichdo capture distinctive Asian patterns and experiences, and serve as the basis ofcomparing Asian international relations with the more general pattern.Another emerging body of work which can be considered here draws on gener-alizations about Asian interdependence and regional institution building andAsian regional practices such as ‘the ASEAN Way’. While these constructs areconsidered exceptionalist, in reality they are not. For example, consensusdecision-making is a world-wide practice of multilateral institutions. But theydo acquire a certain myth of distinctiveness in local contexts and are recog-nized and accepted as such. Hence, claims about Asia’s distinctive regionalismhas found increasing acknowledgement in IRT literature on multilateralismand regionalism (Johnston, 2003).

The extent of non-Western IR literature focusing on distinctive praxisremains a potentially rich source, although it is limited. And with few excep-tions, neither type of work has been attempted in Asia by Asians. Theoreticalwork by Asian scholars seems to be concerned mostly with testing WesternIRT on an Asian national or regional setting. Countless graduate dissertationsby Asian scholars in American universities testify to this trend. Hence, a keychallenge for IRT in Asia is to explore ‘how “local knowledge” can be turnedinto definitive frameworks for analyzing global processes’. Such type of work –in which Western local patterns having been turned into IRT concepts – iscommonplace in the West. Hence, the Concert of Europe has been the basisfor the literature ‘security regimes’, the European Union is a springboard ofthe theory of neo-liberal institutionalism, and the classical European balance


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of power system informs a good deal of theorizing about power transitions(now being applied to China’s rise), alliance dynamics, and ‘causes of war’ lit-erature. Hence, the question: ‘if European and North Atlantic regional politicscould be turned into international relations theory, why not Asian regionalpolitics?’ (Acharya, 2001).

Yet such work, if and when attempted by non-Westerners, would beg thequestion – another subject of heated debate at the Singapore Workshop: havethey been simply been co-opted into Western IRT, or whether they have insome sense transcended it, and made contributions that could be counted asdistinctively non-Western variants of originally Western ideas? One candidatehere would be Dependency theory (Frank, 1966; Smith, 1979). This was sup-posed to be a theory derived from the experience of Third-World countries.But this too became an over-generalized framework, in some way reinforcingthe neglect of the non-West in IRT by denying it any autonomy. Shamir Aminor Fernando Cardoso were followers of an essentially Western theory, but theydid not simply stop at theory testing (as happens in Korea, Taiwan, or Japan),but advanced some of their own ideas as well. A stronger claim for an indigen-ous theory is post colonialism. There is now a discernable IR variant in whichIndian scholars have played a prominent role in developing ‘subaltern studies’:Bhaba (1994) on subaltern studies, and Appadurai (1996) who writes on glo-balization. They are rebelling against orientalism and Western dominance, andhence are largely negative in their inspiration. But postcolonialism’s auton-omous nature can be overstated. Postcolonialism challenges Western domi-nance by pointing to its odious outcomes4; Gayatri Spivak criticized Foucaultfor treating ‘Europe as a self-enclosed and self-generating entity, by neglectingthe central role of imperialism in the very making of Europe’ (Ahmad, 1977,p. 374). Edward Said had made similar criticisms, accusing Foucault forneglecting not only European imperialism, but also resistance to imperialismoutside of Europe. Postcolonialism also seeks to dismantle relativism andbinary distinctions found in postmodern theory such as the distinctionbetween First World-Third World, North-South, center and periphery and‘reveal societies globally in the complex heterogeneity and contingency’(Dirlik, 1994, p. 329). These are useful contributions in the search for anon-Western IRT. But postcolonialism cannot be regarded as an authenticattempt to counter Western-centrism, because, as Arif Dirlik points out, it isbasically framed within cultural discourses originating from the West. Its aimhas been ‘to achieve an authentic globalisation of cultural discourses by theextension globally of the intellectual concerns and orientations originating atthe central sites of Euro-American cultural criticism. . .’ (Dirlik, 1994, p. 329).In other words, postcolonialism seeks ‘not to produce fresh knowledges about

4 The remainder of the paragraph draws from Acharya (2000).


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what was until recently called the Third-World but to re-structure existingbodies of knowledge into the poststructuralist paradigms and to occupy sitesof cultural production outside the Euro-American zones by globalizing con-cerns and orientations originating at the central sites of Euro-American cul-tural production’ (Ahmed, 1997, p. 368). It is also noteworthy thatpostcolonialism has not attracted wide adherence in Asia from scholarsoutside of South Asia, certainly not in China.

5 The structure of the special issue

The articles that follow cover China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. Eachhas a quite different story to tell, but each in its own way touches on the fol-lowing themes:

1. To survey the thinking about IRT in the country/area concerned takinginto account how it emerged and developed; how well organized and exten-sive it is; how it relates to general patterns of thinking in the social sciences;and what the main focus of its debates is.

2. To evaluate the impact of Western IRT as an approach to understand theIRs of the country/area concerned: in what ways does it clarify and giveinsight, and in what ways does it distort and obscure?

3. To survey and assess how thinking about IR in the country/area concernedhas been impacted by (and if relevant, impacted on) the Western debatesabout IRT.

4. If there is an indigenous, non-Western IRT in the country/area concerned,to discuss whether it has been excluded from the Western debates, and/orinsulated itself from them, and/or simply been insulated from them byfactors such as language barriers.

5. To examine the historical, political, and philosophical resources of thecountry/area concerned (e.g. key historical experiences; key politicalleaders; key ideological traditions; key philosophical thinkers), with anevaluation of how these do or do not play into the debates about IRT, andassess how they might form the basis of an indigenous non-Western IRT.How do the key Western IR concepts such as sovereignty, statehood, legiti-macy, balance of power, international law, justice, war, diplomacy, national-ism, private property, and great power fit or not fit with local traditionsand practices? Are there indigenous political or strategic traditions, beliefsand practices that may have no equivalent in the Western IRT, but whichdid and may continue to influence local political beliefs and practices rel-evant to IR?


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This introductory article has served to set up and frame those that follow.In the conclusion we return to some of the key questions raised here in thelight of what the intervening articles have revealed.

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CHAPTER 3

T H E L I BER A L V I EW OF T H E I N T ER NAT IONA L R EL AT IONS OF

ASI A

STEPHAN HAGGAR D

The liberal view of international relations rests on three foundational pillars; they address how domestic politics, institutions, and economic relations affect interna-tional relations. The first—and most basic—notes that the incidence of cooperation and conflict, peace and war, cannot be read from either the static distribution of power or changes in it. We have to understand national preferences: what countries seek in their relations with others (Moravcsik 1997). Nor, as realists have done, can interests simply be imputed, such as in generic claims that states seek power or balance against threats. Full understanding of national preferences demands theorizing and investi-gating how underlying social preferences are mediated by political institutions to gen-erate foreign policy. The liberal view of international politics is thus a bottom-up rather than top-down approach; it takes as its starting point the convergence and divergence of the politically defined foreign policy interests of the relevant parties.

The second pillar of the liberal view considers that cooperation is possible in interna-tional politics, that it can be institutionalized, and that institutions matter in sustaining cooperation and resolving disputes (Keohane 1984). Institutions are not just an epiphe-nomenal superstructure, as crude realism might contend. Rather, they can constrain actors. They do so not through a mythic supranational capacity to command—liber-als no less than realists understand the anarchic elements of the international order—but rather they have consequences because they yield efficiencies and benefits: in the negotiation process; in securing mutual policy adjustments; in providing information; in implementation; in dispute resolution. Moreover, a growing body of empirical evi-dence suggests that institutions not only facilitate functional cooperation, but they also have the broader effect of moderating conflict (Russett and Oneal 2001; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2003). States, particularly major powers, may choose to forgo the benefits of institutionalized cooperation in favor of more ad hoc arrangements, bilateralism,

46 THEORETICAL APPROACHES

or unilateralism. States also can—and do—renege on their obligations. But the choice to forgo the benefits of institutions comes at considerable cost, including to national reputations.

The third pillar of the liberal view of international politics concerns the conse-quences of interdependence, including but not limited to economic interdepen-dence. Firms, banks, NGOs, social and religious organizations, and individuals cross—and exchange funds, goods, and services across—borders because it is in their interest do so. There are gains from trade in terms of economic interdepen-dence. In principle, states possess the capacity to restrict cross-border movement or to pursue bellicose foreign policies that expose cross-border economic relation-ships to risk, but they must consider the international and domestic political and economic costs of doing so.

This outline of the liberal research program is couched in the language of cost and benefit because the approach is typically conflated with normative positions that advo-cate for international institutions or free trade, or with an idealism in international politics. However, as will be discussed, this is neither an exclusive nor defensible con-nection: peace and cooperation are a function of national preferences and political institutions, which may diverge as well as converge. Institutions may provide benefits, but they have to be negotiated among parties, and their depth, scope, and moderating effects will depend on the outcome of those negotiations. And while economic interde-pendence generates net benefits to countries, it also carries sovereignty and adjustment costs and can be manipulated to political ends. The liberal tradition, no less than the realist one, has its somber side, but it identifies different risks and opportunities from those emphasized by its realist counterpart (Haggard 2014).

This chapter applies these arguments to an understanding of the international rela-tions of Asia. The first section outlines a simple model of cooperation that is rooted in the convergence and divergence of interests. Although Asia has become increasingly economically open and democratic, it is by no means a community of democracies. Asia remains politically and economically heterogeneous in ways that are significant to prospects for order and peace; a review of empirical indicators of differences in eco-nomic and political development, economic policies and foreign policy alignments in Asia suggests a number of constraints on cooperation in the region. Regardless of these constraints, however, Asia’s diversity has not stymied regional cooperation: to the con-trary, institutions have proliferated.

In the presence of heterogeneity, however, there is a trade-off between the widen-ing of cooperation and institutions through inclusion of new members and deepening through more robust commitments. The Asian pattern of community building—the so-called ASEAN Way—has opted for inclusion over depth. This choice has influ-enced how decisions are made, the nature of commitments, and the extent of delega-tion to regional bodies. The regional institutional order is more fragmented than in Europe—characterized by multiple organizations with overlapping memberships—but also shallower, with fewer binding and enforceable commitments among the par-ties. However, the trend toward institutionalization and even legalization is clear, and

THE LIBERAL VIEW OF THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF ASIA 47

a number of strategies have been pursued to finesse the region’s diversity, including smaller convergence clubs.

The last section considers the well-known economic integration of the region and its political consequences (see in particular Part IIIB). In his contribution to this volume ( chapter 2), Michael Mastanduno offers the realist hypothesis that “economic coopera-tion is difficult in an uncertain security environment.” The liberal counter is that an uncertain security environment is costly when economic integration is deep. Not all countries in the region have been economically integrated with their neighbors: North Korea and Burma provide examples. Moreover, constraint—even powerful con-straint—is not the equivalent of a guarantee that conflict will be avoided. However, the moderating effect of economic interdependence on conflict remains a sustained—and testable (Goldsmith 2007)—hypothesis arising out of the liberal approach.

In sum, the liberal view generates a mixed set of expectations for the future of inter-national relations in Asia (Haggard 2014). Overall, the diversity of the region has not precluded increasing cooperation and institutionalization, but it has affected its form. Rather than the European pattern of relatively homogeneous countries converging around a common set of institutions, we find a more fragmented and overlapping insti-tutional structure, knit together by an increasingly complex economic division of labor that nonetheless acts as a constraint on foreign policies. However, some authoritarian or semiauthoritarian regimes and closed economies participate less regularly in regional institutions and cross-border exchanges and have been the source of significant ten-sions and even overt conflicts. The realists emphasize the uncertainties associated with changing power dynamics, most notably the rise of China. The liberal framework, by contrast, also perceives uncertainties in the region but places much greater weight on domestic political and economic change in the region, including but by no means lim-ited to China. In contrast to the great power focus of the realist canon, middle and even small countries—North Korea, Pakistan, Iran—can also pose large political challenges.

3.1. Preferences and Cooperation: The Challenge of Heterogeneity

If realists are interested in the conditions that give rise to conflict, and particularly overt conflict, the liberal intellectual tradition places greater emphasis on the flip side of the coin: the conditions under which cooperation emerges. Political scientists tend to model cooperation as a mutual adjustment of policies (Keohane 1984; Hawkins et al. 2006; Epstein and O’Halloran 2008). Economists consider centralized provision of public goods financed by contributions from the members (for example, Alesina, Angeloni, and Etro 2005). Yet in both approaches, countries cooperate because of mutual gains. Nations create and join institutions because they provide public goods from which their members benefit.


Yet at the same time, cooperation and membership in institutions entail sovereignty costs, as countries adjust existing policies in order to reap gains from cooperation. Cooperation, including institutionalized cooperation, is thus more likely to occur among countries with similar or contiguous preferences. Countries with similar pref-erences can cooperate or create institutions without having to move policies far from their stand-alone ideals. Those who want either more cooperation than others in the group (“high-demanders”) or less (“low-demanders”) pay high sovereignty costs from cooperation. High-demanders threaten incumbents with further policy adjustments if they are granted any decision-making influence after entry into existing or new institu-tions or agreements. The admission of low-demanders, by contrast, poses the opposite problem of diluting the gains of the organization. These conflicts between high- and low-demanders have been a perennial feature of the politics of regional institutions, including in Asia: are organizations doing too little or too much?

Table 3.1 follows Hix (2010) in outlining several components of the region’s hetero-geneity. It focuses on three overlapping groups of countries that have already institu-tionalized cooperation to some extent: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the more inclusive East Asian Summit; and the yet more inclusive APEC, which comprises not only Asian countries but a handful of Latin American ones as well. ASEAN is significant because of its historical influence on regional norms. APEC by contrast reflects the most expansive conception of the Asia-Pacific, although it omits India, a rising power that is a member of the EAS (see also chapter 34). The table com-pares the Europe of the EU with these three Asian groupings using indicators designed to capture differences in economic and political development; economic policy; and international alignments. The table reports mean values on the indicators and their standard deviation as an indicator of heterogeneity.

Europe is very much richer on average than any of the Asian groupings, although in terms of level of development, the incorporation of the Southern and Eastern European countries has resulted in a more diverse union. However, the differences between devel-oped and developing countries are even more evident in all of the Asian groupings. This diversity has been a consistent source of political differences within the region over the policy commitments governments can be expected to take on. Noteworthy examples include expectations with respect to the liberalization of trade and commit-ments with respect to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Nor have these issues arisen with respect to small developing countries only; they have become significant points of contention with India and China as well.

If we look at domestic political structures we see even greater variation. The EU is made up entirely of democracies (indeed, it is a prerequisite for membership). The evo-lution of a supranational political structure in Europe rests in no small measure on this underlying political convergence. EU institutions have also taken a democratic form, including a European Parliament, and have even granted standing to individuals, for example with respect to human rights issues before the European Court of Justice (compare with Asia, chapter 30).

Tabl

e 3.

1 Pr

efer

ence

Het

erog

enei

ty in

the

Asia

-Pac

ific

Euro

pe

mea

n

Euro

pe

stan

dard

de

viat

ion

ASEA

N

mea

n

ASEA

N

stan

dard

de

viat

ion

EAS

mea

n

EAS

stan

dard

de

viat

ion

APEC

mea

n

APEC

st

anda

rd

devi

atio

n

Econ

omic

and

Pol

itica

l Dev

elop

men

t

GD

P pe

r cap

ita31

,189

20,7

0410

,472

15,18

817

,894

18,7

3620

,364

18,0

33Po

lity

IV9.

60.

70.

76.

33.

56.

75.

95.

5

Econ

omic

Pol

icy

and

Pref

eren

ces

Econ

omic

Fre

edom

: Ove

rall

Inde

x67

.70

6.33

58.9

813

.59

63.4

514

.66

69.3

213

.06

Trad

e an

d In

vest

men

t Fre

edom

81.9

15.

8758

.24

12.1

060

.38

14.0

466

.62

13.3

4

Inte

rnat

iona

l Alig

nmen

tsU

NG

A vo

ting

with

US

0.23

0.06

−0.

590.

07–0

.39

0.36

−0.

270.

42

Sour

ces:

GD

P pe

r cap

ita, W

orld

Ban

k 20

10; P

olity

IV (−

10 le

ast D

emoc

ratic

to +

10 m

ost D

emoc

ratic

), M

arsh

all a

nd C

ole

2011

; Eco

nom

ic

Free

dom

(0 le

ast f

ree

to 1

00 m

ost f

ree)

, Her

itage

Fou

ndat

ion

2011

; UN

vot

ing

scor

es (−

1 ne

ver v

otes

with

the

US

to +

1 al

way

s vo

tes

with

the

US)

, Gar

tzke

201

1.

Not

es: E

U C

ount

ries:

Ger

man

y, F

ranc

e, U

K, It

aly,

Spa

in, P

olan

d, R

oman

ia, N

ethe

rland

s, G

reec

e, P

ortu

gal,

Belg

ium

, Cze

ch R

epub

lic,

Hun

gary

, Sw

eden

, Aus

tria

, Bul

garia

, Den

mar

k, S

lova

kia,

Fin

land

, Ire

land

, Lith

uani

a, L

atvi

a, S

love

nia,

Est

onia

, Cyp

rus,

Lux

embo

urg,

Mal

ta.

ASEA

N C

ount

ries:

Bru

nei,

Cam

bodi

a, In

done

sia,

Lao

s, M

alay

sia,

Mya

nmar

, Phi

lippi

nes,

Sin

gapo

re, T

haila

nd, V

ietn

am. E

AS C

ount

ries

(aft

er

2010

): Au

stra

lia, B

rune

i, Ca

mbo

dia,

Chi

na, I

ndia

, Ind

ones

ia, J

apan

, Lao

s, M

alay

sia,

Mya

nmar

, New

Zea

land

, Phi

lippi

nes,

Sin

gapo

re, S

outh

Kor

ea,

Thai

land

, Vie

tnam

, Uni

ted

Stat

es, R

ussi

a. A

PEC

Coun

trie

s: A

ustr

alia

, Bru

nei,

Cana

da, C

hile

, Chi

na, H

ong

Kong

, Ind

ones

ia, J

apan

, Sou

th K

orea

, M

exic

o, M

alay

sia,

New

Zea

land

, Pap

ua N

ew G

uine

a, P

eru,

Phi

lippi

nes,

Rus

sia,

Sin

gapo

re, T

aiw

an, T

haila

nd, U

nite

d St

ates

, Vie

tnam

.


APEC has a mean score on regime type that is just below the standard threshold for democratic rule (6 on the Polity scale from −10 to +10). This fact alone is a striking indicator of the extent of political change in the region. But the standard deviation of regime type in APEC is roughly equal to the mean. In ASEAN, the extraordinary polit-ical diversity yields a mean score of approximately zero, squarely in authoritarian terri-tory. If we turn our gaze further west, to South and particularly Central Asia, political diversity becomes even more marked. Iran and the former Soviet Central Asian repub-lics are authoritarian or semiauthoritarian in form. Pakistan has oscillated between authoritarian and democratic rule throughout its entire history and at this point in time, Afghanistan can only be described as a failed state.

Differences in regime type, and the social coalitions that support regimes of differ-ent types (Solingen 1998), not only raise questions about the prospects for cooperation and the formation of international institutions. Political differences of this sort and magnitude also raise the more fundamental issue of the prospects for peace. One of the more robust findings in the liberal tradition of international politics is the hypothesis of a democratic peace. Democracies do not fight one another. However, they do go to war against authoritarian adversaries, suggesting that regional heterogeneity in regime type increases the risk of conflict (for example, Russett and Oneal 2001). Although the empirical findings with respect to transitional regimes are more mixed (Narang and Nelson 2009; Lind 2011 on Asia), liberalizing polities and new democracies may also be particularly vulnerable to nationalist appeals and bellicose foreign policies (Mansfield and Snyder 2005).

The concerns about the effects of regime type on the prospects for peace have been raised regarding Chinese foreign policy and are of obvious relevance to any under-standing of North Korea and Iran as well. Moreover, the concern that liberalization will drive nationalist or antiforeign sentiment has explicitly been raised with respect to China (Shirk 2007) and is a leitmotif of US concern with respect to Pakistan as well.

Indicators of economic policy and preferences yield some surprises, reflecting the substantial reforms that have taken place across the region in the postwar period. An aggregate measure of “economic freedom” constructed by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal has a strong libertarian foundation, capturing property rights, freedom of movement for labor, capital, and goods—including trade and investment—as well as measures of the fiscal burden and price stability. Because of the presence of advanced industrial states and countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore, the mean value of this indicator for the pan-Pacific APEC grouping is not that much different from Europe, where larger governments and labor market policies depress scores. However, when we isolate two dimensions of the index dealing with economic open-ness—trade and investment freedom—we see that Europe has a much higher mean score and reveals much lower variance than any of the Asian groupings (see chapters 14 and 17). Although economic reforms have dramatically shifted the political economy of the region, differences in foreign economic policy have placed limits on encompassing economic agreements, such as the proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP).


Finally, it is important to underscore that the liberal approach to world politics does not ignore the international relations of states; it differs from realism primarily in its greater attention to their preferences. The affinity score reported in table 3.1 captures the extent to which the countries in the region vote with the United States in the UN General Assembly, a simple proxy of foreign policy alignment. The theoretical range for any country is from –1 (never voting with the United States) to +1 (always voting with the United Stats); the scores are simply averaged across the regional memberships. In all three of the Asian regional groupings, the affinity score with the United States is negative although once again portraying high variance. Cooperation and institutional development in the region still face the headwinds of an array of foreign policy differ-ences, including among the major powers.

In sum, the liberal view of international politics traces the ultimate source of cooper-ation, the formation of institutions and their design to convergence of preferences and even of domestic institutions among countries. Europe is by no means homogeneous, but on almost all salient dimensions identified, the diversity of Asia is greater: with respect to level of development and economic model. These differences have placed limits on the ability to converge around common approaches to the liberalization of trade and investment or the development of common regulatory standards.

The region is also characterized by highly diverse political structures, ranging from authoritarian cases such as North Korea and China through intermediate regimes, such as Singapore and Malaysia, to new democracies and well-established ones. These political differences not only circumscribe the extent to which governments are willing to cooperate and delegate to international institutions but also raise more fundamental questions about the prospects for peace.

3.2. International Institutions in the Asia-Pacific

Despite these types of differences, a central claim of the liberal approach to interna-tional relations is that cooperation among heterogeneous states is still possible, that it can be institutionalized, and that institutions matter in sustaining cooperation and reducing conflict. The first two of these claims may seem anodyne, but it is important to remember that pessimism about institutional development in the Asia-Pacific has been a leitmotif of the literature on the region for years. The explanations for the stylized fact of underinstitutionalization range from factors favored by constructivists—culture (Acharya 2000, 2009), historical animosities and nationalism (Rozman 2004; Shin and Sneider 2007)—to those deriving from the realist canon, such as the legacies of the Cold War (Ikenberry and Moon 2008; Aggarwal and Koo 2008) and geostrategic rivalries among the major powers (Grieco 1997; Green and Gill 2009). Liberal arguments have even been turned against themselves. Despite claims that economic interdependence


should generate demands for institutional deepening, Katzenstein (2005) has pointed out that market integration and dense cross-border production networks in Asia may have mitigated pressures for the creation of regional multilateral institutions.

Despite this pessimism, institutions have in fact mushroomed in the Asia-Pacific since the end of the Cold War (see chapters 34 and 36). Gorbachev’s Vladivostock speech of 1986 and the gradual embrace of multilateralism on the part of China since the mid-1990s (Goldstein 2005) had a profound impact on the prospects for building regional institutions that cut across Cold War divides. We can now identify a number of major institutional complexes centered in East Asia, setting aside for the moment the proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs), to which I return in the next sec-tion: the ASEAN proper, including the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC); the ASEAN+3 (APT) and associated institu-tions such as the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI); the Trilateral Summits among China, Japan and Korea that spun out of the ASEAN+3 processes; the East Asian Summit; and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Following a somewhat different insti-tutional trajectory from these East Asian and Asia-Pacific groupings are the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which now has eight members.1

The last claim outlined above—that institutions matter for enhancing cooperation and limiting conflict—is more contentious. Despite the proliferation of formal orga-nizations, these institutions appear “shallow” or “thin,” and in several senses (Kahler 2001; Haggard 2013a; Pekkanen 2013):

• Institutionsoperateonthebasisofconsensusdecision-makingproceduresthatpush toward modest “lowest common denominator” agreements.

• Commitmentsarenonbinding,voluntary,andinsomecasessimplyimprecise.Asa result, they are not credible, and it is difficult for adjudication and third-party enforcement to evolve.

• Theextentofdelegationtostandinginternationalsecretariatsorbureaucraciesislimited.

• Asa result, theapparentlydense institutional environment ispartly informal,does not always constrain actors in a meaningful way, and does not provide the foundation for a more rule-governed or peaceful regional order.

In this section, I draw on a wide-ranging literature on the design of international institutions (Goldstein et al. 2000; Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal 2003; Epstein and O’Halloran 2008; Vaubel 2006; Bradley and Kelly 2008: Pekkanen 2013) to assess these claims and demonstrate their limitations. Preference heterogeneity and consensus decision-making have limited the nature of commitments and the extent of delega-tion, but they have also accommodated the interests of a wider array of parties. I also consider some dynamic aspects of the institutional landscape, including conver-gence clubs and the prospects for “organizational cascades”; circumstances in which


competing institutions generate pressures for more cooperation. Moreover, I underline a new strand of the “commercial peace” literature that highlights the role that overlap-ping institutional memberships appear to play in dampening conflict.

3.2.1. Decision-Making Rules, Commitments, and Delegation

As I noted above, there is a clear trade-off between the breadth of interests represented in regional institutions and their ability to forge substantive agreements, in short between widening and deepening. The large institutional complexes that we identified above have generally opted for more inclusive and diverse memberships, and this has of necessity affected decision-making rules.

The most inclusive intergovernmental voting rule is a requirement for unanimity or consensus; such consensus is often considered a defining feature of the “ASEAN Way,” and one that has gradually been extended to other institutions in the region. Former ASEAN secretary-general Severino (2006, 34) points out that this conception of ASEAN decision-making misrepresents what actually happens in the organization:

Consensus on a proposal is reached when enough members support it—six, seven, eight or nine, no document specifies how many—even when one or more have mis-givings about it, but do not feel strongly enough about the issue to block action on it. Not all need to agree explicitly. A consensus is blocked only when one or more members perceive the proposal to be sufficiently injurious to their national interests for them to oppose it outright.

Despite this important nuance, it is clear that until some adjustments in the ASEAN Charter (2007), the “ASEAN Way” was strongly intergovernmental and emphasized consensus decision-making. Acharya (2009) shows how these rules reflected very par-ticular concerns about sovereignty costs among newly independent countries. But these procedures also reflected substantial heterogeneity within ASEAN itself, a prob-lem that only became more acute with the accession of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma, as table 3.1 shows clearly (Ravenhill 2007; Jones and Smith 2007).

Yet the depth of cooperation was not simply bounded by consensus decision-making; commitments in some organizations have also tended to be nonbinding and impre-cise (Pekkanen 2013). Under the so-called Kuching Consensus (1990), for example, ASEAN agreed to the formation of APEC only if the organization would not engage in formal negotiations that would lead to binding commitments on its members. The Bogor Declaration (1994) and the Osaka Action Agenda (1995) sought to finesse these constraints by permitting voluntary action toward the goal of “free and open trade and investment.” But countries simply offered what they were already doing as commitments.

There is limited evidence of an effort to move beyond consensus decision-making. The most interesting effort in this direction is the case of the multilateralization of the Chiang Mai Initiative, a financial cooperation scheme that involves weighted


voting: China, Japan, and Korea have preponderant influence (Grimes 2009 and chapter 15 in this volume; Henning 2009). However, such weighted voting schemes are still decidedly intergovernmental and there have been no moves toward direct voter input through the creation of regional parliaments. The potential for a more active NGO role in international institutions is similarly bounded. If there is a democratic deficit in Europe, there is a yawning chasm in Asia (Hix 2010). The persistence of authoritarian rule in a number of significant countries in the region, including but by no means limited to China, is likely to block the evolution of direct voter or NGO rep-resentation at the multilateral level.

The combination of consensus decision-making rules, imprecise commitments, and informality has naturally limited the extent of delegation in the region. The secretari-ats of the various institutional complexes I have outlined above are generally weak. East Asian institutions have undertaken considerable delegation for the purposes of “research, advice and agenda-setting,” but it is precisely for this reason that regional institutions such as APEC are frequently derided as mere talk shops. Moreover, even high-powered advisory bodies often do little more than recreate the heterogeneity among the princi-pals. The most famous regional example of this sort was the well-known disagreements among APEC’s Eminent Persons Group over the concept of “open regionalism.”2

Consensus decision-making and imprecise rules have also limited dispute settlement procedures. ASEAN’s Protocol on the Enhanced Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM, 2004), for example, appeared to advance a more binding DSM process. But closer inspec-tion reveals that the Senior Economic Officials Meeting (SEOM)—a key intergovern-mental body—plays a central role in the process, and decision-making on that body has tended to be consensual. Not surprisingly, the process has received little use. Although there have been marginal steps to strengthen monitoring and surveillance through so-called peer review, such procedures are a long way from more formal legalization.

3.2.2. Finessing Preference Heterogeneity: Convergence Clubs, Institutional Cascades, and the Institutional Commercial Peace

In sum, while institutions have proliferated in the region, intensive cooperation in the major institutional complexes has been limited by consensus decision-making struc-tures, nonbinding and imprecise commitments, and the limited willingness to delegate to regional bodies. Given this stylized fact, isn’t it correct—as realists have concluded—to discount the effects of institutions on the future of the regional order?

The answer is no, and for three reasons: the formation of convergence clubs; the effects of competing institutions on cooperation; and the broader effects that institu-tional memberships appear to have, quite apart from the functional cooperation they are designed to effect.

First, one solution to the preference heterogeneity and lowest-common-denominator problems is to step out of organizations with wider memberships and forge overlapping


agreements among countries whose preferences are more closely aligned (also see chapter 39). Such convergence clubs would be characterized not only by higher levels of cooperation but more robust institutional arrangements as well. Just such a pro-cess of institutional proliferation—and fragmentation—has occurred not only in the well-documented explosion of free trade agreements in the region (Dent 2006; Aggarwal and Urata 2006; Hufbauer and Schott 2007; Ravenhill 2009) but in the growth of functional institutions as well (Pekkanen 2013).3

Given weak multilateral disciplines on the formation of FTAs, such clubs need not converge on higher levels of cooperation. For example, Japan has had ongoing difficul-ties committing to FTAs because of political constraints with respect to agriculture and has pursued more limited “economic cooperation agreements.” China seems con-tent to exploit its market position to create its own hub-and-spoke system of agree-ments, most notably with ASEAN. Nor is it plausible that institutions that are incapable of generating common agendas and institutions in the first place will be able easily to reconcile or incorporate these divergent clubs once they have formed.

However, against this more cynical story is a second possibility of wider signifi-cance: that the competing institutions that have emerged in the region might in fact press countries toward deeper cooperation (Baldwin 1997; Suominen 2009). This might occur as the benefits of membership lead states to greater cooperation or if the forma-tion of the convergence club lowers the welfare of nonmembers through discrimina-tion. In 2011, a group of nine countries coalesced around a potential FTA with an open accession clause, the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership or TPP, and began negotiations on a range of issues that would make it the deepest multilateral agree-ment in the region.4 In line with the cascade model of competing institutions, the TPP quickly attracted interest on the part of major countries that were outside the initial negotiations, including Mexico, Canada, and Japan. A similar process could be traced with respect to India’s growing interest in institutions such as the EAS that were ini-tially confined to East and Southeast Asia.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that the loose forms of cooperation that have evolved in the region have the offsetting benefit of accommodating broad and hetero-geneous memberships. Ironically, this has long been the justification for the “ASEAN Way” (Acharya 2009). But in the last decade, the “commercial institutional peace” hypothesis has gained empirical support (Mansfield and Pevehouse 2003; Bearce 2003). By deepening economic integration—which I take up in the next section—by increasing information, and by providing opportunities for high-level leaders to meet, regional commercial institutions may have the broader effect of reducing overt conflict (Bearce 2003).

In addition, the major powers in the region—including China—are also linked through multilateral institutions that extend beyond the region but nonetheless have at least some of the constraining effects outlined here (Foot and Walter 2011). Indeed, part of the grand strategy of the United States has long been to seek such institutional incor-poration as a means of inducing compliance with existing norms—as in the WTO—and as a means of increasing transparency and socializing entrants to existing norms.


As Erik Voeten (2010) shows in an important empirical paper, despite the fact that regional dispute settlement and judicial process are relatively weak, Asian states are in fact no less likely than countries from other regions to use international dispute settle-ment and judicial processes. Asian institutions—whatever their restraining effect—are not the only piece of the institutionalist story.

3.3. The Commercial Peace: Economic Interdependence and Cooperation in

the Asia-Pacific

Realists live largely in a world of states, and tend to discount the effects of economic integration. However, most—although not all (Barbieri 1996)—empirical studies find an inverse relationship between interdependence and war (Russett and Oneal 2001 for a summary). As with the democratic peace, the reasons for the commercial peace are subject to dispute. But if anything, the evolving literature has only expanded the list of mechanisms through which economic interdependence might constrain overt conflict. Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer (2001) pointed out that in addition to the simple opportunity costs of forgoing trade, interdependence may also allow states credibly to signal their resolve, thus deterring conflict, because of the costliness of breaking com-mercial ties. Initial work testing the commercial peace focused on trade, but the find-ings have now been deepened by attention to financial flows as well. Indeed, because of the rapidity with which financial markets move, financial flows may be an even greater constraint on governments than trade flows. At a deeper, sociological level interdependence can moderate foreign policy behavior and even preferences through the creation of interest groups with stakes in existing political-economic relationships (Solingen 1998).

Just like arguments about preferences and institutions, these economic accounts need to be approached with appropriate caution. One fear is that economic develop-ments could generate a new hierarchy or even hegemony in the region. During the 1980s, concern centered on the prospect that Japan would come to sit at the center of a hierarchically organized East Asian bloc, with adverse implications for both the United States and other countries in the region. Quite similar arguments have resur-faced around the tremendous pull exerted by the China market. Growing intra-Asian integration and a new center of economic gravity in China could produce the dreaded bandwagoning that realists fear, as weaker, dependent trading partners accommodate China’s economic and strategic interests. Such developments could culminate in a regional economy and institutions in which the United States and other countries out-side the region would face discrimination or even exclusion.

Even if these larger structural patterns were not to arise, deepening economic integration with China could nonetheless provide it with the basis for leverage.


Developments across the Taiwan Strait are the most obvious concern in this regard—a process of quiet absorption—but they extend to China’s relationship with South Korea and Southeast and Central Asia as well.

The “flying geese” history of the regional division in fact masks a much more cross-cutting pattern of economic relationships, as can be seen by the timing and nature of countries’ incorporation into the regional division of labor. Japan reached the advanced country frontier in the middle of the postwar era through self-conscious policies of technological catch-up, a large domestic market, and exports targeted ini-tially at the United States. Japan’s export-oriented success was followed by a second tier of newly industrializing countries (NICs)—Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea—which began their turn toward export-oriented industrialization in the 1960s, moving into sectors that Japan had shed and also relying not only on the US market but on Japanese and American foreign investment as well. A third group of later indus-trializers including the major Southeast Asian countries of Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia began to emulate the first generation of NICs in the 1970s, and proved even more dependent on insertion into the networks created by Japanese, American, European, Korean, Taiwanese, and other overseas Chinese multinational corporations. They too heavily exported to the United States.

The fourth group to enter included China and Southeast Asia’s late-late developers, par-ticularly Vietnam. China was large enough that it could have deepened its inward-looking, dirigiste strategy. Since the late 1980s the trend toward a deeper incorporation into inter-national trade and investment networks is unambiguous. While the US market is pivotal to this strategy, as with its predecessors, China is even more profoundly enmeshed with actors outside of the region because of the growing significance of two-way capital flows. On the one hand, China’s export-oriented success is largely dependent on the operations of foreign firms. On the other hand, the large trade surpluses China runs have made it a significant creditor to the United States and other deficit countries. Although there is ongoing debate about the leverage these financial ties might yield to China, the consen-sus is that China is as constrained by the sheer magnitude of its Treasury holdings as the United States is, with precious little way that it could manipulate or even extricate itself from its codependence without catastrophic losses of its own (Drezner 2009).

In short, realists cannot have it both ways; if you argue that China’s growing eco-nomic weight provides it leverage vis-à-vis its smaller trading partners, you must also acknowledge the constraints that China faces from its reliance on foreign markets for capital, technology, and key commodities—such as oil and grain—that go to the very heart of the socialist social compact. Asia is becoming more integrated with itself, but is hardly economically self-contained, nor do Asian countries want it to be. As a matter of both market outcomes and strategic choice, most major Asian trading states rely as heavily on the United States and Europe as they do on other Asian countries, including China. At the micro level, the growing density of cross-border production networks (CPNs), as Ravenhill’s chapter 18 in this volume shows, makes it difficult to imagine the emergence of closed or discriminatory regional institutions or an enduring capacity for China to manipulate investment and trade relations for strategic ends.


3.4. Conclusion: The Dynamic Nature of Preferences

The liberal approach advanced here has only implicitly been pitted against its realist rival; by way of conclusion, it is worth bringing some of the differences into sharper focus. Balance-of-power approaches to the region have highlighted shifting capabili-ties and multipolarity as sources of concern. But this family of approaches remains divided on both what to expect from different power configurations and even what the balance of power in the region is. The central challenge to realism from the liberal approach is in its failure to provide a convincing theory of actors’ preferences or inten-tions. For realists, preferences are derived from capabilities and international struc-ture. For liberals, this view of the world is puzzling on its face. How could we possibly believe that the rise of the United States, Meiji Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and post-Mao China would have the same effects on world order in any but the most banal or general way? The predictions derived from models considering both polarity and power transitions hinge crucially on whether rising powers are “revisionist” and in what particular way (Chan 2008).

In bringing these issues of domestic politics to the surface the liberal approach to international politics is by no means a tale of sweetness and light (Haggard 2014). Asia remains a highly heterogeneous region, and in ways that not only place limits on the extent of cooperation but suggest continuing risk of conflict and even war. Whether we believe the greatest risks arise from differences in regime type—as the democratic peace literature has argued—or in coalitional dynamics, as the important work of Etel Solingen (1998) has argued, there are clearly important dyads in the region that remain at risk. These are by no means limited to the major powers, such as China’s relation-ships with the United States and Japan, but include the India-Pakistan relationship and the tensions that Iran and North Korea—middling powers at best—generate with their neighbors. While realists fret about shifts in the balance of power, liberals worry about the path of domestic politics, and not only in China but also in smaller authoritarian regimes that threaten the peace.

Against the risks associated with the region’s diversity stand two offsetting tenden-cies: institutions and economic interdependence. Regional heterogeneity has affected patterns of cooperation in the region, to be sure. Institutions are governed by consen-sus intergovernmental decision-making. Binding commitments have been limited and monitoring and adjudicative functions correspondingly weak. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a willingness to delegate more substantial authority to secretariats or other monitoring and dispute settlement bodies.

Yet despite this diversity, important—indeed epochal—changes have occurred in the foreign and domestic policies of Russia, China, and India over the last three decades. These domestic changes have resulted in a much greater commitment to multilateral institutions than was previously imaginable. The stylized fact of an


underinstitutionalized Asia is no longer tenable. We now have not only competing, and overlapping, institutions but increased participation by major regional actors in global multilateral institutions as well. We see the formation of convergence clubs and the possibility of institutional cascades that push toward deeper forms of cooperation.

Finally, there are sound theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that economic integration has a restraining effect on the foreign policy behavior of states. Economic integration creates its own conflicts, and states will attempt to manipulate these ties to their advantage. And this strand of liberal theory—like the democratic peace—has its somber side, noting the weak economic integration of countries like North Korea, Burma, and a number of the Central Asian states. But the trajectory of national policies across the region suggests that there is little risk that Asia might retreat into a closed economic bloc. Economic integration is increasing in Asia, but that includes a substan-tial widening of relations as reform spreads and South Asia is drawn into the regional dynamic.

These developments underscore a crucial analytic point. Unlike the static imputed preferences of the realist world, preferences in the liberal view are by no means fixed or given by changing power position alone. As interests evolve, the prospects for coop-eration may brighten or dim. Given these theoretical assumptions, it is incumbent on democracies to fashion foreign policies that do not generate the backlash coalitions that liberals most fear. Any understanding of these dynamics can only derive from combin-ing the insights of international relations, comparative politics, and economics. This combination is perhaps the core theoretical contribution of the liberal approach.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to participants in three earlier projects who advanced my thinking on these issues. Byung-Kook Kim urged me to reflect on the application of IR theory to Northeast Asia in Haggard 2004. A large project on institutions in the Asia-Pacific directed by Barry Eichengreen resulted in Haggard 2013, with helpful comments from Giovanni Capannelli, Jenny Corbett, Richard Feinberg, Stuart Harris, Simon Hix, Miles Kahler, Andrew MacIntyre, T. J. Pempel, Eric Voeten, and the late Hadi Soesastro. An invitation to the Australian National University resulted in my first effort to outline the idea of “liberal pessimism” (Haggard 2014). The editors of this vol-ume, Saadia Pekkanen, John Ravenhill, and Rosemary Foot, pushed me to move from a narrow institutionalist perspective to the wider liberal approach.

Notes

1. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. 2. The differences centered on the American representative’s preference for a more standard

FTA rather than the concept of “open regionalism,” under which concessions offered


under the APEC process would be extended unilaterally beyond the region on an MFN basis.

3. As of this writing the United States has signed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement, as well as bilateral agreements with Australia, Singapore, and Korea. China has signed an FTA with ASEAN as well as eight bilateral agreements, with another five under negotiation. In addition to an “economic partnership agreement” with ASEAN, Japan has signed eleven bilateral agreements in the region—including one with India—with two more (Korea and Australia) under negotiation. Even India, long known for its cautious trade policy, was negotiating agree-ments with ASEAN.

4. Initially created by the most liberal states in the region—Singapore, Chile, and New Zealand—the framework agreement of November 2011 was signed by Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States.

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REVIEW ESSAY

East Asia and international relationstheory

Masaru Kohno

School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University,Nishi-Waseda, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8050, JapanE-mail: [email protected]

David Kang, (2007) China Rising: Peace, Power, and Orderin East Asia, New York: Columbia University Press.

David Kang, (2010) East Asia before the West: FiveCenturies of Trade and Tribute, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Shogo Suzuki, (2011) Civilization and Empire: China andJapan’s Encounter with European International Society,London: Routledge.

Wang Yuan-kang, (2011) Harmony and War: ConfucianCulture and Chinese Power Politics, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Vol. 14 No. 1© The author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press in association with the

Japan Association of International Relations; all rights reserved.For permissions, please email: [email protected]

International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Volume 14 (2014) 179–190doi:10.1093/irap/lct024 Advance Access published on 30 December 2013

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1 Introduction

East Asia now occupies a prominent place in the study of internationalrelations (IR). This, of course, does not mean that IR scholarship in thepast failed to pay due attention to East Asia. Wars, trade, and internation-al integration in this region have been the subject of analysis in countlessbooks and scholarly articles. However, the renewed interest in this region isnot so much empirically driven (to increase East Asian coverage in the lit-erature) as before but rather represents a theoretical inquiry pertinent tothe intellectual underpinning of the scholarship itself. Today, some expertsof the region harshly criticize the ‘euro-centric’ bias of existing IR studyand seek to provide alternative conceptions based on the East Asian ex-perience.1 In response, other scholars have advanced views less provocativebut more nuanced about the originality of East Asia. And, there are stillothers who flatly reject the connotation that the logic of East Asian inter-national relations is inherently different from that elsewhere. Thus, adiverse set of perspectives has been laid out on the table, but their strengthsand shortcomings are yet to be evaluated systematically.

The present article offers a critical review of this emerging debate onEast Asia. I first examine some of the notable works published recently inthe field, distinguishing their orientations in relation to the mainstream IRtheories and highlighting the key differences in their empirical claims. Mypurpose here is not to recap each of the listed works in detail but to mapout their characteristics in a contrasted way. After thus clarifying the keyparameters of the debate, I proceed to argue that none of the perspectivescurrently available in the debate (nor, hence, the debate itself as it stands)addresses the definitive theoretical lesson that IR scholarship should drawfrom the East Asian experience. In my view, that lesson has to do with thequestion of the system–unit relation in international relations, on whichthe latter part of this article is devoted to elaborate.

2 Four perspectives

The contemporary world is based on a set of formal and informal organiz-ing frameworks, including state sovereignty, norms of diplomacy and

1 For a broad survey of possible ‘non-Western’ IR theories, see the special edition of thisJournal some issues ago, which was also later published as a collected volume (Acharya andBuzan, 2010).

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warfare, and institutions for capitalism and market economy, all of whichwe take for granted today. These frameworks originally evolved in Europe,and it was not until the 19th century that East Asia became absorbed intothem. The process of this absorption took place gradually but forcefully,as the magnificent waves of Western industrial and imperial expansionreached the shores of East Asian countries one after another. Dramaticevents such as the Opium Wars, the Meiji Restoration, and the decay andsubsequent collapse of the Qing dynasty all illustrate how overpoweringthese waves were.

In the traditional narratives on East Asia, this ‘encounter with the West’was told as a story of great historical discontinuity.2 The circulated claimwas that pre-modern East Asia itself was a ‘world’ and had a distinct inter-national system, before it was ousted by the modern European alternative.Typically, this original system was described as a system of hierarchywhere China, with its geopolitical and economic advantages, formed tribu-tary relations with other states in return for their security guarantee.Further, according to these traditional accounts, this system sustained re-gional stability for a remarkably long period, in part because of the influ-ence of Confucianism, which promoted the ideas of harmony, order, andnonviolence. Certainly, in the pre-modern era, Confucian teaching wasprevalent throughout the region, not only in China but also in the neigh-boring states including its chief rival, Japan. Hence, to the extent that theyattributed the absence/infrequency of major wars to the hierarchical struc-ture of the regional society and the ideational force of Confucianism, thesenarratives advanced a kind of constructivist explanation for East Asianinternational relations, highlighting the unique organizing principles thathad long regulated state-to-state interactions in this region.

In a series of provocative studies, including the two books under reviewin this article, David Kang tries to revive these traditional accounts of EastAsia. In the earlier work of the two, China Rising, which is primarily con-cerned with the present-day situation, Kang begins by emphasizing thatwhile China has recently emerged as a major power, its rise has not desta-bilized the region. According to Kang, the neighboring states ‘are not bal-ancing China’ but rather ‘accommodating it’, a behavioral pattern that

2 The classic views summarized here are found most notably in the writings of JohnK. Fairbank and his collaborators. See, for example, Fairbank (1968) and Fairbank andKierman (1974).

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‘contradicts much conventional international relations theory’. Kang’sown explanation for this pattern, then, turns to constructivism, highlight-ing the importance of identity:

Identity is also central in framing how regional states interpret China’srise. East Asian states view China’s reemergence as the gravitationalcenter of East Asia as natural. China has a long history of being thedominant state in East Asia… Thus, to East Asian observers and otherstates, the likelihood that China will seek territorial expansion or useforce against them seems low. Most see China as desiring stability andpeaceful relations with its neighbors (pp.4–5).

Kang’s conviction of China’s pacifism is derived from his understanding ofthe history of East Asia, which is revealed more fully in his second book,East Asia before the West. In this sequel, Kang engages in a long-rangesurvey of trade and conflict in this region from the 14th to 19th centuriesand elaborates on attributes like ‘hierarchy’, ‘Confucian society’, and‘tribute system’ as the distinct characteristics of the pre-modern East Asiansystem. To be fair, as a historical documentation, Kang offers hardly any-thing new in this book, as he relies mostly on secondary sources. Yet, thelargest merit of the book perhaps lies in his presentation of East Asia in aclear contrast with the European ‘Westphalian’ system that ‘emphasizes aformal equality between states and balance-of-power politics’ (p. 2). It isthrough such a contrast that he pursues his ambitious aim of questioningthe euro-centric bias of the existing IR literature. For Kang, the East Asianinternational system presents an obvious alternative model, ‘both as a nor-mative goal and as an underlying and enduring reality’ (p. 3).

Thus, Kang’s work can be placed unmistakably in a direct lineage ofthose traditional accounts described earlier. It should be noted, however,that Kang’s position differs from those traditionalists’ on one importantscore. As indicated, the earlier classic writings on East Asia were premisedon the notion of historical discontinuity, suggesting that its encounter withthe West had caused an irreversible change in the organizing principles ofthe regional international relations. By contrast, Kang believes that what-ever mechanism had sustained its pre-modern order in this region was nottotally obliterated, but somehow survived for all these years. What Kangoffers, then, is a story of historical continuity: East Asia constituted a dif-ferent world before and, despite the interruption of Western universalism,it still constitutes a different world today.

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The next book on the review list, Shogo Suzuki’s Civilization andEmpire, is an in-depth historical study that offers an entirely original re-interpretation of East Asia’s encounter with the West. Couched in theEnglish School tradition of IR theories, and drawing on vast Chinese andJapanese primary sources, Suzuki documents how East Asia generally, andChina and Japan in particular, were socialized into the European‘International Society’ in the late 19th century. Suzuki’s book thus adds athird perspective to the current debate on East Asian international rela-tions. Certainly, to the extent that he recognizes East Asia’s integrationinto the Western world, his view advances a story of historical discontinu-ity and is thus consistent with those traditional narratives (and inconsistentwith Kang’s account). But, unlike the traditionalists who thought that thisintegration was brought about by the material superiority of the West,Suzuki presents a far more nuanced argument, pointing to the ideationalfactor associated with the then-prevailing concept of ‘standard of civiliza-tion’ as the key determinant of China’s and Japan’s engagement with theworld. According to Suzuki, elites in these two countries understood cor-rectly the complexity of this concept, and they ultimately made a consciouschoice to learn and adopt it.

Finally, Yuan-kang Wang’s Harmony and War presents yet another im-portant viewpoint in the current debate. Relying on the mainstream IRtheory of structural realism, Wang rejects the connotation that the logic ofEast Asian international relations is different from that elsewhere both inthe past and at present. To demonstrate his point, he chooses to investigateChina’s foreign relations under the Song and Ming dynasties. BecauseConfucianism was thought to be most influential under these two dynas-ties, they offer the hardest test with which to reject a constructivist argu-ment that emphasizes the ideational force of Confucian pacifism. Theempirical findings Wang presents based on his painstaking archive re-search are straightforward: even at its height under these two dynasties,‘Confucian culture did not constrain the leaders’ decisions to use force; inmaking such decisions, leaders have been mainly motivated by their assess-ment of the balance of power between China and its adversary’ (p. 181).Thus, according to Wang, there is nothing unique or cultural about thepattern of China’s external behavior; international environment of EastAsia is anarchical, not hierarchical, as elsewhere. Obviously, these argu-ment and evidence are inconsistent with the other perspectives in the

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debate, and they are particularly in direct contradiction with the construct-ivist position taken by Kang.

In summary, as the scholarly interest in East Asia has recently beenrenewed, a fresh debate is taking place about how this region should beunderstood both historically and in relation to existing IR theories. Thevariety of perspectives offered so far in the literature, as well as the majorparameters of the debate, is summarized in Table 1.

3 Evaluating the debate

Having thus identified different perspectives, how can we evaluate variousclaims made in the debate, as well as the debate itself ? Here I offer someobservations and comments.

First, generally, the debate is advancing a set of important questions forboth the theories of international relations and the historical understand-ing of East Asia. Theoretically, the work of David Kang seems most pro-vocative, in that his constructivist exercise self-consciously raises criticismsagainst the potential intellectual bias of mainstream IR scholarship. As anexercise of historical interpretation, on the other hand, the structural-realists’ claim represented by Yuan-kang Wang’s study is most significant,in trying to discard much of what has been believed as conventionalwisdom about this region. The positions represented by these two authorsare most clearly contrasted with each other, and it is according to this di-mension that the exchange is likely to be most vibrant in future rounds ofthe debate. Needless to say, this contrast has direct, practical implicationsfor policy makers in many countries, as it will greatly influence how oneshould infer and predict the behavior of the rising power, China, in today’sworld.

Table 1 Distinct dynamics in East Asia?

Past Present Sources of dynamics Story line

Traditionalists Yes No Ideational–material Discontinuous

Constructivism Yes Yes Ideational–ideational Continuous

English School Yes No Ideational–ideational Discontinuous

Structural Realism No No Material–material Continuous

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Second, between the works of these two authors, I find Wang’s empiric-al demonstration based on structural realism far more convincing thanKang’s constructivist rendering. Not only does Wang conduct his own ori-ginal research, utilizing massive primary sources, his research design isalso methodologically sophisticated, particularly with regard to the cri-teria of case selection and the manner of testing hypotheses competitivelyagainst evidence. No such sophistication exists in the work of Kang, whouses far too many quotes out of context from other authors and makes fartoo many judgmental statements without substantiation. Just to give oneexample, Kang states, in his second book, ‘[t]he states of China, Korea,Vietnam, and Japan emerged over one thousand years ago as centralizedpolitical units, territorial states with internal control that conductedformal, legal international relations with one another, and for whom inter-national recognition as a legitimate nation was an important componentof their existence’ (p. 26). As far as Japan is concerned, which case I knowthe best, this characterization is totally inaccurate. Japan had never been a‘centralized’ entity with ‘internal control’ prior to the late 16th century;nor was its territorial border firmly established even as late as the 17th and18th centuries. I am surprised, even shocked, to find that such basic mis-characterizations of history (so many of them indeed) can be found in theworkof this established scholar.

Third, there is some irony in that, if my reading of the debate is correctthat structural realism, not constructivism, is more convincing, one wouldhave to conclude that IR scholarship does not gain much by focusing onEast Asia per se. As forcefully argued by its founder (Waltz, 1979), thebeauty of structural realism lies in its parsimony and generalizability, andthe reasoning based on this theory will not be influenced by any region- orcountry-specific attributes. Does this mean, then, that we do not have topay special attention to East Asia after all? My answer to this question is atentative no, because it is possible that we may be missing out some pointsof importance because of the way the current debate itself has been framedso far. In the following section, I explore this possibility further.

4 East Asia and the system-unit question

As surveyed in the previous section, the most significant cleavage in thecurrent debate on East Asia appears to lie between the constructivist andstructural-realist positions. It must be noted, however, that despite the

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contrast, these two theories share a common ontological premise.Structural realism describes the international system as anarchy, and Wangis convinced that such characterization applies to East Asia as well. Kang’sconstructivist account, on the other hand, perceives the East Asian inter-national system as hierarchy. Note here that both ‘anarchy’ and ‘hierarchy’are concepts used to characterize the ‘system’ without referring to its‘units’. Here thus lies the underlying premise: a ‘system’ exists separatelyfrom the individual ‘units’ of which it consists.

Does this ontological separation of system and units really hold? In myview, this is the key question that the analysis of East Asian internationalrelations must address, andwhich the current debate has not yet raised prop-erly. The long history of East Asia is full of events and phenomena, whichcast doubt on this premise. Let me offer just two cases for illustration.

The first caseIn the late 13th century, the Mongolian empire led by Kublai Khan carriedout a series of military campaigns against Japan. Japan managed to fendoff the attacks, and the Mongolians were forced to retreat to China. Priorto this incident, Japan was hardly a unified state.3 The Mongolian invasionhalted this situation and applied pressure for unification, but it did so onlytemporarily. Soon after the incident, the regional fragmentation progressedeven further and internal wars ensued all over Japan.

The second caseIn the late 14th century, the Kyushu area of Japan was under the controlof a regionally autonomous power led by Prince Yoshikane (aka‘Kaneyoshi’), a son of the former Emperor, Godaigo. The frustrated govern-ment (Bakufu) of Ashikaga based in Kyoto sent troops repeatedly, butcould not conquer the region for some time. In the midst of the stalemate,Yoshikane decided to form tribute arrangement for trade with the Mingdynasty. The Ashikaga government was shocked to find out that theEmperor of China accepted the offer and recognized Yoshikane as the ‘King(Kokuo) of Japan’. This incident prompted Ashikaga leaders themselves to

3 Since 1221, there had been two governments, one in Kyoto and the other in Kamakura, eachruling western and eastern Japan, respectively, with their own legal jurisdiction and even witha mutual agreement not to intervene in the other’s internal affairs. See Amino (2000),pp. 156–158.

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apply for a tribute relation with the Ming dynasty as well as to step up theirmilitary and political pressure against the independent Kyushu.4

What do these two cases illustrate? At a glance, one might not noticeanything particularly unusual or significant about them. Both theMongolian invasion and the conclusion of a tribute agreement could becounted as ordinary incidents of state-to-state interactions. After all, statesdo invade other states, and they do establish trading relations with eachother all the time. But, such a view would completely miss the crucialinsights to be drawn from these historical incidents, regarding the ambigu-ity of such central concepts as ‘system’ and ‘unit’.

Note these two cases show that the state of Japan, at least during theseyears, existed both as a unit and as a system. On the one hand, Japan wascertainly a unit that interacted with other units (the Mongolian empireand the Ming dynasty in China) in engaging in military conflicts and con-cluding trade agreements. On the other hand, Japan then also existed as asystem where various autonomous entities, themselves being individualunits, competed for territorial control and hegemony. The most interestingand significant point revealed in these two cases was that Japan becameless (more) of a system itself when the pressure for unification imposedupon its units heightened (faded).

I am not making the point, to be sure, that Japan in those eras, or statesmore generally, should not be assumed to be unitary actors. That would bean empirical criticism. And, that kind of criticisms, hardly original, havebeen raised many times against theories like structural realism. My criti-cism, here, is ontological, not empirical, aiming to address the impossibilityof conceptualizing, or even defining, ‘unit’ and ‘system’ in separation. It isprecisely such inseparability that the above-mentioned two cases pointedto, illustrating that the degree to which Japan could be treated as a systemand that to which Japan could be treated as a unit were interdependent.

As indicated earlier, none of the perspectives available in the emergingdebate on East Asia has raised this issue as a central agenda for research.In my view, the failure to be sensitive to the ontological dimension of inter-national relations leads to wrong inferences and conclusions. Take a look,for example, at one of the tables presented in Kang’s second book

4 The details surrounding Prince Kaneyoshi, his negotiation with the Ming dynasty, andAshikaga’s reaction are extremely complex. See Kuribayashi (1979) for a survey of the rele-vant historical documents and various interpretations.

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(reproduced partly as Table 2), which counts the number of conflicts thatChina engaged in under the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Based on the data summarized in Table 2, Kang draws an inference,consistent with his constructivist account, that early modern East Asiawas‘peaceful’ because ‘wars involving the Sinicized states [namely Korea,Vietnam, and Japan] were so rare’, (p. 93) while admitting the relative fre-quency of border skirmishes with nomads.

Note, however, such an inference can only be supported by focusing ex-clusively on ‘noninternal’ conflicts and thus by peculiarly dismissing thelarge number of incidents coded as ‘internal conflicts’, as Kang himselfcalculates the percentages in the right-hand column. A more candid andfair reading of the data would lead anyone to an entirely different infer-ence, perhaps not about peace and stability, but rather about conflict anddisorder inherent in this region. Kang’s problem is his ontological preju-dice with which he regards China only as a unit, but not as a system.Throughout its history, the continent of China presented itself as a vasttheater, in which various autonomous forces competed for territory,resources, authority, and legitimacy. Viewed from the nexus of unit and

Table 2 Kang’s ‘Table 5.3: Type of conflict, 1368–1841’ (Kang, 2010, p. 92)

Type Number Percent

Ming dynasty

Border skirmishes 192 69.06

Interstate war 26 9.35

Pirate raids 60 21.58

Non-China or diplomacy 13

Internal conflicts 264

Regime transition 23

Total noninternal use of force 278 100.00

Qing dynasty

Border skirmishes 33 56.90

Interstate war 25 43.10

Pirate raids 0 0.00

Non-China or diplomacy 10

Internal conflicts 120

Regime transition 57

Total noninternal use of force 58 100.00

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system, it is entirely possible that the infrequency of interstate wars was dir-ectly related to the frequency of internal wars. And, if that were the case, tocharacterize such an ambivalent situation as being peaceful would be ajudgmental call, to say the least.

5 Conclusion

In his brilliant critique of Waltz’s formulation of structural realism, JohnRuggie once made an important distinction between the ‘differencebetween units’ and the ‘differentiation of units’ (Ruggie, 1983). Waltz hadsimply equated these two concepts and was convinced that the latter’s rele-vance for international politics would disappear because of the inevitableprocess of selection and imitation. Ruggie, on the other hand, maintainedthat ‘when the concept of ‘differentiation’ is properly defined’, its analytic-al importance would not ‘drop out’ (p. 279). He then defined the unit dif-ferentiation by referring to the ‘principles on the basis of which theconstituent units are separated from one another’ (p. 274).

The history of East Asia provides an extremely fertile ground for investi-gating the analytical relevance of unit differentiation. Ruggie lamented,three decades ago, that, in Europe, there was only one historical case, orone truly transformative incident in which we witnessed a change in unitdifferentiation, namely the transition from the medieval/feudal to themodern sovereignty system. The brief argument and examples, which Ihave presented in the latter part of this article, suggests that in East Asia,the principles for differentiating units were in constant flux. Japan, China,and possible other states in this region were interacting with each other,not only as units belonging to a common international system, but each asa system in which autonomous units existed and competed with varyinganalytical relevance. Such a complex and dynamic pattern is the definitivecharacteristic of international relations in East Asia, clearly distinct fromthe one that originated from Europe. Unfortunately, as reviewed in thisarticle, the emerging debate on East Asia, as it currently stands, is yet tocapture its significance.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Suntory Foundation for financially aiding my research,which led to the critique presented in this article. I also thank participants

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of the workshop held at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University ofToronto, March 2011, where an earlier version of this article was presented.

ReferencesAcharya, A. and Buzan, B. (eds). (2010) Non-Western International Relations

Theory. London and New York: Routledge.

Amino, Y. (2000) ‘Nihon’ to wa Nani ka [What is ‘Japan’?]. Tokyo: Kodan-sha.

Fairbank, J.K. (ed). (1968) The Chinese World Order. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.

Fairbank, J.K. and Kierman, F.A., Jr. (eds). (1974) Chinese Ways in Warfare.Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kuribayashi, N. (1979) ‘Nihon Kokuo no Yoshikane no Kenshi ni tsuite [On theambassadorial mission sent by Yoshikane, the king of Japan]’, BunkyoDaigaku Kyoiku-gakubu Kiyo, 13, 1–13.

Ruggie, J.G. (1983) ‘Continuity and transformation in the world polity: toward aneorealist synthesis’,World Politics, 35(2), 261–285. (Reprinted in Keohane, R.(ed.) (1986) Neorealism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press).

Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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CHAPTER 2

R E A L ISM A N D ASI A

MICHAEL MASTANDUNO

Political realism arguably remains the dominant paradigm in the study of interna-tional relations and the subject of seemingly endless debate among its many supporters and critics (Keohane 1986a; Frankel 1996; Vasquez 1998; Lebow 1994; Moravscik and Legro 1999; Lobell, Ripsman, and Taliaferro 2009). Realism means different things to different scholars; a recent article identified no less than thirteen versions of this prominent school of thought (Onea 2012, 156). What scholars term “realism” is simul-taneously a philosophy or worldview, a guide to practical action, and a set of theories, arguments, and propositions designed to understand and explain international rela-tions and foreign policy.

Despite the variety of approaches within the realist school, they exhibit a number of commonalities. Realists typically focus on the cyclical as opposed to progressive aspects of politics. They believe that the fundamental patterns of international rela-tions—the struggle for power, alliance formation, conflict and war, scarcity and eco-nomic competition—endure despite changes over time in ideologies, institutions, or technology. Political liberals might point to the abolition of slavery and the diminution of great power wars as signs of enlightened human progress. Political realists might point instead to the brutal similarities, despite the passage of some 2,500 years, between how the powerful Athenians treated the weaker Melians in ancient Greece and how the stronger Serbians treated the unarmed Bosnians of Srebrenica in the modern Europe of the 1990s. Although realists recognize the potential for cooperation and peaceful relations among states, they tend to be pessimistic regarding the human condition and political behavior. Realists emphasize the fallibility rather than perfectibility of human beings or, as Robert Gilpin once put it, political realists “never had much hope for the human species to begin with” (Gilpin 1996, 3).

Realism is also a guide to action. What is commonly referred to as “realpolitik” involves the purposeful pursuit of state interests. For realists, power and interests go hand in hand in driving state policy. Principles and ideals are of secondary impor-tance. Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy is often viewed as an exemplar of realpolitik: not-withstanding America’s principled opposition to Communism, Kissinger led the US


government to make peace with China as part of a strategy for containing the Soviet Union in a post-Vietnam era in which American power had diminished significantly. As policy advocates, realists are neither invariably pacifists nor warmongers. They emphasize prudent statecraft and fear the unintended consequences of international activism or a crusading foreign policy. Realists counsel state leaders not merely to appease expansionist states, but also to avoid the temptation to expand one’s own com-mitments beyond the reasonable assessment of state power.

In terms of explanation, there is no single theory of realism that can be tested, con-firmed, or refuted (Kapstein and Mastanduno 1999). From a basic set of assumptions numerous realist theories and propositions may be generated. An exhaustive review is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is important to recognize major divisions within realism. Classical realists draw on a variety of causal factors in explaining for-eign policy and international relations (Thucydides 1954; Morgenthau 1978; Gilpin 1981). They invoke material factors such as relative power and interests and nonmaterial factors such as the importance of fear, honor, and prestige to explain state behavior. Classical realism is also sensitive to the roles that domestic politics and state intentions play in world politics. Structural or neorealism favors theoretical parsimony (Waltz 1979). It begins with a simple set of systemic (e.g., anarchy) and material (e.g., distribu-tion of capabilities) variables to infer conclusions about the broad patterns of interna-tional relations over time. Structural or neorealists do not claim they are able to explain the particular foreign policies of particular states. For roughly two decades following the publication of Waltz’s seminal work, The Theory of International Politics, neoreal-ism came to define the realist approach in scholarly terms (Keohane 1986a; Wohlforth 2011). More recently, so-called neoclassical realists have sought to recover the classical realist focus on foreign policy while still paying attention to the systemic variables at the core of neorealism (Lobell 2009; Schweller 2006).

This chapter draws on the rich insights of classical and neoclassical realism to shed light on the international politics of contemporary Asia. Unlike neorealism, the general principles of which are intended to apply more or less equally to all states, classical and neoclassical realist analyses link general propositions with the specific circumstances of particular countries or regions (Rose 1998; Onea 2012). Classical and neoclassical realism offer greater analytical leverage than neorealism on key international relations issues including the dynamics of international change, the relationship between eco-nomics and security, the interplay between state capabilities, intentions, and threats, and the role of hegemony in managing political relationships.

As a critical region in contemporary world politics, Asia is a worthy empirical labo-ratory for the insights of realism and other prominent schools of thought (Beeson 2006; Alagappa 2003). The world’s two most populous countries, China and India, reside in this region. Asia possesses the second (China) and third (Japan) largest national econo-mies in the world, and the Asian regional economy is sufficiently dynamic and techno-logically advanced for some analysts to point to the twenty-first century as the “century of Asia” in the world economy (see Part III of this volume for further discussion). Asia is home to several current or emerging great powers including China, Japan, India,

REALISM AND ASIA 27

Russia, and potentially Indonesia. India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and North Korea all possess nuclear capabilities (see Yuan’s chapter). Regional flashpoints—along the North Korea–South Korea border, in the Taiwan Strait, in the South China Sea, and in the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan—hold open the potential for political and military conflict (see Fravel’s chapter in particular). Finally, the rise of China, and its relationship with the United States, are remaking regional as well as global politics and economics and are critical to the future of world order (Foot and Walter 2011). In light of the stakes and circumstances, it is not surprising that since the end of the Cold War IR scholars have debated whether Asia is likely to become either “ripe for rivalry” or a regional zone of peace and prosperity (Friedberg 1993; Ikenberry and Mastanduno 2003; Tellis and Wills 2006).

The primary focus of this chapter is Northeast Asia. Realism emphasizes great power dynamics, and relations among China, the United States, Japan, and Korea are espe-cially critical to regional stability. Other subregions—South, Southeast, and Central Asia—are also consequential for Asian prosperity and security. Since Asian subregions are politically and economically interdependent, we must draw out those connections even if the primary focus is Northeast Asia. In South Asia, India is a rising power and its economic and security policies necessarily affect the strategic calculations of China and the United States (see chapter 21). Southeast Asian countries have security ties to the United States, complicated historical relationships with China and Japan, and are positioning themselves to preserve security and autonomy in the face of possible great power rivalry (see Goh’s chapter). Central Asian states affect great power calculations due to their energy resources and proximity to the central front in the war on terrorism (see chapters 13 and 25).

The next section of this chapter describes the core assumptions of realism and some behavioral expectations that follow. The subsequent section spells out five realist prop-ositions that help us to understand the international politics of contemporary Asia. These propositions concern the role of hegemony in managing Asian regional order; the rise of China and the potential for a dangerous power transition; the foreign policy response of Asian states to the interplay of capabilities and threats; the role nationalism and historical memory play in exacerbating conflict; and the interplay of economic and security relations. A final section develops concluding thoughts on the prospects for stability and conflict in this region.

2.1. Realism: Assumptions and Expectations

Political realists would likely agree on four core assumptions (Gilpin 1996; Mastanduno and Kapstein 1999). First, the key actors in political life are groups, or territorially defined entities. Realists focus on group behavior while recognizing that the defining


features of groups change over time. In Thucydides’s day, city-states were the key group actors, and in some premodern societies tribes may have been the most important political groups. In the modern international system the key group has been the ter-ritorial state. Groups develop a sense of identity and solidarity based on shared values or experiences. Nationalism describes the sense of identity that defines and separates nation-states from each other and has served since the peace of Westphalia in 1648 as an important source of interstate conflict.

Second, realists assume that state behavior is best understood in rational and instru-mental terms. Realists, according to Robert Keohane, believe that “world politics can be analyzed as if states were unitary rational actors, carefully calculating the costs of alternative courses of action and seeking to maximize their expected utility” (Keohane 1986b, 165). State leaders must be sensitive to the opportunities and constraints offered to them by the international setting. Their behavior is conditioned, though not deter-mined, by their own relative size and power, by geography and technology, and by the intentions and attitudes of their neighbors. Realists do not believe states always act rationally. State leaders often miss or ignore the signals offered by the international environment. They may underreact or overextend, based on the vagaries of domestic politics, misperception, or hubris (Jervis 1976; Snyder 1991; Kupchan 1994).

Third, realists assume that power and interests are mutually reinforcing and are the key variables that drive state behavior and international outcomes. The growth of state power enables a more expansive view of state interests, while decreases in relative power call for the scaling back of interests. The most powerful states in the interna-tional system possess interests beyond their national security and well-being; at the extreme, they seek to remake the world in their own image and according to their own values (Jervis 2009). Powerful states frequently justify their behavior in terms of broad, collectively valued principles, for example, the promotion of peace or free trade, but for realists such proclamations are a cover for the pursuit of self-interest motivated by rela-tive power (Carr 1939).

Fourth, realists assume that the international environment is inherently competi-tive. States compete militarily, economically, and even culturally. They compete for material goods such as territory, natural resources, and markets, and also for positional goods such as prestige and status (Schweller 1999; Wohlforth 2009). States pursue ben-efits through cooperation in absolute terms, but are necessarily concerned with rela-tive gains—that is, the extent to which cooperative ventures benefit disproportionately potential adversaries (Baldwin 1993).

These four assumptions lead to a variety of realist expectations about international politics. Realists expect states to pursue self-interest at the expense of collective inter-est. They expect states to protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity and to guard their capacity for independent action. Because state leaders fear being dominated by stronger states, realists expect states to balance power either internally by building military capacity or externally by forming alliances. Because over the long run eco-nomic power is the foundation for military power, realists expect political calculations to drive international economic relations (Gilpin 1975).

REALISM AND ASIA 29

2.2. Realism and Asia: Five Propositions

Like any analytical construct, realism by itself is neither right nor wrong. Realism per se cannot be proved or disproved. It can, however, be more or less useful. In this section I develop five propositions, drawn from realist assumptions, with potential to illumi-nate the international politics of contemporary Asia.

2.2.1. Realist Proposition 1: Regional Order in Asia after the Cold War Requires a Political Foundation

For realists, international orders, whether regional or global, do not emerge spontane-ously. Absent a political foundation, there is no invisible hand to assure that relations among states are peaceful and prosperous and governed by a common set of rules (Bull 1995). Security orders may be based on the workings of a stable balance of power, on a concert of great powers, or on the hegemony of a single state (Ikenberry 2001). Realists typically view hegemony as a necessary foundation for international economic order because only dominant powers have both the means and motivation to underwrite this order (Mastanduno 2009; Gilpin 2000).

During the Cold War, global and regional orders were constructed upon the bipo-lar balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. Realists writ-ing in the early 1990s expressed concern that the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the anticipated disengagement of the United States would lead regional stability in Europe and Asia to give way to uncertainty and possible conflict (Mearsheimer 1990; Friedberg 1993–94). Aaron Friedberg argued that the countries of Asia were particularly vulnerable to rivalry and conflict due to the coexistence of a variety of regime types, long-standing historical resentments, unresolved territorial and border disputes, and weak regional institutions.

Realists agree that order in post–Cold War Asia requires some type of stabiliz-ing mechanism. They disagree, however, on what that mechanism should be and what the implications are for US foreign policy. So-called offshore balancers argue that it is too costly and risky for the United States to continue to assume primary responsibility for assuring stability in Asia (Layne 1997). They believe a US with-drawal would force the natural emergence of a stable regional balance of power as countries such as Japan and India react and adjust to the rise of China and the absence of the United States. So-called global engagers believe that absent the United States, an Asian balance of power is likely to be unstable and characterized by arms racing, security dilemmas, and the risk of conflict over festering political and territorial disputes. Global engagers prescribe an active US role to def lect con-f licts and provide stability to both regional security and economic relations (Art 2003).


It was not clear at the beginning of the 1990s which path, if either, the United States might take. By the middle of the decade, however, the United States had committed to a strategy of “deep engagement” for Asia (Nye 1995). US officials announced that they would maintain the presence of the US Navy and the forward deployment of US troops in Japan and South Korea for an indefinite duration. They reinforced America’s post-war “hub and spoke” approach to Asian security by strengthening bilateral alliances with Japan, Australia, and South Korea. They added new spokes by developing nascent partnerships with China and India. US officials gave priority to bilateralism but also supported regional institutions, particularly those such as APEC that defined the region as “Asia-Pacific” and therefore included the United States. America also sought to spread its preferred liberal economic model both before and after the Asian finan-cial crisis of 1997–98. This strategy of deep engagement, which remains in place today, has been based on a calculation of US national interest and conditioned by US relative power. Deep engagement serves American security interests by checking both Chinese and Japanese power, serves economic interests by facilitating US trade and investment, and serves ideological interests by providing the opportunity to spread the American brand of democracy and private-led capitalism.

US deep engagement has contributed positively to regional order as well (Mastanduno 2003, 153–56). Beginning in the 1990s, the United States has in effect served as a political referee, maintaining special though asymmetrical partnerships with both Japan and China and working to keep these potential regional rivals at bay. The US-Japan alliance has provided security to Japan and has discouraged it from becoming an independent military power that would alarm China. For China, the US-Japan alliance ideally serves as the cork in the bottle, restraining Japanese mili-tarism; for Japan, it serves as a balancing strategy in the face of a rapidly growing and potentially hostile neighbor (see Hughes’s chapter in particular on this latter point). The US presence also provides assurance to smaller states in the region that have profit-able economic relations with China yet retain concerns about its growing power and regional influence. Finally, during the 1990s the United States played a key role in help-ing to defuse regional security crises over the North Korean nuclear program, between China and Taiwan, and between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region.

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, complicated US strategy in Asia. The Bush administration’s obsessive focus on the war on terror and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq meant that America’s priority in regional attention shifted to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. In most Asian capitals the United States was viewed as a dis-tracted power that was losing its ability to decisively shape events within the region (Mahbubani 2007). Leading US officials such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates sought to allay those concerns by describing the United States as a “resident” power in Asia and contending that “for those who worry that Iraq and Afghanistan have distracted the United States from Asia and developments in the region, I would counter that we have never been more engaged with more countries” (Gates 2008). By 2011, the Obama administration made the point all the more forcefully by proclaiming that as the war on terror subsided, the United States would “pivot” back to Asia and in particular East

REALISM AND ASIA 31

Asia (Clinton 2011). This renewal of US interest, however, seemed driven as much by balance-of-power calculations in the face of a rising China as by any US desire to main-tain or expand regional hegemony.

In the absence of an active US role, would East Asia over the past two decades have been a more conflict-prone region, along the lines feared by Friedberg in 1993? This counterfactual question is difficult to answer, depending in part on the faith an analyst is willing to place in other possible sources of regional stability such as the balance of power absent the United States, regional institutions (Acharya 2003), or even the paci-fying security effects of regional economic interdependence (Wan 2003). The natural experiment of a US withdrawal into an offshore balance posture has yet to occur, and in light of US concerns over China’s rise, is unlikely to happen soon.

2.2.2. Realist Proposition 2: The Rise of China Creates a Potentially Dangerous Power Transition

Realists consider great power transition—the rise of one or more great powers rela-tive to others—as among the most dangerous situations in world politics. Power tran-sitions are inevitable due to the law of uneven development, or the tendency for some states to grow their economic and military power much faster than others (Gilpin 1981). Power transitions are dangerous because great powers structure global governance, or the international rules of the game, to reflect their own particular values and interests. Since any given order reflects the values and interest of the state or states that created it, rising powers naturally will want to reshape international order to suit their own needs, while declining powers will try to defend the order that has served them so well. In Gilpin’s formulations, the trouble begins when the distribution of material capa-bilities is no longer commensurate with the distribution of prestige or authority among major players in the system.

Realists recognize that power transitions do not inevitably lead to war. The existing great power(s) may decline gracefully, finding ways to accommodate or appease the ris-ing powers, as Great Britain did with regard to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century (Rock 1989; Friedberg 1988). The Soviet Union ultimately chose peaceful decline as a means to end the Cold War, in light of the incalculable costs of war between nuclear-armed superpowers. Although peaceful change is possible, real-ists fear that rising and declining states might choose to fight rather than cede control of the international rules of the game, or might somehow stumble into war as a result of misperception, miscalculation, or the complicated pull of alliance commitments.

For realists, contemporary US-China relations are essentially a story of power tran-sition. International observers and IR theorists are preoccupied by whether China will continue to grow at a spectacular pace, and whether and when the size of its economy will catch up to that of the United States. In April 2011, the IMF predicted provoca-tively that in purchasing power parity terms, China’s economy would overtake that of the United States in 2016. The Economist subsequently estimated that in real terms


the crossover point could come as early as 2020 (Economist 2011). There is an obvious realist geopolitical concern lurking behind this spectacle of an economic footrace—if Chinese rapid economic growth continues, how quickly and efficiently will it trans-late economic capabilities into military capacity, expanded interests, and geopolitical influence, thereby challenging US regional and global dominance and triggering the dangerous phase of a power transition?

Liberals and realists recognize that China is rising, but differ with regard to the implications for international order. Liberals emphasize that China is rising within the existing order, implying that it accepts the existing rules of the game and, as long as it continues to prosper, has little incentive to pose a revisionist challenge (Ikenberry 2008). Liberals also foresee the potential for economic interdependence and China’s integration into the world economy eventually to transform China internally into a more democratic state with peaceful foreign policy intentions toward other democra-cies. One logical consequence is a future US-China condominium, or a “G2” in which these dominant powers share influence and jointly manage international politics and the world economy.

Realists find this scenario attractive but improbable. They assume that as China’s power grows, its interests will expand and it will not necessarily view the existing order as benign and supportive, much less optimal (Mearsheimer 2006). Because interests are a function of relative power, realists stress that it is impossible to know China’s intentions with any degree of confidence; in fact, China itself cannot know its own future intentions because the leaders of China in ten or fifteen years will likely be in charge of a country in a very different relative power position than that experienced by the leaders of today (Legro 2007). In the event China continues to rise, realists expect it to develop and promote its own conception of interests more forcefully.

It is not difficult for realists to imagine serious conflicts of interest between a ris-ing China and a still powerful America in relative decline. The political systems of the two countries are incompatible. The United States finds China’s human rights practices repugnant, while China finds US lectures on the subject hypocritical and an affront to Chinese sovereignty. From China’s perspective, the United States takes unfair advan-tage of its privileged reserve currency position to run fiscal deficits that threaten the sta-bility of the world economy; from the US perspective, China exploits its self-identified status as a developing country to flout global rules and norms on intellectual property protection and state-led industrial policy (see chapter 9). Most importantly, the United States treats and arms Taiwan as an ally it is committed to protect, while China consid-ers Taiwan an integral part of its sovereign territory and national identity.

Realists worry that even if China does not aspire to mount a global hegemonic chal-lenge, it will still desire, as would any great power, a sphere of influence in its immediate regional neighborhood. In this regard realists expect China to act no differently than America did during its rise to power. The United States claimed exclusive hierarchi-cal authority over Central and South America, declaring its intentions as early as the 1820s with the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine. The postwar Soviet Union asso-ciated its great power status with the right to control a buffer zone of friendly states in

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Eastern Europe; even today, the much-weaker Russia holds sway in what it terms its near abroad. Realists do not expect China to act any differently.

A sphere of influence in China’s neighborhood would reach across Asian subre-gions, impinging on the interests of Japan and Korea in the east, India in the south, and Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia among others in the southeast. The most press-ing problem for realists is that the United States, as a global power with hegemonic interests in key parts of the world, is already entrenched as a resident power in China’s regional neighborhoods. America’s global strategy, in effect, precludes China from act-ing as a normal great power. For China to act as a normal great power would neces-sitate a fundamental change in America’s grand strategy, and in a region that many American strategists consider the most vital to US security and economic interests. Although some type of accommodation is certainly possible, realists fear that the risks of brinksmanship, crisis management, and miscalculation could lead to conflict as each side tests the resolve and conception of vital interests of the other. Aside from Taiwan, the most dangerous flashpoints are the East and South China seas, where China takes an expansive view of its territorial waters, one that the US Navy and US allies do not recognize, and defends it with increasing assertiveness.

Realists are thus pessimistic, though not necessarily fatalistic, about the likely geo-political consequences of China’s rise (Friedberg 2011). It is worth noting that the realist vision, unlike its liberal counterpart, does not change materially if we posit a future China that is democratic rather than authoritarian. For realists interests and power matter more than regime type: as competing great powers the United States and China will inevitably have conflicting interests even if each is ruled by a democratic regime.

2.2.3. Realist Proposition 3: States in Asia Will Balance in Response to Some Combination of Power and Threat

A core expectation of realism is that the international system creates incentives for states to balance power (Levy 2003). Balancing may be internal (i.e., building up mili-tary capability) or external (i.e., forming alliances). Realists expect multipolar systems to be characterized more by external balancing and bipolar systems more by internal balancing. Unipolar systems are unusual; they imply the failure of balancing since one state has risen to preponderance. Realists foresee that other countries will eventually balance against the United States in the post–Cold War unipolar setting, and as a tran-sitional step expect those countries to engage in “soft balancing” or efforts to thwart or frustrate the activities of an otherwise unconstrained great power (Posen 2011; Walt 2009).

Classical and neorealists diverge over whether states balance in response to mate-rial capabilities (neorealists) or in response to both capabilities and threats (classical realists). Classical realists expect variation in state balancing behavior to be driven not only by the military capabilities of potential adversaries but also by whether or not those potential adversaries are geographically proximate and the extent to which they


display aggressive intentions (Walt 1987). Intentions are crucial; in the classical realist formulation of the security dilemma, to arm oneself against a neighbor with peace-ful intentions may provoke that neighbor to become more aggressive, while the fail-ure to arm oneself against a neighbor with aggressive intentions puts one in security danger. The dilemma is that states must decide how to react against their neighbors without fully knowing their neighbors’ true intentions. Aggressive states have incen-tives to hide their true intentions, and over time intentions may change in ways unan-ticipated by the actors involved. Morgenthau argued that the “fate of nations” rested on the always difficult assessment of others’ foreign policy intentions (Morgenthau 1978).

To the countries of Asia, China is geographically proximate and, because it is grow-ing rapidly, potentially threatening. Since the extent to which China appears threat-ening will affect the calculations and reactions of its neighbors, China has strong incentives to try to shape how it is perceived in the region. This basic logic of threat and intention helps us to understand both Chinese foreign policy and the Asian security environment after the Cold War.

An important turning point in recent Chinese foreign policy took place in the wake of the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–96. In that crisis China sought to intimidate Taiwan during an election campaign in order to discourage the Taiwanese support for what China perceived as the pro-independence sentiments of President Lee Teng-hui. The Chinese military conducted amphibious assault exercises and a series of missile tests in the waters surrounding Taiwan to emphasize its concern over Taiwan’s path. Some of the missiles landed within thirty-five miles of Taiwanese ports, disrupting commercial ship traffic and causing changes in the flight paths of transpacific jets. China’s coercive tactics ultimately backfired. The United States responded by moving an aircraft car-rier group into the Strait as a show of support for Taiwan (though not necessarily for Taiwanese independence). The Taiwanese people increased their support for President Lee, and China’s neighbors, alarmed by the show of force, perceived China rather than Taiwan as a source of regional instability (Ross 2000).

Chinese leaders drew an important lesson and following the crisis adopted a grand strategy of global and regional reassurance (Goldstein 2005; see also chapters 9 and 20 in this volume). They reasoned that achieving China’s priority goals of economic growth and development required continued integration into the global economy and an accommodating, as opposed to hostile, international security environment. “Peaceful rise” (since 2004 the leadership has used the phrase “peaceful develop-ment”) is the slogan that captured China’s grand strategic intention. Chinese leaders wished to convey that their country had embarked on a long-term development path that would lead it to great power status yet without threatening its neighbors or dis-rupting international order. As part of the reassurance strategy Chinese leaders exer-cised self-restraint, for example by signing on to international agreements banning the testing of nuclear weapons and by resisting the temptation to beggar its neighbors by depreciating the yuan during the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. China reversed its traditional suspicion of multilateralism and embraced it globally and regionally, joining the WTO in 2001 and taking the diplomatic lead in the Six-Party Talks after

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2003 designed to contain North Korean nuclear ambitions. The peaceful rise strategy received unexpected assistance after September 11, 2001; the dramatic attacks on US soil turned US attention for a decade away from East Asia and the geopolitical implica-tions of China’s rise as it pursued terrorists and so-called rogue states across the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

China’s strategy succeeded until the late 2000s. Its reassuring diplomacy helped to offset the natural uneasiness felt by its neighbors as Chinese economic and military power grew rapidly. The global financial crisis of 2008, however, signaled another turn-ing point. Financial problems within the United States, the self-appointed leader of the global economic order, precipitated a profound crisis that brought its own econ-omy and the overall order to the brink of collapse. China, now a formidable economic power with an alternative economic model, was where the world looked to help. China’s leadership responded with a massive stimulus package that helped to sustain global demand and its own rapid economic growth in the face of depressed export markets. In foreign policy, however, China began to display greater self-confidence and assertive-ness (Christensen 2011). It reinforced its controversial territorial claims in the South and East China seas and warned its ASEAN neighbors not to coordinate with outside powers—such as the United States—in managing their territorial disputes with China. The Chinese navy and coast guard harassed Japanese and Korean vessels, and China publicly rebuked the United States and South Korea for holding naval exercises in inter-national waters near China. Peaceful rise and the reassurance strategy seemed to give way to a Chinese self-perception of inevitable rise and presumptive great power status.

Analysts continue to debate the extent to which these Chinese initiatives were driven by a newfound confidence abroad or by insecurity and an effort to placate national-ist sentiment at home (Ross 2012). Whatever China’s motive, the regional response to China’s new assertiveness would not surprise classical realists. States in East and Southeast Asia, despite close economic ties to China, sought closer security relation-ships with the United States. Australia agreed to allow the United States to base several thousand marines on Australian territory, the first long-term expansion of the US mil-itary presence in the Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War (Calmes 2011). Singapore offered to station US warships and the Philippines, which had evicted US forces from America’s largest Pacific base two decades earlier, initiated talks aimed at enabling US ships and ground forces once again to use bases on Philippine soil. The United States and its former enemy, Vietnam, staged joint naval exercises in July 2011 and later that year a US Navy vessel called in at Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay naval base for the first time in over thirty years (Whitlock 2012; Hookway 2011). India’s response proved some-what more ambivalent. On one hand, it welcomed the chance to strengthen coopera-tion with the United States on nuclear and weapons transfer issues; on the other, it was reluctant to tilt too closely to the United States and alienate China with whom it shares disputed borders and status as a BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) country and anticolonial power.

The United States, itself alarmed by China’s growing regional assertiveness, was all too willing to accommodate these closer security ties. America’s own security


calculations evolved as it witnessed the growth of Chinese power and apparent shift in China’s intentions. For roughly two decades after the end of the Cold War, US pol-icy was premised on the liberal idea that if China developed within the confines of an American-centered international order, it would eventually become a responsible stakeholder, that is, a supporter of that order and America’s special role within it. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, however, US policymakers were not so sure. While certainly not abandoning cooperation, they began to emphasize the more competi-tive aspects of the US-China relationship while reasserting US economic and security interests in East Asia. Chinese officials protested that through its closer alliance net-works America was seeking to encircle and contain China, and highly placed observers from the two countries warned of a growing sense of distrust in the bilateral relation-ship (Lieberthal and Wang 2012).

For classical realists, power, interests, and intentions are woven into the same geo-political cloth. As China’s power and self-confidence increased it slid away from its strategy of reassurance and began to assert its interests more forcefully. Its behavior changed the calculations of neighboring states that were watching Chinese power grow and seeking clues regarding its foreign policy intentions. Neighboring states sought to strengthen protection from a global power whose own calculations of capabilities and interests made it willing to oblige.

2.2.4. Realist Proposition 4: Nationalist Sentiment and Enduring Historical Rivalry Heighten the Potential for Conflict in Asia

Political liberals—and their neoconservative counterparts on the right of the US politi-cal spectrum—see democracy as the key driving idea of the modern world. They believe that democratic states are more peaceful and less threatening than nondemocracies. For realists, nationalism is the key idea of the modern world. Nationalism inspires peo-ples to resist domination and helps to explain why European colonial empires could not endure and why during the Cold War the American and Soviet superpowers could not impose their wills on Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively. By creating a sense of solidarity among an in-group in opposition to other nationalist out-groups, nation-alism is also a source of conflict in the modern international system. Groups employ nationalism to construct narratives about themselves and their neighbors that can jus-tify irredentist claims, the taking and retaking of territories and the use of force to set-tle historical grievances (Van Evera 1994). By focusing on national identities as a source of conflict, classical realists share more in common with constructivists (see Leheny’s chapter) than with structural realists, for whom systemic incentives are more impor-tant than nationalism as causes of war.

Asia is characterized by the unfortunate combination of states with strong nation-alist sentiment and unresolved historical grievances. Classical realists view this

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combination as heightening the potential for conflict by complicating diplomacy and dispute resolution efforts and by providing opportunistic governments with tools to mobilize support among their populations.

East Asia’s nationalist predicament becomes clear when compared with the situa-tion in contemporary Europe. The modern history of Europe until 1945 is a story of nationalist-inspired conflicts epitomized by the Franco-German problem that prompted three major wars and the destabilizing peace of Versailles between 1870 and 1945 (Calleo 1980). Following World War II, the problem was resolved remarkably as the two former enemies became bound together as economic partners and military allies in the face of a common threat and in pursuit of a trans-European project. Nationalist sentiment dissipated as that European project progressed and today war between these formerly combative neighbors is virtually unthinkable. Allegiance to the nation-state exists in contemporary Europe but is now more diffuse and competes with suprana-tionalist sentiment—the idea of Europe—embedded in the highly developed regional institutions of the European Union.

Contemporary Asia stands in sharp contrast. Although talk of Asian values and the Asian way achieved some popularity during the 1990s, there is no Asian institu-tional project with the scope and depth of the European Union and no pan-Asian iden-tity that competes with national identities for public allegiance. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and India possess especially strong national identities that have been rein-forced by conflicts with neighboring states. Although its rise to great power status has been overshadowed by that of China, India maintains a strong sense of national pur-pose and pride in its democratic tradition (see chapter 21). Indian leaders are inclined neither to defer to China nor to cultivate a pan-Asian identity. Vietnamese national identity was shaped by centuries of Chinese oppression long before the French or Americans took up that role. Japan is a relatively homogeneous nation whose Meiji-era slogan “rich nation, strong army” captured the idea of developing institutions based on national identity to catch up to the West, insulate the nation from Western imperial-ism, and attain its own great power status (Samuels 1994 and see chapter 19). China has a long and proud history as the dominant national player in Asia, and more recently both Chinese and Korean identities have been shaped by the trauma of Japan’s aggres-sion and occupation during the 1930s and World War II.

Equally important, unlike European states, the nation-states of Asia have not man-aged to come to terms with their collective brutal history. French and German leaders have walked hand in hand across World War II battlefields vowing “never again.” In Asia, the experiences of imperialism, occupation, and war perpetrated in the decades before and after World War II remain festering grievances that re-emerge in modern diplomacy as if they occurred last year rather than seventy-five years ago. These his-torical tensions are omnipresent in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean relations. Japan and Korea have no alliance relationship despite the fact that each has shaped its national security strategy around a close bilateral relationship with the United States (Cha 1999 and chapter 38). China and Japan are regional rivals who experience diplomatic cri-sis whenever Japan releases new textbooks that, in China’s eyes, whitewash Japan’s


imperial past or whenever high Japanese government officials visit the controver-sial Yasukuni Shrine, a monument to Japan’s war dead that also houses the remains of Japanese convicted of war crimes. Japan feels it has apologized sufficiently for past crimes; China and South Korea find those apologies insincere (Lind 2008). Japan complains that China’s government manipulates popular anti-Japanese sentiment to deflect attention from its repressive practices at home (Christensen 1999).

Nationalism and historical animosity by themselves will not lead Asian states to war. But they make diplomacy more difficult and raise the stakes when Asian states encounter territorial disputes or conflicts over trade or natural resources. Absent any fundamental reconciliation, the best that can be hoped for is the management of these tensions through diplomacy that is responsive to national sensitivities (e.g., Japanese prime ministers declining opportunities to visit Yasukuni). In the worst case, national-ism fueled by historical memories becomes part of a toxic mix that includes a regional power transition and the use of stereotypes to mobilize nationalist sentiment behind beleaguered governments (Calder 2006).

2.2.5. Realist Proposition 5: Economic Cooperation Is Difficult in an Uncertain Security Environment

For classical realists, economic and security relations go hand in hand at both the state and systemic levels of analysis (Mastanduno 1998 and chapter 29 in this volume). State leaders in a world of anarchy view economic relations as instruments of state power. At the extreme, they may organize their economic relationships directly and purposely to serve grand strategic objectives (Hirschman 1945). At the systemic level, realists expect security allies to conduct cooperative economic relations, and security adversaries to be cautious about trading with the enemy and at the extreme to practice economic war-fare against each other (Gowa 1994; Mastanduno 1992).

Many states, of course, are neither explicit allies nor adversaries in relation to their neighbors. Realists expect that as the security environment among states becomes less certain and more threatening, economic cooperation will become more difficult. Threats to the ability of the state to conduct an autonomous foreign policy and the possibility of war, however remote, always play into the calculations of state leaders (Kirshner 1999). In a low-threat environment, state leaders will look to promote eco-nomic cooperation in order to reap the absolute gains from economic exchange. As threats or security uncertainty increase, state leaders become more wary about rela-tive gains, or the possibility that, although both parties gain, a potential adversary may gain disproportionately from economic exchange and over time pose a more formida-ble security threat than it otherwise would have (Grieco 1990). In short, realists expect security concerns to shape economic interactions for better or worse.

In this context Asia offers a puzzle for realist analysis. The rise of China, its military expansion, and its assertion of territorial claims has created a more uncertain security environment and, at least for some states, a more threatening one. At the same time,

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economic indicators point to deepening integration, a region coming together rather than pulling apart (Tellis and Wills 2006; Pempel 2005; see also Part IIIB in this vol-ume). Over the past two decades intraregional trade as a share of total trade for East Asian countries has grown significantly. Financial and monetary cooperation has deepened since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. Since the end of the Cold War Asian states have increased participation in bilateral and regional economic coopera-tion initiatives. China and Japan are potential regional rivals with strained security ties, yet their bilateral economic relationship has strengthened rather than worsened. China-Japan relations overall are commonly characterized as “cold politics and hot eco-nomics.” India and China remain geopolitical and regional rivals, yet as of 2008 China became India’s leading trading partner and in 2011 the two held their first Strategic Economic Dialogue. Similarly, the US-China relationship is one of rising security ten-sions accompanied by deepening interdependence in trade, investment, and finance.

The US regional role offers one solution to the realist puzzle of security and eco-nomics moving in opposite directions. The United States provides security assurances directly to some states and indirectly to the region, helping to make East Asia safe for economic interdependence. The US presence is an insurance policy that mitigates security uncertainty. A US withdrawal would alter the pattern of regional economic activity; economic integration would lessen or change direction as neighboring states organized to balance Chinese power. It is also plausible that at least some states would bandwagon with China, exchanging their security autonomy in Hirschman-like fash-ion for the prosperity that results from greater dependence on the region’s dominant economy. It is not surprising that states, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, have preferred to hedge and have it both ways—strong security relations with the United States as insurance against Chinese expansion and the economic benefits of interde-pendence with both China and the United States.

Since the end of the Cold War the United States and China have struck a grand bar-gain serving their mutual security and economic interests (Mastanduno 2012). For China, economic interdependence with the West and the United States has enabled it to pursue an export-led growth strategy resulting in sustained high levels of economic growth and development. A benign security environment, one in which China nei-ther threatens the existing order nor is threatened by it, facilitates and is reinforced by economic interdependence. From the US perspective, China’s willingness to retain massive amounts of US dollars has enabled America to have both guns and butter simultaneously—to run sizable deficits without inflation or the need to make painful adjustments at home. Deep economic engagement with China has also held out the anticipated US security benefit of a democratic China with a peaceful foreign policy. This grand bargain has been shaken by the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, which have led both countries to rethink their economic strategies and the extent to which their interests are served by China lending and exporting to the United States, and the United States borrowing and importing from China, on a massive scale (Cohen 2006). An interesting test of the realist expectation that a colder US-China security relationship will lead to a colder economic relationship will play out in the years ahead.


2.3. Conclusion

This chapter has explored the contribution of classical realist analysis to our under-standing of post–Cold War Asia. Classical realism offers insights into why the secu-rity environment in Asia has remained relatively stable (proposition 1), and why it may deteriorate in the years ahead (propositions 2, 3, and 4). It also calls attention to the puzzling combination of growing regional economic interdependence in an increas-ingly uncertain security environment, and provides some ideas on how one might resolve that puzzle (proposition 5).

The analysis of this chapter suggests that two variables will be most significant in determining the course of security relations in Asia in the near future. The first is the role of the United States. In light of China’s remarkable rise, if the United States remains engaged in Asia it is likely to discourage Chinese expansion, provide reassurance to China’s neighbors, and maintain an environment conducive to continued economic interdependence. A US withdrawal from the region would increase uncertainty as a more powerful China might be tempted to pursue its territorial ambitions while neigh-boring states faced the dilemma of whether to balance against China or bandwagon with it in both security and economic terms. The second key variable concerns Chinese foreign policy. After a recent bout of foreign policy assertiveness that has alarmed its neighbors, China has the option to return to its grand strategy of reassurance, essen-tially as it did following the Taiwan crisis of 1995–96. Alternatively, Chinese leaders might calculate that the United States is a declining power that must retrench global commitments for economic reasons, leaving China the opportunity to dominate East and Southeast Asia. The most prominent fear of classical realists is conflict triggered by miscalculation. For example, the United States could fail to signal clearly its determi-nation to defend its current interests in Asia, leaving China to misperceive that it has a regional free hand. Alternatively, China might signal by words and deeds a greater regional assertiveness than it intends, leading the United States to overreact and trigger an action-reaction cycle of conflict between the world’s dominant power and perceived rising challenger.

Realists place less weight analytically and less confidence politically on two other possible sources of regional stability. Regional institutions such as ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum, or APEC are only as strong as the great power interests behind them; realists would expect these institutions to play a minor role in any effort to arrest a dete-riorating security environment. Similarly, realists appreciate that regional economic interdependence may help to reinforce peaceful security relations. But, as the case of World War I, in which Britain and Germany were deeply interdependent economically yet nevertheless went to war, demonstrates, the fear of disrupting positive economic linkages would not hold back determined nation-states from playing out a competition for regional mastery by diplomacy if possible and by military means if necessary.

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Over the longer term, regional security will be determined primarily by whether China continues to rise and if so, how the United States reacts. We should bear in mind that a collapse in Chinese growth or significant disruption in Chinese politics would also have profound and detrimental effects on Asian regional security. Assuming that China’s rise continues, classical realists hold out the hope for peaceful change—that two dominant powers might find an accommodation that serves their respective inter-ests while mitigating the potential for serious conflict. The great concern of classical realism, to paraphrase Thucydides, is the rise of Chinese power and the fear it causes in the United States and others in the region.

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Mastanduno, Michael, and Ethan Kaptein. 1999. “Realism and State Strategies after the Cold War.” In Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies after the Cold War, edited by Ethan Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno, 1–27. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mearsheimer, John. 1990. “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War.” International Security 15: 5–56.

Mearsheimer, John. 2006. “China’s Unpeaceful Rise.” Current History 105, 690: 160–62.Morgenthau, Hans. 1978. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. 5th ed.

New York: Knopf.Nye, Joseph. 1995. “The Case for Deep Engagement.” Foreign Affairs 74, 4: 90–102.Onea, Tudor. 2012. “Putting the ‘Classical’ in Neoclassical Realism: Neoclassical Realist

Theories and US Expansion in the Post–Cold War.” International Relations 26, 2: 139–64.Pempel, T. J. 2005. Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.Posen, Barry. 2011. “From Unipolarity to Multipolarity: Transition in Sight?” In International

Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity, edited by John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William Wohlforth, 317–41. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


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Ross, Robert. 2012. “The Problem with the Pivot: Obama’s New Asia Policy is Unnecessary and Counterproductive.” Foreign Affairs 91, 6: 70–81.

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Schweller, Randall. 2006. Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schweller, Randall. 1999. “Realism and the Present Great Power System: Growth and Positional Conflict over Scarce Resources.” In Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies after the Cold War, edited by Ethan Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno, 28–68. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Conflict and Transforming Security Order in Asia.” In Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features, edited by Muthiah Alagappa, 280–310. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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C H A P T E R 9

The 2010s: Asia’s Slide toward

Conf lict and IR Theory

Gilbert Rozman

Whereas in the 1970s–1980s there was great hesitation to review theories validated as befitting the Cold War and in the 1990s–2000s a limited set of theoretical revisions cautiously reflected overall con-fidence in Asian developments, IR theories faced new skepticism in the 2010s amid growing pessimism. Unlike the previous periods, Sino-US relations were on a collision course, North Korea was acting with near impunity, Sino-Russian relations grew much closer, as clash-ing efforts to reorganize Asia were advancing quickly. As the ferment intensified, IR theories lagged in interpreting its meaning. Liberal theory suffered a serious setback. Realist theory gained ground, but it faced many puzzles that only national identity perspectives seemed to explain, even if many doubted they provide the desired theoretical rigor, that is, how to make single-country analysis suitable for predic-tions about bilateral and other relations.

The Sino-US relationship has taken on the trappings of a new cold war. Instead of a G2 through which the resurgent superpower and the state expected to be the next superpower strive for consen-sus in resolving global and regional problems, a rivalry is marked by security, economic, and cultural competition of an intensity not seen among the great powers since the end of the Cold War. Summits captivate attention as did US-Soviet summits. With the United States welcoming membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and China pressing for a bilateral FTA with South Korea and a regional ASEAN-centered FTA, the lines were drawn for conflict-ing approaches to regionalism despite talk of a future FTA of the

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Asia-Pacific. In parallel with the Asian quadrangle of the Cold War era: venomous Sino-Japanese rhetoric matches Sino-Soviet animosity, and upbeat US-Japanese ties of that era are echoed in claims of best-ever Sino-Russian ties now. In the spring of 2014 China made clear its plan for a security structure exclusive of the United States, using the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), an obscure entity. Earlier, Barack Obama had traveled along China’s maritime rim, reinforcing defense ties. The lines of opposi-tion were more firmly drawn, despite several important states—India, Indonesia, and South Korea—showing reluctance to cease hedging even as they gave preference to leaning toward the United States.

Of all themes in IR theory, none was more compelling in this decade than that of a rising power, referring to China’s rapid ascent, and the response in the United States and in neighboring states. This cut across nearly all discussions about China linked to IR, whether about triangular relations, regionalism, or civilizations. Theory is concerned not only with whether a rising power and hegemonic power can avoid war, but also how other states position themselves with respect to the two powers. For the principal antagonists, ques-tions center on which conditions lead to greater competition or coop-eration. For other great powers, ideas about triangularity are being tested, whether in the case of Russia the lingering goal of a strategic triangle or in the case of Japan balance between the US alliance and a claim to be a regional leader. As in the 2000s, theories must explain the complicated course of regionalism from the East Asian Summit (EAS) as the new umbrella association encompassing all the great powers in the region to the once precarious Shanghai Corporation Organization (SCO) going from marginalization to expansionism and the moribund Six-Party Talks serving as a framework for bilateral discussions aimed at finding a path forward for North Korea. With China’s explicit civilizational challenge to the West, the impact of culture on IR theory drew increased attention.

In 2014 two clashing views drew on IR theories as well as dif-ferent readings of the situation in East Asia. One view was that the region was heading to a new cold war, driven by a more aggressive China as well as by a newly belligerent Russia, both critical of the nuclear ambitions of North Korea but acquiescent to its resistance to US pressure. China’s calls for a new model of great power rela-tions, respectful of its core interests, left the United States trying to test China and gave Japan reason to bolster its military and its US alliance, while arousing suspicions also in numerous countries that this was a screen for expansionism and a Chinese sphere of influence.

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If Chinese anticipated that this approach would drive a wedge between US allies and expose the United States as the hegemon unwilling to accommodate the rising power, the US response drew allies and oth-ers closer. Theory was challenged to explain why this was happening and how states were responding, boosting realism coupled with new attention to national identities for explaining many anomalies.

The second view reasserted economic priorities, anticipating com-promises that would revive the positive atmosphere of the 2000s. On North Korea, it called for rewards to elicit trust, pretending that a soft line to the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles as long as there was a freeze on tests did not mean emboldening the North as a nuclear weapons state. Optimists favored assuring North Korea of more regime security, leading it to choose peace and reforms. On the territorial clash between Japan and China, concessions acknowledg-ing that a dispute exists offered hope of alleviating tensions without explaining why China would be patient if it did not soon achieve its desired goals or would to revert to its “peaceful development” strategy and a past agreement for joint development of resources in the East China Sea. Calling on US leaders to reassure Russia after it was alienated, hopes were high for the “reset” to transform relations. The Six-Party Talks, Japan’s “thaw” with China in 2006–2008, and the “reset” were premised on engagement and goodwill, but none succeeded. North Korea, China, and Russia bided their time before finding a pretext to turn hostile. Idealists fell back on earlier logic without confronting new realities.

Optimists differed on which of many venues would achieve the breakthrough that they had anticipated. If Obama made a strong push for better Sino-US relations, the results would be promising, they argued. Once the Sino-Japanese-South Korea FTA talks went forward, all-around relations would advance. Missing in such appeals was clarity on what China was seeking and on how damaging was Chinese rhetoric equating Japan with militarist Japan in the 1930s and the United States with the anti-Communist Cold War enemy of the 1960s. Confusing Japanese realism with revisionism and the US pivot with containment, China aroused a backlash against itself, damaging any basis for idealism, rupturing ASEAN, and polarizing the region.

Boosters of national identity in the United States, China, and else-where were intent on making IR theory consistent with their beliefs. The neoconservatives of the early George W. Bush years had a chance to act on their theory, and in later campaigns by presidential candidates as well as in hearings for Barack Obama’s national security nominees

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of 2013, their IR thinking was further in evidence. Rejecting notions of benefits from multilateralism and economic interdependence, they coupled belief in aggressive promotion of values with realist certi-tude about the need for unilateral US leadership backed by a “coali-tion of the willing” to preempt threats.1 Justifying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while denying the value of diplomacy through the Six-Party Talks and the reset with Russia, the Vulcans assumed an extreme version of the “beacon on the hill” messianic identity, com-plementing an extreme realist security posture, downplaying interna-tional diplomacy. Confronting China sooner rather than later fit this theoretical viewpoint, opposing Obama’s IR policy. Theory led to the conclusion that Obama was coddling rivals. Claiming to be realists, many were driven at least as much by a particular interpretation of US national identity.

On the other side of the US political spectrum were some who did not appreciate the danger of a domino effect from failure to offer suf-ficient realist assurances. This could result from prioritizing another aspect of US national identity democracy, even if it meant that strate-gic partners lost confidence in US coalition building. National identi-ties mattered in the world’s leading power, but the challenge in the 2010s was responding to an upsurge in others’ identities. To make one’s own national identity the basis of theorizing had serious draw-backs for analysis.

Despite the power of identities in national politics, many do not acknowledge them. There is a common temptation to interpret them as just a complicating factor in explaining deviations from realist and liberal theories. If historical memory has exacerbated threat percep-tions, then it, essentially, is distorting the impact of realist consider-ations or slowing the pace of multilateral institutionalization. Holding firm to one’s theoretical orientation is more comforting than trying out another one. As realism regained its footing, it is claimed by many who are driven by national identity, first and foremost. Few openly acknowledge that identity is driving policy. Theorists also find it hard to pinpoint how national identity relates to realist claims.

One problem in applying national identity theory is a lack of agree-ment on what it is. If an identity is assumed to be a constant, then it is of little use in explaining changes in IR. Conceptualizing national identity as changing has appeared, at times, to lead to ad hoc explana-tions. Showing a way to estimate changes in identity and trace their impact can address this problem. If treating identity as if it were one-dimensional leads to a narrow fixation, there is room to present a multi-dimensional approach with comprehensive indicators. Ideology

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predominated at times in the identity of Communist states, and his-torical memory in bilateral relations with Japan recently has taken center stage, but relying on those two dimensions alone does not suffice.

Theorists were slow to grasp that China had become the driving force in the region and was prioritizing a clash of narratives about history, civilizations, and security. From 2009 Chinese national iden-tity was being reconstructed, and from 2013 under Xi its clashing conceptions of IR theory were repeatedly asserted. If some analysts avoided the theme of China’s transformation and repeated arguments about realism and liberalism, as if China was just responding to US initiatives, once attention focused on China’s rhetoric and on the way issues in the region were now being interpreted, a different response arose, improving the chances of revising IR theory. Focusing on China leads to de-emphasis on liberal theory and recognition that both realist and national identity analysis of IR decision-making have become imperative.

Theorizing a New Cold War?

Sino-US relations were the primary IR concern of the 2010s. The perspective of a dominant power facing a rising power puts “stra-tegic reassurance” in the forefront; yet, when Obama took office with Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg using this term to win trust, China responded with a sharp rebuff. Another view is that the ideology of the two powers matters most. Insisting that US thinking remained anti-Communist in a cold war mentality, Chinese were reconstructing the trappings of an ideology—mixing social-ism, Sinocentrism, and anti-imperialism. A third perspective is that clashing territorial claims bring out the rising power’s expansion-ism against the hegemonic power’s will. Many expected Taiwan to reveal this incompatibility, but small islands in the South China and East China seas led to the most serious rifts. Subject to dispute for decades; the islands changed in significance due to China’s decision to raise tensions and use force.2 Theorists were challenged to explain why. The threat to China had not increased. As it charged that renewed militarism by Japan and US pressure on Southeast Asian states for containment were at fault, the answer for others was ris-ing confidence that brought the emerging Chinese national identity to the foreground in support of the legitimacy of the Communist party and revival of Sinocentrism drawn from a traditional worldview embraced in Beijing.

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Liberal theorists faced the challenge of a China so confident of its power and its economic ascendancy that it had decided to use economic threats in order to press other states to back away from human rights challenges, such as hosting the Dalai Lama, or security challenges, such as maritime territorial disputes. Instead of an inten-sified level of economic interdependency leading to increased trust and the institutionalization of bilateral and multilateral relations, it was giving confidence to Chinese who believed that asymmetrical dependence gave China new leverage. For realist theorists, another problem existed: Asian states were hesitant to oppose their principal trading partner. They preferred to sustain multilateral organizations that obscured a strategic response to China or even North Korea. The nexus of both economic-security ties and cultural-security ties did not fit prevalent assumptions.

We need to acknowledge that China as the rising power has a strat-egy to weaken the United States, especially in East Asia, and split its alliances, directed at various times at Japan-US relations or South Korea-US relations. From 2012 leaders focused on Japan-South Korean relations, deteriorating over territorial and “comfort women” issues. China was taking advantage of divided interests responding to the threat of conflict over North Korea and the Senkaku-Diaoyu dispute. US responses to this complex environment included warn-ing: Japan not to arouse South Korea and divert its attention; China on sanctions against North Korea to follow new provocations; and China on US support for Japan in case of a military clash. Yet, reas-surances that the United States would avoid unnecessarily arousing China were needed along with those that it would firmly defend its allies and support its defense partners. This complicated act in a hedg-ing environment puts theorists to the test. Only by finding a balance between East Asian regionalism and US alliances could Washington sustain support. Even with regionalism stunted, shared aspirations for it had to be taken seriously.3

The United States was being dragged into three disputes, which threatened to result in armed conflict: North Korea’s nuclear/mis-sile program, the Sino-Japanese dispute over the East China Sea, and China’s dispute with maritime states in Southeast Asia over the South China Sea. When China’s military grew assertive, the US response was realist in rebalancing and strengthening alliances and defense partnerships. Yet, theorists grappled with what to combine with realism. US national identity may be linked to the response of demonizing North Korea, ruling out compromise, which alien-ates South Korea as well as China, Russia, and others seeking

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multilateralism with engagement on the table. US liberal identity may send a message to allies that North Korea would be recognized as a nuclear power and China as the go-between for it. Especially South Korea, on the frontline, required understanding of its dif-ficult situation and desire to work with China and leave the door open to North Korea.

Calls by US and Chinese academics for the other to change direction have backfired. Appealing to China in 2006–2008 to be more assertive and less passive in its foreign policy to help resolve problems rather than leaving them mainly to US initiatives, US officials got more than they bargained for as China’s policies shifted. Similarly, Chinese academics called on the United States to be more self-confident in order to compromise more on inter-national disputes, but confidence in US leadership in Asia came back to haunt China. Assertiveness or even confidence by either power brings clashing goals to the fore. China aims to weaken the US role by establishing a web of economic dependencies on itself combined with minimal multilateralism. It became more aggressive in support of North Korea and against South Korea, Japan, mari-time states in Southeast Asia, and the United States from 2009. If its arguments are accepted, then it was provoked, as in the late 2012 Japanese “nationalization” of the Senkaku/Diaoyu territo-rial dispute, but few agree that the states targeted by China took hostile measures prior to China’s aggressive moves. The reasons for its moves must be assessed in order to adequately consider their theoretical impact. 4

The US war on terror, which turned into an obsession also against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, tried to rally China and Russia into a joint campaign, but it was twisted in these nations into an anti-Communist or cold war style crusade with the con-tainment of their own country the ultimate objective. Their focus centered not on denuclearization, which they professed to support, nor on shared danger from Al Qaeda and its affiliates, but on the necessity of US concessions for multilateralism and to stop criticism centered on universal values in order to win the confidence of these antagonists, even if there is scant reciprocity from them. Only by accepting its own decline would US policies satisfy Chinese and Russian leaders. Rather than rallying states such as South Korea to join in pressuring North Korea to agree to denuclearization, US policy should agree to their rising reliance on China or Russia. This is the essence of the message delivered in the publications from these states.5

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Analyzing the Strategic Triangle

The balance between the United States and China has kept changing in China’s favor, given the great gap in economic growth after the global financial crisis and the rapid military modernization of China. Moreover, China’s growing assertiveness along its borders, although not toward Russia and Central Asia, had aroused concern in some cir-cles in Russia. With Dmitry Medvedev from 2009 pursuing a “reset” with the new Obama administration, there was reason to expect some rebalancing of the triangle in which Russia was clearly the weakest power. Theorists were challenged to argue if Russia would refocus its foreign policy and whether China or the United States was prepared to entice it in order to shape the triangle to its advantage. After two decades triangularity had serious prospects, given Russian ambitions to shape it.

Analysis naturally starts with Russian reasoning about relations between the other two. In the forefront in its analysis of China’s rise was the US response. In Chinese publications there was little doubt that this response was unprovoked containment. Writings in Russia echoed this argument, taking little care to distinguish responses to China’s actions from offensive measures rooted in persistent Cold War thinking. Whether it was due to extreme caution in openly criti-cizing China or to an engraved mindset about a US threat, Russia’s approach to the triangle left little room to act. Russian national iden-tity treated the triangle in a manner ruling out balancing.

One factor driving Russia and China closer was a sense that regimes were becoming more vulnerable, widening concern that the United States would press harder for democratization, exposing extreme cases of corruption and even fueling popular discontent. The upshot was a triangle of widening identity gaps as the central source of con-cern and further reluctance to do anything to harm Sino-Russian ties. Theories that dwell on IR without consideration of national identities would have a difficult time accounting for the forces shaping the stra-tegic triangle. Russia calibrated its relationship with the United States to the personalized concern of its leadership for regime legitimacy, survival, and also recovery of aspects of Soviet identity. Blocking the formation of a civil society able to participate in politics through interest groups as would ordinarily follow the modernization process, Russian as well as Chinese leaders are bent on skewing the national identity in ways that focus self-esteem overwhelming at the state level even as they leave the state focused on personalized executive power. Management of IR reflects an obsession with this distorted goal of

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intensifying national identity.6 This is a starting point for reconsider-ing IR theory.

The Sino-Russian relationship strengthened in 2012–2014, as both states drew a sharper line against the United States. Signs of increased political challenges from domestic problems drove decisions to oppose the United States more vigorously as well as to draw closer together. In 2006–2008 Putin had sought closer ties with China, and in 2009–2011 China’s leaders had pressed for closer Russian ties. In this new age, as Putin renewed his earlier tone and Xi Jinping inten-sified China’s recent rhetoric, conditions were ripe for closer ties, diplomatically, militarily, and economically. In the national identity narratives of the two states the case was drawn for new IR ties. This convergence was rooted in the legacy of Communist great power iden-tities. At the end of 2012 Igor Zevelev pointed to the limits of both realism and liberalism in accounting for this triangular relationship, noting that Russia’s perceptions of the West are heavily influenced by national identity while its views of China are oddly removed from discourse about identity. He found this trend exacerbated with ris-ing anti-Western rhetoric, opposing an imaginary, abstract West and utterly refusing to consider the changing balance of Sino-US power.7 This pattern soon intensified as Russia set its sights on dismantling Ukraine and China blamed the West for large, pro-democracy dem-onstrations in Hong Kong. They articulated a shared narrative.

Russia’s dependency on China in the 2010s resembles the depen-dency of China on the United States in the 1980s. In the 1990s, as in the 1960s, a weak state had been convulsed by internal struggles while struggling without taking serious interest in triangular relations for strategic advantage. Eventually, China sought a balanced triangle, as it focusing on equidistance with the presumed goal of becoming the pivot. Similarly, Russia could have been expected to reposition itself in a search for equidistance. Theories that pay no heed to national identity have failed to explain a delay in triangulation and how it was handled later. The failure to seek balancing later can be traced to the national identity obsessions that leaders had prioritized.

In 2014 Putin’s decision to annex Crimea and destabilize Ukraine as it was mired in a transition driven by mass demonstrations that ousted a president put Russia on a collision course with the United States. This presented China with an opportunity to solidify relations with a long-delayed gas pipeline deal, military exercises in the sensi-tive area of the East China Sea, and talk of a new, broader security framework. Russia was even less likely to pursue balancing against China, given its identity need to distant itself more from the West and

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its nostalgia for a Soviet-era expanse under its control. IR theories of optimal balancing were contradicted by Russia’s choices.

Analyzing Other Triangular Frameworks

Japan could become the most important target of triangular maneu-vering, but in the 2010s China had lost interest and Russia was strug-gling to find a way to express its. Stronger than it had been when it had wooed Japan at times over the previous three decades, China decided that Japan was too allied with the United States to be worth further overtures. If a weaker China could find benefit in raising interest in Japan in a more balanced triangle, a China that still trailed the United States in power did not see enough advantage from a tri-angle still skewed in the US favor to proceed. From a theoretical per-spective, this is not explicable by realist geometrical analysis, but by the particular value of Japan to Chinese national identity in support of the legitimacy of the Communist Party. Demonizing Japan as the unrepentant heir to imperialist aggression trumps cultivating Japan as a peace-oriented state since 1945 ready to welcome China’s rise as a cooperative neighbor. With the spike in China’s identity gathering force from 2008, targeting Japan became a natural byproduct.8

For Russia, Japan’s promise was more continuous despite frequent denials. It served as an occasional “whipping boy,” as in Medvedev’s visit in 2011 to one of the four islands in dispute, while it also loomed as a possible target of multipolarity, as in the pretense in 2012–2014 that Putin could cut a deal. In Russian national identity Japan had receded into a secondary role, allowing room for more flexibility. At times it had figured into the triangle with the United States, but as Putin refocused on a long-term strategy in the Asia-Pacific the triangle with China had greater relevance. In late 2012 agreement was reached on rekindling the spirit of the Irkutsk summit of 2001, as hopes were rising for Japanese investment in the Russian Far East aimed primarily at energy exports to Japan.9 Analysis linked this to a realist and identity aspiration for balancing Russia’s presence in Asia and achieving multipolarity. Yet, the priority on China with the Ukraine crisis made Japan expendable unless it could be weaned from the US sanctions regime due to its fear of close Sino-Russian ties.

Realist theories do not provide guidance on how to forge multilat-eral coalitions that go against immediate economic interests. Turning US alliances into trilateralism with Japan and South Korea, each fac-ing increased danger from North Korea, is a case in point. Neither country approaches the other by prioritizing realism over historical

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vindication. Even the longstanding US attitude of remaining aloof from their squabbles apart from urging both sides to keep calm proved more difficult as ads in US papers and memorials on US streets in 2014 saw each side escalating the conflict. It was Obama who insisted to both sides on prioritizing realist behavior, as he brought about a trilateral summit in March and visited both states in late April. In neither state, however, had the drive to judge the other through the prism of history been overcome or the mass media been persuaded to emphasize realist reasoning.10

At opposite ends of East Asia are North Korea and Myanmar, whose fast-changing posture in the 2010s posed challenges to Sino-US rela-tions. China drew closer to its ally, North Korea in 2010–2012, despite the North’s provocative behavior, and defiant of the understandings with the United States in 2007–2008, which had led to the Joint Agreement in the Six-Party Talks. IR theory had to address the role of a belligerent third country in the triangle encompassing the world’s two leading powers. When China grew angry with Kim Jong-un, the new leader, this did not mean cooperation in prioritizing pressure to denuclearize. In the case of Myanmar, its shift toward the United States in 2012 set back relations with China, offering a prospect for broader integration into Southeast Asian as well as global markets and political circles. This too raised theoretical questions regarding triangularity and diversification beyond dependence on one power. Both cases point to the rapid increase in the significance of triangles for IR theory despite little theorizing about what leads to relative lev-els of hedging or bandwagoning at a time when states were groping for a new response.

Considering the North Korean Challenge

North Korea posed an unprecedented challenge to states active in Northeast Asia and to IR theory. One response was to predict a for-tuitous regime collapse that would spare other states the difficulty of coordinating to remove the threat. Wishful thinking about the unsustainability of an extremely oppressive regime able to offer few economic benefits and facing dynastic leadership change preempted IR analysis. A second response was to presume that shared interests in economic growth and regional stability would translate into a joint strategy through the Six-Party Talks. North Korea could confirm lib-eral institution building or, perhaps, a new awareness of the priority of a common threat from terrorism and the spread of nuclear weap-ons. An alternative perspective focused on North Korea’s advantage

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maneuvering among states with conflicting security priorities and identities. This proved more correct than other choices. If the most important divide was between China and the United States, other differences relevant to theory were between South Korea and both the United States and Japan. Opinions differed on the relative prior-ity of denuclearization, non-proliferation, regional stability, alliance maintenance, and alliance disruption. North Korea became a prime test of IR theory.

North Korea proved to be a critical test too of Sino-US relations to avert a cold war. China’s lack of cooperation on denucleariza-tion, putting the bulk of the blame for the failure of the Six-Party Talks on the US negotiating position, aroused great distrust. At the end of 2010, China’s blasé response to North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island led to a warning from Obama that US sup-port would be given to South Korea in its pledge to retaliate in the event of another attack.11 China took the warning to heart, although the January 2011 Hu-Obama summit made only minimum head-way in finding wording to suggest that the two powers were narrow-ing their differences on this issue. As Chinese trade with the North grew rapidly and North Korea tested long-range missiles with scant response in the UN Security Council, to the chagrin of the United States, tempers over this critical security issue continued to simmer. For US policy makers, a more imminent showdown with Iran over its nuclear weapons development and strong indications of Iranian-North Korean cooperation, as in the improvement in the North’s long-range missiles in 2012, made countenance of the North’s nuclear weapons more difficult, despite China’s insistence that first relaxing regional tensions is to the way to win North Korea’s trust. In the case of Chinese policy makers, linkage between North Korea and Taiwan loomed in the background with some suspecting that the end of US arms sales to Taiwan and a posture more amenable to reunification would lead to Chinese moderation on North Korea.

In 2013 as North Korea threatened to unleash war, repeated US warnings of a large military build-up put China on the spot either to pressure the North and appear to do the US bidding or to stand by and appear to abet the breakdown of Asian order. The situation remained on hold in 2014, as China’s relations with North Korea were tense, despite its support for the North’s economy and renewed Russian support

If China’s goal is Sinocentrism, which shakes loose South Korea’s dependence on the United States as well as the US alliance system in Asia, then North Korea can serve China’s strategy. If the North

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collapsed and was absorbed by the South or even if it agreed to a peaceful strategy of denuclearization without posing further threats, then China’s aspirations would be frustrated. North Korean reforms would lead to its destabilization, and US confidence would be bol-stered as alliance partners felt reassured. If, instead, North Korea veered between provocations and negotiations, the United States and, especially, South Korea would be inclined to seek stability in a manner that reinforces China’s leverage. North Korea is accustomed to playing one rival off against another, as in three decades of manip-ulating the Soviet Union and China during the Sino-Soviet split. If it found a new balance in a renewed cold war atmosphere between two adversaries, it would welcome that. For China, it might be preferable as a path toward Sinocentrism and toward leverage on South Korea to a weaker North Korea losing its clout in destabilizing a regional order that China aims to alter.

Weighing Regionalism and Globalization

Regionalism remains a test for IR theory centered on Asia. In the 2010s the EAS expanded to include the United States and Russia, raising the prospect for wide-ranging regionalism, while China pressed harder for exclusive regionalism focused on ASEAN or at most ASEAN + 3. With competing ideals of the range and function of regionalism, theorists were challenged to predict the course of this quest. Multiple answers were given. One postulates the primacy of economic reason-ing, as states pursued economic integration when other factors proved to be unfavorable. With China’s rapid economic rise and increasing primacy in the region, the expected outcome was China-centered regionalism. Another hypothesizes the priority of security, arguing that confidence in improved security would be decisive. This is a pre-scription for US leadership at China’s expense. A third answer focuses on shared aspirations for balance in great power leadership as the best guarantee of security. This would lead to attempts to find equilib-rium between powers. Finally, a fourth response emphasizes iden-tity, requiring a shared vision of the fit between national, regional, and global identities. The likelihood of finding complementarity is low; so that regionalism would advance slowly, if at all, if this answer applies. The EAS, ASEAN + 3, the SCO, CJK (China-Japan-South Korea trilateralism), and the Six-Party Talks are all tests of regional-ism. For more than a decade, ASEAN cohesion has been the building block for most attempts at some sort of wider regionalism. Its failure in the 2010s to grow stronger casts a dark shadow on other efforts.

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Many interpretations of regionalism have been based on arguments about economic integration serving as a driving force in community formation. They posit increased trust through mutual dependence. Yet, developments that demonstrate the benefits of regional FTAs do not necessarily translate into shared understanding of security or overlapping values that forge community awareness. Moreover, membership in a region raises the question of how to determine who is included or excluded. Theory may focus on degree of economic interaction, but even that is subject to alternative views, given the mixture of investments, markets, production networks, and formal agreements. Economics alone does not make a community, as seen in challenges facing China, Japan, and South Korea in the search for a CJK FTA without spillover in support of greater trust, management of security issues, and a focus on future ties.

Theorists faced the challenge of recognizing how much China had changed from the 2000s to the 2010s and why. Many continued to focus on the United States as the driving force in East Asia, over-stating the impact of what it might do to boost ties with China or to forge opposition to China. Simplistic answers put little weight on triangular relations, national identities, and situations such as North Korea’s new belligerent posture that had no easy solutions. One source of simplification was to argue that domestic conditions oblige regimes to change in the desired direction, whether the yearning for freedom or an escape from poverty in North Korea or the rise of civil society in China and Russia. Wishful thinking was common in theories.

Another source of simplification was to focus on quick ways to build trust as if the symbols of distrust were the actual causes. Many argued that Japan’s mishandling of sensitive historical issues, such as visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and disputes over islands and textbooks, was the principal reason for distrust. Genuine contrition would supposedly provide the reassurances needed in China and South Korea. In these arguments, advocates were repeating the assumptions of the Cold War era: Communist regimes would collapse from uncompromising responses (realism) or wide-ranging reforms (liberalism); and coun-tries burdened by historical memories opposed to each other would ameliorate their differences through apologies and common security concerns as well as economic interdependence. If previously solutions were not found, the conclusion was to redouble mutual efforts. More integration, such as the CJK FTA would be the answer. This hope for regionalism as the solution to bilateral and non-economic tensions was dashed by the mid-2010s.

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Taking Account of Eastern vs. Western Civilization

In the first years of the 2010s national identities were growing more intense. IR theory lacked an explanation for why this was happening and how it was altering bilateral relations. China was in the forefront, as few doubted that Xi Jinping played on this emotionalism more than Hu Jintao, whose final years had seen a spike in all dimensions of national identity. In place of the moderation on identity themes of Medvedev, Putin returned to the presidency trumpeting Russia’s uniqueness. In Japan, Abe Shinzo, the leader best known for his obsession with national identity, gained the prime minister’s post for a second time, advertising this passion as a remedy for two decades of malaise and newfound pressure from its neighbors. Progressives did not regain the presidency in South Korea in 2012, but their candi-date narrowly lost after it had been widely assumed after a resound-ing defeat five years earlier that the strong identity message of Roh Moo-hyun had alienated the public. In office, Park Geun-hye kept identity in the forefront vs. Japan. While tea party boosters in the United States in 2010–2012 did not control the executive branch, they similarly exposed the susceptibility of the public to extreme emotionalism.

Explaining the widespread readiness to take refuge in claims to superiority of one’s nation, observers could point to rising insecurity in the wake of globalization and a world financial crisis that raised doubt about longstanding assumptions. Also, the degree to which dependency on the United States had satisfied nations had to be reassessed, as did US soft power at a time of repeated self-inflicted wounds. The less confident people felt that their state controlled its own destiny, the more eager they became to embrace claims about the uniqueness or superiority of their nation. It proved easy to find evocative symbols to arouse one’s nation in history as well as in ter-ritorial matters, in each case identifying a neighbor or the West as the villain.

Advocates of genuine globalization were hard to find in the grow-ing backlash of the 2010s. Obama chose to play down this theme and his support for climate change legislation during his 2012 cam-paign. The “global Korea” hoopla of Lee Myung-bak was little in evidence in the campaign to succeed him in 2012. Instead of inspi-ration in resolving urgent global problems, leaders were consumed with satisfying popular grievances over perceived historical injus-tices. Widening national identity gaps with neighbors or others, they

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catered to aroused domestic constituencies at the expense of diplo-matic pragmatism. The source of the downward spiral in the interna-tional environment was, first of all, China, which in the early 2010s decided to demonize the states with which it had constructed a wide identity gap, and it found in the aftermath of the world financial crisis a convenient target in the United States, undermining confidence in the management of the world economic system.

What made the downward spiral in relations most serious from 2012 was that in the thinking of each state the various disputes had become joined—to concede ground on one meant that one’s nation would become much more vulnerable on the others. The need to hold the line was growing. Indeed, going on the offense was now seen as an effective way to rally one’s base in the face of images of growing pressure and victimization. In China, Russia, and Japan, Xi, Putin, and Abe seized the moment to take assertive approaches that few anticipated only a year or two before. Xi led China’s new Political Standing Committee to pay homage at a history museum as the symbolic beginning of a new era. Putin broke sharply with the West, renewing the historical mindset of the Communist era coupled with a sharper divide between tsarist Russia and Western civilization. Abe broke taboos present since Japanese had embraced defeat in the late 1940s. Each leader appeared to be saying the time had come to overcome an era of historical shame and silence. They found broad support.

A rising power can pose a civilizational challenge as well as a strate-gic one. IR theory may ignore culture, treat it as peripheral, or make it a centerpiece in analysis. It was customary when Japan was the fore-most threat in Asia to acknowledge a role for civilizational divides, but the postwar period saw a backlash against claims to be civilizing the world, which extended to hesitation against charging other states with such intentions. Chinese writings have no such compunctions, as much is written on the negative nature of Western civilization in con-trast to the harmonious legacy of China’s heritage. While many stud-ies of IR still eschew the civilizational theme, it is present in writings about Chinese national identity and its impact on foreign policy.

Theoretical coverage of Sino-US relations veered between paral-lels with the Soviet-US clash in the Cold War and recollection of the Japanese-US competition at the end of the Cold War. In the first case, concentration on ideologies obscured other differences linked to national identities, while in the other case second thoughts on how apparent cultural differences appeared to have been exaggerated led to calls to avoid similar excesses. Both lessons mitigated against

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analysis of the civilizational variable in Sino-US relations, even as it was arbitrarily invoked by China’s leaders.

In the 1960s–1970s the Sino-Soviet dispute was characterized by far-reaching mutual accusations of incompatible civilizations. What began as an exchange of narrow charges about ideological differences became venomous denunciations of each other’s essence from time immemorial, deviating from some allegedly normal course of devel-opment. In the 2010s Chinese demonization of the United States, Japan, and South Korea followed a similar trajectory, attacking differ-ences related to security or regime character as the result of nothing less than a fundamental divide with a conflictual civilization, given to war and imperialism, by a harmonious civilization that produced a model regional order and is ready to duplicate that if not for contain-ment policies stirring trouble near its borders. IR theory explaining that a single world civilization is taking shape as middle-class societ-ies inexorably share the same tastes and values fails to account for the widening gap in Chinese rhetoric.

Chinese were driving discussions of a civilizational divide, which accounts for foreign policy conflict. Not only did they repeatedly argue that Eastern civilization, represented by China, and Western civilization, embodied by the United States, must diverge on human rights and “universal values” because of civilizational factors, not Communist Party rule, but they charged that Sino-Japanese antago-nism originates in a civilization gap in the East and that Sino-South Korean relations are burdened by the impact of Western civilization on the South. North Korea is spared such analysis, and Russian civi-lization is mostly treated as separate from the West, lacking those negative features that are driving the East-West conflict.

After the establishment of the G20 China referred to the glo-balization of bilateral relations and identified itself as the defender of the developing world in opposition to the agenda of the United States in protecting an unjust distribution of world power for the one-sided benefit of the existing powers, which, as seen in the global financial crisis, is causing great damage and needs to be change. The upshot of this worldview is that China and the United States will find cooperation in the G20 very difficult. China will champion the case for governance reform, changing the share distribution and voting structure as well as the reserve security system and other features that do not reflect changes in the distribution of economic power. If both countries value the G20 and are prepared to make further compromises there, this is unlikely to be the venue for the most seri-ous clashes between them. Economic dialogue here and in bilateral

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meetings is proceeding more smoothly than strategic dialogue. Yet, the civilizational theme shadows economic relations too. Deciding that Communism must be saved by Chinese civilization, after it lost in the Soviet Union through a flawed connection to Russian civiliza-tion, Chinese view the fact that Russia had long seen itself as part of the West, and Soviet leaders had reaffirmed their support for human-ism as differences that could work in China’s favor. Since the pri-mary threat was US soft power, this had to be resisted by all means possible. This meant maximizing the divide, insisting that human rights are a tool for the dismemberment of China by weakening its unity and cohesion. Support for the Dalai Lama and religious free-dom were divorced from principled humanism. Preempting efforts to join Confucianism and humanism leaders insisted on shaping a bas-tardized Confucianism that they tethered to Communism. Although desperate moves to channel growing despair over rampant corruption and loss of ideals into anti-Americanism echoed Soviet moves of the 1970s, China’s leaders intensified them on the assumption that they had found a different formula able to work even as economic growth slowed and social problems deepened. When Obama visited China in late-2009, he was prevented from speaking to the Chinese people over television as US presidents had been permitted previously, pre-sumably from concern that he projected charisma, which could cast doubt on the civilizational divide leaders wanted citizens to accept. After all, Gorbachev in May 1989 had won a Chinese following.

The Japanese-South Korean downturn in relations in the early 2010s added to the perplexity of IR theorists in explaining this rela-tionship over half a century. If Abe’s call in 2013, at last, to forge a complete military alliance with the United States confirmed realist theories, his stubborn insistence on subverting the 1993 apology on “comfort women” damaged relations with South Korea deemed vital for the US alliance system to the complete dismay of IR theorists. Failing in 2012 to conclude a deal for basic intelligence sharing and left with little prospect of coordination on the ballistic missile defense system deemed vital for regional security, especially in the face of North Korea’s progress in missile technology, the two “virtual allies” defied the logic of security requirements, widening an identity gap fixated on a bygone era.

If market economies do not bring democracy and an informa-tion glut does not lead to convergence of thinking, then what will result in increased trust? The prospect of facing common threats such as climate change and Islamic terrorism is not having this effect. Increased frequency of dialogue accompanied by assurances from

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savvy diplomats is not building trust. Youth exchanges and study abroad does not mean that the younger generations are less suscepti-ble to virulent accusations against another country. Appeals for more trust are rarely accompanied by efforts to understand the reasoning of the other side that accounts for the distrust. Symbols of humiliation are eclipsing markers of diplomatic progress. Demonizing supposed adversaries was the hallmark of traditional Communism, and it has resumed in the states heir to this tradition, reverberating to a degree in the states being demonized. With China’s penchant to present the contrast as East vs. West and the US habit of contrasting universal values to authoritarianism a civilizational dichotomy ensues.

Conclusion

The Cold War led IR theory to be preoccupied with a dichotomy, but China’s break with the Soviet Union, its breakthrough with the United States, and Japan’s pursuit of some autonomy in Asia added elements of triangularity. In the 2010s the return of polarization suggests that aspirations for multipolarity are illusionary, but there is much more evidence of triangularity revolving around Sino-US relations—starting with Russia and Japan again, but also including India, and many other Asian states hedging to a greater or lesser degree. Two extreme positions fit the IR theoretical traditions: readi-ness to see a new cold war over the horizon, narrowing concerns to the realist perspective that prevailed at the time without serious con-cern for rising triangularity; and optimism about institutionalization of mechanisms that would boost the impact of economic integration, fixating on the liberal framework that gained popularity in the 1990s but also has little room for triangular maneuvering. Neither position has struck a balance appropriate to the ups and downs of China’s rela-tions with other states, notably the United States, and to the hedging of others.

Some under the sway of realist theory insisted on tough policies toward China and Russia that might have jeopardized their coopera-tion on North Korea and other threats and alienated states still eager to test their intentions. Enamored of liberal theory, others clamored for further incentives to North Korea and China that could jeopar-dize relations with South Korea and Japan while exposing weakness in US policy unnerving to many other states. With certain allies eager for a tough US response to Moscow or Beijing, and others seeking a more accommodating US response, finding a balance is not easy, nor is the theoretical basis for specifying what it may look like. IR

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theory needs more emphasis on national identities to capture how countries are viewing new challenges and triangles to recognize how third countries matter in managing Sino-US relations in a more com-plicated era.

Massive leadership change in 1992–1993 raised hopes for a new era of amity on terms favorable to democratization, human rights, and all-around globalization. In 2001–2002 another mass turnover came with more ambivalence about its impact. The third wave of post-Cold War leadership renewal in 2012–2013 exacerbated identity gaps. IR theory faced the challenge of explaining why familiar names have been topping the leadership ranks in one state after another. As Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush loomed as favorites for 2016, Putin reclaimed Russia’s presidency, Abe returned as the prime minister in Japan, Park Geun-hye returned to the Blue House a generation after her father’s assassination, and Xi Jinping gained China’s top spot a generation after his father had returned from exile as one of China’s leadership group, whether democracies or not, nations were seeking security through familiarity. This was linked with hopes for reassurance about national identity in a period of ever deepening challenges.

The geometry of IR is rarely far from the surface in theorizing. This is especially true in the 2010s in a rapidly shifting Asia-Pacific environment. In the Cold War, bipolar confrontation of the Soviet Union and United States prevailed, although some added China to form the strategic triangle. In the 1990s the range broadened, pitting the United States in search of unipolarity vs. an amorphous mix of countries within East Asia, but opening space for images of multi-polarity that showcased, at a minimum, the triangle with China and Japan. In the 2000s the number of actors expanded in the shadow of the Six-Party Talks and the rise of ASEAN, India, the SCO, and Australia. In the 2010s, the case for bipolarity between the United States and China is gaining support without eclipsing analysis of third countries, that is, triangularity.

Whereas bilateral relations are the building blocks of IR, triangles operate as the testing grounds. Many that attracted increasing atten-tion in the 2010s included both the United States and China, and even those with only one of these two acquired newfound impor-tance with the other looming in the shadows. The Sino-US-Russia triangle gained renewed saliency with the US reset to Russia and then the Russian rebuke of that. The Sino-US-Japan triangle drew special attention as the two Asian neighbors confronted each other, dragging the United States into the struggle even as the world’s number one power had its own troubles with China. The Sino-US-South Korean

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triangle acquired significance in the face of North Korea’s threats, as Seoul turned first one way and then the other in seeking support. The Sino-US-India triangle rarely captured the limelight because of India’s lower profile, even as it had the potential to be one of the dominant configurations. The Sino-US-ASEAN relationship became at least an annual focus as disputes over the South China Sea maritime boundaries moved from the rhetorical to the military level. The list of triangles revolving around Sino-US relations would not be complete without the presence of Australia, a close US ally debating how to find balance with China.

Another seven triangles with only one of these two leading powers faced new challenges of significance for IR theory. The US-Japan-South Korean triangle saw more ups and downs than before, as it was threatened with a downward spiral in the shadow of Chinese rela-tions with these states, especially South Korea. On the other side, the Sino-Russia-North Korea triangle was buffeted by US responses to the belligerent course of North Korea, as was the Sino-South Korea-North Korea triangle and the US-South Korea-North Korea triangle. The Sino-Russia-Central Asia triangle played out within and beyond the SCO, often in response to US moves, as in the establishment and removal of US bases linked to the war in Afghanistan. Another con-figuration was that of China, Japan, and South Korea, formalized with an annual summit but troubled by Sino-Japanese tensions. China and Japan contended for influence in Southeast Asia, as ASEAN sought to bridge the divide in ASEAN + 3.

What gives the above list of 13 triangles strategic IR significance? Triangles are building blocks for balancing, liberalizing, or pursu-ing goals of national identity. We can distinguish in-triangle balances (e.g., the Sino-Russian strategic partnership) against a dominant power, from out-triangle balances (e.g., the US-ROK-Japan alliance) against a threatening power. We can also view the triangle as the incubator of multilateralism in pursuit of the liberal aim of forging international organizations based on trust and openness. At the tri-angular level, we can also seek evidence of seeking advantage in dis-putes over identity by forging a line-up of two versus one on matters of values (China has sought this with South Korea vs. Japan). In the evolving regional order of the 2010s all of these theoretical concerns are in play, as liberal aims for expanding regionalism persist, realist aims of countering the world’s number one power or the region’s ris-ing power are intensifying, and an upsurge in national identity emo-tions is driving more countries to look for third parties to join in widening the national identity gaps they have with a significant other.

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However much IR theory has lagged in covering Asia and moving beyond old paradigms, it is poised to overcome its inertia with plenti-ful opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region.

Notes

1. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).

2. Gilbert Rozman, Chinese Strategic Thought toward Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, revised ed. 2012).

3. Gilbert Rozman, Northeast Asia’s Stunted Regionalism: Bilateral Distrust in the Shadow of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

4. Gilbert Rozman, ed., China’s Foreign Policy: Who Makes It, and How Is It Made? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

5. See www.theasanforum.org, Country Report: China, Country Report: Russia, bimonthly in 2013–2014.

6. Gilbert Rozman, ed., East Asian National Identities: Common Roots and Chinese Exceptionalism (Washington, DC and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2012); Gilbert Rozman, ed., The Sino-Russian Challenge to the World Order: National Identities, Bilateral Relations, and East vs. West in the 2010s (Washington, DC and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2014).

7. Igor Zevelev, “A New Realism for the 21st Century: US-China Relations and Russia’s Choice,” Russia in Global Affairs, Dec. 27, 2012.

8. Gilbert Rozman, ed., National Identities and Bilateral Relations: Widening Gaps in East Asia and Chinese Demonization of the United States (Washington, DC and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2013).

9. Togo Kazuhiko, et al., www.theasanforum.org, Topics of the Month, July–Dec. 2013.

10. See www.theasanforum.org, Country Report: Japan, Country Report: South Korea, bimonthly in 2013–2014.

11. Gilbert Rozman, Strategic Thinking about the Korean Nuclear Crisis: Four Parties Caught between North Korea and the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, revised ed. 2011)

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