2009–2010 will be remembered as a period in which China became difficult for the world, to deal with, as Beijing exhibited increasingly tough and truculent behavior toward many of its neighbors in ...

Coping with a Conflicted China

This article examines why international relations theories presume checks and balances but universal domination triumphed in ancient China. I argue that one should not presume the European experience as the norm and treat ancient China as a deviant case. I propose a dynamic theory of international politics that views international competition as processes of strategic interaction and that allows for alternative trajectories and endogenous transformation. Realist theories of international politics tend to focus on structural mechanisms and overlook agential strategies. At the same time, these theories focus on causal mechanisms that check attempts at domination and overlook mechanisms that facilitate domination. It is true that attempts at domination are checked by the mechanisms of balance of power and rising costs of expansion. But domination-seekers may overcome such obstacles by pursuing divide-and-conquer strategies, ruthless tactics, and self-strengthening reforms. From this strategic-interactive perspective, universal domination is no less possible than the balance of power.I would like to express my gratitude to Jack Snyder, Ira Katznelson, Charles Tilly, Thomas Bernstein, Michael Davis, and David Kang for their extensive comments on multiple drafts. I also want to thank Fiona Adamson, Bear Braumoeller, E. Bruce Brooks, Lars-Erik Cederman, Thomas Christensen, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Charles Cogan, Timothy Crawford, Julian Franklin, Taylor Fravel, Robert Goodin, Yoav Gortzak, A. Iain Johnston, Edward Kolodziej, Andrew Kydd, Mark Lewis, Daniel Nexon, Richard Rosecrance, Stephen Rosen, Peter Rutland, Mark Sheetz, Erik Voeten, R. Harrison Wagner, R. Bin Wong, and the editor-in-chief and two anonymous reviewers of International Organization for their thoughtful and critical comments. In addition, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University sponsored various phases of this project.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0020818304581067

Toward a Dynamic Theory of International Politics: Insights from Comparing Ancient China and Early Modern Europe

The historical rise of European foreign, security, and defense policy marks an important development in European politics and world politics more broadly. Long thought unlikely to amount to much, European integration in the domains of traditional “high politics” has consolidated bit by bit since the mid-1990s, under the auspices of a common foreign and security policy (cfsp ) and a pan-European security and defense policy (esdp ). Accordingly, European affairs in these areas have attracted increased scholarly interest. In a variety of books as well as journal articles, scholars from diverse theoretical and intellectual backgrounds have argued that European integration in these policy areas has gained considerable substance—while offering very different causal accounts for why this has occurred. These different theoretical and empirical investigations together produce a new field of study with its own research questions, vocabulary, and search for causal explanations. ir theory is now engaging fully with European integration studies and vice versa. Paradoxically, this takes place in precisely those policy areas in which European integration had long been the weakest and least developed. This article explores and evaluates this new literature that analyzes why, compared with even the very recent past, a European foreign and security policy has emerged and apparently solidified.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887111000141

International Relations Theory and the Rise of European Foreign and Security Policy

This paper discusses the meaning of ‘the West’ in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, ‘the Chinese’ is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as ‘Other’ in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of ‘the Chinese’ in world politics. ‘The Chinese’ is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West,...

The West that is not in the West: identifying the self in Oriental modernity

Cosmographies for the discovery, development and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge in pre-industrial Europe and Late imperial China: a survey and speculation

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Xiuqiang Zheng

Papers

Cultural realism : strategic culture and grand strategy in Chinese history. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. (Johnston, Alastair Iain)