EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.12

Author
Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and comparative politics. Katzenstein"s work addresses issues of political economy, security and culture in world politics. His current research interests focus on the politics of civilizational states on questions of public diplomacy, law, religion, and popular culture; the role of anti-imperial sentiments, including anti-Americanism; regionalism in world politics; and German politics. Recent and forthcoming books include: Analytical Eclecticism (2009), with Rudra Sil. The Politics of European Identity Construction (Cambridge University Press, 2008/9), co-edited with Jeffrey T. Checkel. Rethinking Japanese Security (Routledge, 2008). Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, coedited with Robert O. Keohane (Cornell University Press, 2007). Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006), coedited with Timothy A. Byrnes. Beyond Japan: East Asian Regionalism (Cornell University Press, 2006), coedited with Takashi Shiraishi. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Cornell University Press, 2005). Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford University Press, 2004). He is the author, coauthor, editor and coeditor of 32 books or monographs and over 100 articles or book chapters. 

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

We are, it appears, in the midst of another celebratory cycle. Impatient  journalists  declare a particular decade, especially this one, as the moment in which one particular country will remake a world region, indeed the entire world, in its own image. Based on its meteoric economic rise and riding what eventually turned into a  financial bubble, Japan in the 1980s was widely greeted as a challenger which would come to rival the U.S. as a global power in the 21st century. Pax Nipponica was to be shaped by a civilian power that was destined to determine the technological trajectory of most societies. The i-pod as the successor of the walkman and a Scott as head of SONY illustrate how wrongheaded this world view really was. A decade later, the same thinking was applied to the United States. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the era of globalization America offered a model to the world that appeared to have no rival. With some hyperbole the United States was called the New Rome. Pax Americana was to reign for decades, if not centuries. Within a decade America’s high-tech and low-mortgage speculative bubbles burst; America’s deficits and debt burdens mounted; and the arrogance and ignorance that informed American foreign policy under the Bush administration produced huge political train-wrecks in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Brief as it may be, and with India waiting in the wings, now is the moment to celebrate or fear the Chinese economic juggernaut and a looming Pax Sinica.

China’s rise elicits one of two reactions. The breathless adulation that is the hallmark of today’s economic journalism flourishes side by side with ominous political rumblings among specialists in international affairs about the rise of a new superpower. Enormous markets for economic growth and profit, we are told, are sprouting in a country that is fated to become a serious political rival and deadly military challenge to the United States -- if not today, then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Such optimistic and pessimistic views permeate also scholarship (Friedberg 2005), as they did  a couple of decades ago at the time of Japan’s ascendance and as they will a decade or two hence when India will be greeted as the looming world power.

These different reactions share, however, in one assumption. China as the rising power is seen as responding to the challenges posed by the West. Historian Paul Cohen (1996) has probed that assumption as well as the partial corrective that can be taken.  John Hobson (2004) and Andre Gunder Frank (1998) make the same point in their frontal assaults on Euro-centrism. In contrast to historians and sociologists, students of world politics by and large continue to adhere to the challenge-response framework. Competition is the name of the game -- in global markets and in the international state system. The West challenged China in the late 19th century in the form of imperialism and in the late 20th century in the form of economic globalization. China’s task was and is to respond.

Resisting analytical perspectives that focus exclusively on China’s response, an alternative view celebrates China’s uniqueness. In this view China’s rise is explained by inherent traits that are finally asserting themselves once again and that are placing China in its well-deserved position at the top. This view risks essentializing specific features of China – Confucian traditions, religions, breakthroughs or visions. The risk extends to attempts that articulate Chinese forms of universal empire outside of the Chinese tradition, as in Zhao Tingyang’s theory of Tianxia (Zhao 2006. Callahan 2007).  The intellectual and emotional, impulse to celebrate China’s uniqueness can be powerful, even irresistible. China’s many achievements and traits are easily cited, relevant evidence. To succumb to this temptation is hardly unique to China, but it is a temptation scholars should resist.

China’s distinctiveness, this paper argues, is related to the combination of common features with unique traits. Distinctive of China is the fact that for many centuries it was more than a vast market and a powerful state; it was a civilizational polity endowed with a sense of self, reflected in distinctive practices and values. Whether China experienced the same break as did other Axial Age civilizations remains a matter of considerable controversy among scholars (Schwartz 1975. Eisenstadt 1986). But it is plausible to argue that China today is a civilizational state because of the institutionalization of recognizable rules, identities and habits which enable the Chinese people to cope with changing conditions. And the forever changing boundaries of that civilizational state depend on the quality and relative intensity of interaction and the relative degree of homogeneity that interaction generates (Huang 2002, 222).

The rise of a distinctive China at the turn of a new millennium, this paper argues, is not creating political ruptures but recombinations of old and new elements. China’s and East Asia’s encounter with the West, in the second half of the nineteenth century, lends support to this view. Recent scholarship has offered two explanations, one focusing on autonomy and non-interference and the second on status and recognition. For Stephen Krasner (2001, 179-85) European states habitually violated their own sovereignty and that of East Asian states with impunity. Since sovereignty amounts to nothing more than “organized hypocrisy,” it was trumped by strategic and commercial interests. European practice in the egalitarian Westphalian system, furthermore, was similar to China’s self-serving conduct in the hierarchical order of the Sinocentric world. In sharp contrast, explanations drawing on the English School focus on status and recognition as powerful factors in the expansion of the European society of states into East Asia in the late 19th century (Bull and Watson 1985). This changed both the fundamental nature and the behavior of East Asian states. In joining the international society, East Asian states came to share with Western states expectations, mutual understandings, and core practices.

East Asian debates over sovereignty norms were not just cheap talk concealing the hypocritical interests of rulers as Krasner’s interest-driven analysis assumes; nor were they devoid of meaning as the status-oriented explanation of the English School suggests. In the second half of the 19th century, as Seo-Hyun Park (2006) argues, sovereignty debates in East Asia were intensive rather than scripted, and throughout East Asian history both autonomy and status markers were highly salient in a hierarchically conceived regional order. The meaning of sovereignty fluctuated between both frames over time and between different countries. Like Western principles, Confucian principles allowed for behavioral slack and variable political repertoires of action.

For example, in the second half of the 19th century Japan broke with its traditional, autonomy strategy and adopted instead a status strategy in the Westphalian system. Korea, by contrast, sought to stay within China’s orbit but switch from status to autonomy, unsuccessfully, as it had not fully internalized the Westphalia’s norms. Krasner explains the Korean exception with a quick reference to varying domestic norms and deeply-held elite views. Despite its plausibility, Park argues, this argument fails to offer good reasons why sovereignty discourses in the two states went through different transformations between 1860 and 1885, and why the goals of state policy on questions of sovereignty evolved so differently as well. Agreeing with Gerrit Gong (1984) and Hidemi Suganami (1984) Park offers a coherent analysis of these transformations in terms of the more (Japan) or less (Korea) marginal positions these two states had occupied in the Sinocentric order...(Continued)