Still a Western Social Science: the Debate on Why There Is No Non-Western IR Theory in Asia Revisited✽✽✽✽
Ching-Chang Chen✽✽
This paper attempts to offer a reflection on a growing interest in the discipline of International Relations (IR) as to why there is apparently no non-Western international relations theory (IRT) in Asia and what might be done to ‘mitigate’ that situation. Its central contention is that, if ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ as Robert Cox has put it, simply calling for greater incorporation of ideas from the non-West and contributions by non-Western scholars from local vantage-points does not amount to the democratisation of IR, whose epistemological foundations have been rooted in Anglo-American traditions. Not unlike mainstream political science which promotes domestic modernisation embedded in economic development and political liberalism, most participants of this debate encourage external modernisation in terms of exploiting potential Asian sources for IRT, such as generalisations of Asian experiences to develop concepts which can add to the universality of the discipline. However, even if local scholars were to succeed in crafting a Chinese (or Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc.) school of IR, it would be no more than creating a small, compartmentalised space within the master narrative of IR as a Western social science. Re-envisioning IR, then, is not about discovering or producing as many ‘distinctive’ schools of IR in the Third World as possible, but about reorienting IR itself toward a post-Western era that is not hegemonic in nature. Democratisation of IR is thus inseparable from its decolonisation, which must take place in the periphery – Asia in this case – as well as the core.
Keywords: International Relations, Asian school, modernisation, democratisation,
decolonisation
✽
This paper is prepared for presentation at the International Symposium ‘Democratizing International Relations: New Thinking, Doing, and Being for a New Century’, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 11-12, 2009. The author would like to thank Prof. Ginger Ching-Chane Hwang, Prof. L.H.M. Ling, and Mr. Boyu Chen for their invitation and coordination.
✽✽
Ching-Chang Chen completed his Ph.D. thesis, which examines the relationship between Taiwan’s threat perceptions and its national identity formation, in November 2008 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UK). Dr. Chen can be reached at <chen.chingchang@gmail.com>.
Still a Western Social Science: the Debate on Why There Is No Non-Western IR Theory in Asia Revisited
The main aim of this Symposium is to advocate democratising academic IR, for the current IRTs have mostly been based on Western ideas, methods, experiences, and practices which rarely recognise the need to broaden their analytical (and political) horizon. As a result, even those who are victimised under the existing power relations also continue to reproduce that structure of dominance, simply because of the lack of feasible alternatives in the field to thinking about and doing world politics. In this regard, the Symposium reflects an increasing interest among IR scholars since the last decade in calling for reorienting the discipline towards a more ‘international’, less American- or indeed Western-dominated direction.1
This makes Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan’s recent efforts to ascertain the possibility of a non-Western IRT in Asia particularly relevant to our purpose here.2 According to Acharya and Buzan, their cross-national project seeks to add to existing criticisms that IRT is Western-centric, oblivious to most of world history on one hand, and to consider why there is ostensibly no distinctive non-Western theory and what resources might be available to redress that ‘imbalance’ on the other. The ultimate purpose of the project is to ‘stimulate non-Western voices to bring their historical and cultural, as well as their intellectual, resources into the theoretical debates about IR’.3 Accordingly, non-Western IRT is expected to somehow change the ‘balance of power’ within the discipline, and in so doing change the ‘priorities, perspective and interests’ that those debates embody.4 ‘Mainstream IRT may have been for the West and for its interests’, say Acharya and Buzan, and ‘this skewing needs to be rectified by the
1
See, for example, Ole Waever, ‘The Sociology of A Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations’, International Organization, 52:4 (1998), pp. 687-727; Robert M.A. Crawford and Darryl S.L. Jarvis (eds.), International Relations—Still An
American Social Science?: Toward Diversity in International Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Steve Smith, ‘The United States and the Discipline of International Relations: “Hegemonic Country, Hegemonic Discipline”’, International Studies Review, 4:2 (2002), pp. 67-85. Such reflections can be traced back to Stanley Hoffman, ‘An American Social Science—International Relations’, Daedalus, 106:3 (1977), pp. 68-82.
2
See their special issue in International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007) and Amitav Acharya (ed.), Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives from Asia (London: Routledge, 2009 forthcoming). See also the forum on ‘IR Theory Outside the West’ in International Studies Review, 10:4 (2008); Stephen Chan, Peter G. Mandaville, and Roland Bleiker (eds.), The Zen of International
Relations: IR Theory from East to West (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Waever (eds.), Global Scholarship in International Relations: Worlding Beyond the West (London: Routledge, 2009 forthcoming).
3
Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, ‘Preface: Why Is There No Non-Western IR Theory: Reflections On and From Asia’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), p. 286.
4
Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, ‘Conclusion: On the Possibility of a Non-Western IR Theory in Asia’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), p. 437.
inclusion of a wider range of voices’.5
Critical IR scholarship may find such a West / non-West framing of IRT rather problematic. As Pinar Bilgin has pointed out, rather than trying to look beyond the confines of the ‘West’ in search of essentially ‘different’ ways of thinking about the ‘international’ from the ‘non-West’, it is more helpful to appreciate how elements of ‘non-Western’ experiences and ideas have been built in to those ostensibly ‘Western’ approaches to the study of world politics (and vice versa).6 In this perspective, one may argue that the real problem is not the apparent absence of ‘non-Western’ IRT in Asia as Acharya and Buzan sought to make sense of, but the rather limited awareness in ‘Western’ IR of ‘non-Western’ ways of thinking about and doing world politics. This pitfall notwithstanding, the aim here is not to deny what we think of as ‘non-Western’ experiences and discourses have been underrepresented and marginalised in the discipline’s efforts to theorise world politics. On the contrary, it is also this author’s belief that ‘if IRT is to fulfill its founding mission of clarifying the causes of war and peace, it needs to be for all of us and for our common interest in a progress that is peaceful and prosperous all round’.7 Nevertheless, the question remains as to whether the Acharya-Buzan project and other endeavours motivated by the same interest in thinking past ‘Western’ IR in search of insight understood as ‘difference’ are conducive to the purpose of democratising International Relations.
This paper argues that simply calling for greater incorporation of ideas from the non-West and contributions by non-Western scholars from local vantage-points does not amount to the democratisation of IR as most participants in the aforementioned grand project may believe. While realism, liberalism, and (the pluralist wing of) the English School may indeed speak for the West and in the interest of sustaining its power, prosperity and influence, the ‘solution’ is not that Asian states should also have an interest in ‘indigenous’ IRT that speaks for them and their interests, which would reproduce the hegemonic logic of dominance that is precisely Cox’s concern.8
The remaining part of the paper will first look at how the Acharya-Buzan project’s promotion of non-Western IRT in Asia re-inscribes the hegemonic logic
5
Ibid.
6
Pinar Bilgin, ‘Thinking Past “Western” IR?’, Third World Quarterly, 29:1 (2008), pp. 5-23. See also John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
7
See note 4 above.
8
For his rationale of distinguishing between ‘problem-solving theory’ and ‘critical theory’ (will be discussed later), see Robert W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 207-10.
within Western IRT. Not unlike mainstream (read: Western) political science which promotes domestic modernisation embedded in economic development and political liberalism, its proponents generally encourage external modernisation in terms of exploiting potential Asian sources for IRT, such as generalisations of Asian experiences to develop concepts which can add to the universality of the discipline.
On this basis, the second section will argue that (emerging) non-Western IRT in Asia can be understood as a Western-induced evolution so as to achieve modernisation and development (hence the observation that China is going to have its own school of IR, that Japan already has several, and that post-colonial India should avoid creating one).
In the third section the paper will conclude that discovering or producing as many ‘distinctive’ schools of IR outside the West as possible is not the same as democratising IR; to be specific, the latter should be about reorienting IR as a whole toward a post-Western era whose epistemological foundation is not hegemonic in nature. Democratisation of IR requires its decolonisation (meaning permanent resistance to structural dominance in power relations of all kinds), which must take place not only in the periphery but also in the core.
Non-Western IR Theory: The More, The Better?
Prompted by the question as to why there is apparently no non-Western IRT in Asia, Acharya and Buzan initiated a comparative research (including case studies on China,9 India,10 Japan,11 and Southeast Asia12) that seeks to understand how and why thinking about IR has developed in the way it has.13 For them, it is puzzling that non-Western voices have not had a ‘higher profile in debates about international relations, not just as disciples of Western schools of thought, but as inventors of their own approaches’, considering that ‘the world has moved well beyond the period of Western colonialism, and clearly into a durable period in which non-Western cultures
9
Yaqing Qin, ‘Why Is There No Chinese International Relations Theory?’, International Relations of
the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 313-40.
10
Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Re-Imagining IR in India’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 341-68.
11
Takashi Inoguchi, ‘Are There Any Theories of International Relations in Japan?’, International
Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 369-90.
12
Alan Chong, ‘Southeast Asia: Theory between Modernization and Tradition’, International
Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 391-425.
13
Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory? An Introduction’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 287-312. Their case studies on South Korea and Islamic IR were not included in this special issue.
have regained their political autonomy’.14 While in their view there is little that can be called an Asian IRT, they maintain that there have been rich (albeit ‘pre- theoretical’) intellectual and historical resources that can serve as the basis for developing a non-Western IRT (which takes into account the positions, needs and cultures of Asian countries) and can be exported to other parts of Asia and beyond.
After examining several possible explanations of the absence of non-Western IRT, Acharya and Buzan hold that local scholars do not think that Western IRT has found all the answers to the major problems of world politics to the extent that it precludes the need for other voices. Nor do they consider non-Western theories as essentially ‘hidden from the public eye’ due to language or other cultural barriers. Rather, they point to the lack of institutional resources to support theory production, the time lag between the West and Asia in developing theoretical writings, and, more importantly, the Gramscian hegemonic status of Western IRT that discourages theoretical formulations by others. As far as the prospects of non-Western IRT in Asia is concerned, the Acharya-Buzan project recognises the difficulties that latecomers must face in their construction of IRT, because ‘Western IRT has not only built the stage and written the play, but also defined and institutionalized the audience for IR and IRT’.15 Drawing a parallel between industrialisation and IRT development, new entrants are said to have a range of options, such as joining in to the existing game seeking to ‘add local colour and cases to existing theory’, developing a sui generis exceptionalism (i.e., ‘Asian values’), or organising local thinking into rebellions against prevalent orthodoxies in the manner of the dependencia theory.16 Acharya and Buzan find no need (and probably no way) to replace Western IRT, but argue that it can and should be enriched with the addition of ‘more voices and a wider rooting’ not just in world history but also in ‘informed representations of both core and periphery perspectives’ within the global political, economic and social order.17
While the aforementioned attempts at thinking past Western IR are laudable in that they do not deny ‘Asia’, the ‘Orient’ or the ‘Third World’ having historical agency, what they have suggested is not unlike Samuel Huntington’s (in)famous assertion at the onset of the so-called post-Cold War era: ‘In the politics of civilizations, the people and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of
14
See note 3 above.
15
Acharya and Buzan, ‘Conclusion’, p. 436.
16
Ibid.
17
history’.18 However, given his conflictual, the West-versus-the rest worldview, only the West is in fact depicted as the truly ‘rational’ and ‘civilised’ civilisation. The only agency Huntington grants non-Western civilisations is the destabilising agency of cultural difference, but this point is often left out by his critics – some even view being cast as a threat to the West something positive, in the sense that their civilisation is finally recognised as equal to its Western counterpart.19
With the Huntington fallacy in mind, the central contention of this paper is that current efforts to ascertain the possibility of a non-Western IRT in Asia (and beyond) do not actually empower non-Western voices and experiences in the discipline’s theorising of world politics; as a result, it would be remiss if one too readily treats emerging non-Western IRT in Asia as a sign of the democratisation of IR. While Acharya and Buzan rightly notice that IRT is neither value-free nor neutral (as they put it, ‘Liberalism, especially economic liberalism, can be seen as speaking for capital, whereas Realism and the English School pluralists speak for the status quo great powers and the maintenance of their dominant role in the international system/society’),20 their advice to those hoping to develop non-Western IRT (‘Western powers have Western IRT that speaks for them and their interests, so we should have our own!’) goes against Cox’s exhortation – rather ironically. What the latter means by ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ is to expose any theory’s ideological element, to ‘lay bare’ – not to reproduce – its ‘concealed perspective’.21 As Cox wrote in his essay ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’, IR needs a perspective for understanding global power relations that ‘look[s] at the problem of world order in the whole, but beware of reifying a world system’.22
Having introduced the Gramscian notion of hegemony, it becomes impossible for Acharya and Buzan to defend their position on the ground that their project is only interested in what Cox termed as ‘problem-solving theory’, which seeks to make the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised work as smoothly as possible by dealing with particular sources of trouble.
18
Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (1993), p. 23.
19
See, for example, Myongsob Kim and Horace Jeffery Hodges, ‘On Huntington’s Civilizational Paradigm: A Reappraisal’, Issues & Studies, 41:2 (2005), pp. 217-48; Yongnian Zheng, Discovering
Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 76-85. For useful corrective, see Mark B. Salter, Barbarians
and Civilization in International Relations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), chap. 7; and Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004).
20
Acharya and Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?’, p. 290.
21
Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’, p. 207. Cox was quoted favourably in the Acharya- Buzan project to underline that their attempt to promote non-Western IRT is a meaningful one.
22
In this regard, non-Western IRT cannot but be a Coxian ‘critical theory’, concerning itself with the origins of these relations and institutions and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.23 Indeed, it becomes necessary to ask what is the form of power that underlies the study of world politics and produces the current particular understanding of IRT – or in Gramsci’s words, what is the configuration of the historic bloc? So far those who are concerned with the possibilities of non- Western IRT in Asia have noted the marginalisation effect of Western IRT as a Gramscian hegemony, yet little attention has been paid to the question about how that hegemonic order in academic IR came about.24 Without understanding the origins of the dominant structure as well as its counter-structure’s possible bases of support and elements of cohesion, counter-hegemonic efforts are unlikely to bear fruit; as have seen above, participants in the non-Western IRT project implicitly accept the prevailing structural logic (e.g., the binary opposition of ‘us/them’) as their own point of departure.
This casts doubt on Acharya and Buzan’s speculation that the dominant status of Western IRT in Asia and elsewhere is largely enabled by the ‘hard reality of the Western style of international political economy [which] continues to dominate real existing international relations’.25 In fact, as we shall see, the other way round could be true. As Edward Said indicated in Culture and Imperialism, the era of high or classical imperialism may have come to an end with the dismantling of the colonial structures after the Second World War, yet it has in one way or another continued to exert considerable cultural influence in the present.26 For him, neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of capital accumulation and territorial/resource acquisition:
Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.27
That is to say, the empire needs to define and affirm itself through various relationship of power with its colony. Moreover, the imperial system covers cultural sphere, which
23
See note 8 above. Cox’s distinction between problem-solving theory and critical theory is heuristic. As he wrote, ‘Critical theory contains problem-solving theories within itself, but contains them in the form of identifiable ideologies, thereby pointing to their conservative consequences, not to their usefulness as guides to action (p. 209)’.
24
For an exception, see Behera, ‘Re-Imagining IR in India’.
25
See note 4 above.
26
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 7.
27
Ibid., p. 9. Emphasis in original. Said uses ‘imperialism’ to denote ‘the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre [i.e., empire] ruling a distant territory’; ‘Colonialism’ is understood as a consequence of imperialism, ‘the implanting of settlements on distant territory’.
not only underpins imperial expansion but also makes alternative cultural imaginaries unimaginable. Indeed, counter-hegemony understood in a Gramscian sense would be very difficult, since a hegemonic order (e.g., pax britannica, pax americana) functions mainly by consent in accordance with some principles which even those who are dominated would consider as universalistic.28 The next section will illustrate how non-Western IRT in Asia is being developed (or ignored, in the case of Taiwan) under the complicity of imperialism and IR as a Western social science.
Seeing the World through the Eyes of the Empire
Current attempts to identify local conditions that are unfavourable to the developing of non-Western IRT in Asia remind us of the classic statement of modernisation and development theory by Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell,29 such Third World states became like Talcott Parsons’ adaptive societies, themselves analogies to organisms in evolutionary biology. Parsons measures the degree of movement of a society from traditional to modern by the differentiation of its stratification, whereas Almond and Powell (now followed by Acharya and Buzan) measure the degree of movement from underdevelopment to development of Third World states. Old modernisation and development theorists maintain that, under the right social, political, and economic conditions, Third World states will modernise and develop into more First World-like. The non-Western IRT project similarly promises that Asian states will eventually ‘catch up’ with their Western counterparts and ‘be part of the game’.30
But those ideas and theories that travelled from the West to the non-West and the channels through which they travelled (e.g., the Fulbright Scholarship of the US, the Overseas Research Studentships of the UK, etc.) were not independent of Western interests and policy making. Modernisation theory and development studies emerged during the Cold War as the West’s economic, political, social, and cultural response to the management of former colonial territories. While some Western academics and practitioners of international politics hoped to theorise ideas and then guide policies
28
Robert W. Cox, ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method’, Millennium:
A Journal of International Studies, 12:2 (1983), pp. 162-75.
29
Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell Jr, Comparative Politics: Systems, Processes, and Policy, 2nd edn. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1978).
30
Similar teleology can be found in mainstream democratisation theorists’ assertion that political corruption in democratising countries will be gradually reduced on their way toward ‘mature democracy’. Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner (eds.), The Self-Restraining State:
Power and Accountability in New Democracies (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999). It is therefore interesting to see that participants in the non-Western IRT project wonder whether or not democracy is a necessary condition for indigenous IRT development. Acharya and Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?’, pp. 297-98.
that would transform newly independent colonies into sovereign nation-states, the only acceptable model of development for them was the Western liberal capitalist ‘First World’. Modernisation and development theory was consciously conceived as a Western (and predominately US) alternative to Soviet-style socialist strategies of development espoused in the ‘Second World’. Another case in point is the creation of ‘Pacific Rim’ Studies and the emergence of notions such as ‘Asia-Pacific’ in the US management of the Vietnam War fiasco.31 The new world map was drawn in the way that helped to change the global focus away from failed containment and toward a sort of broader picture, within which communist Vietnam was outperformed by so-called newly industrialised countries (NICs) or ‘four dragons’ (also known as ‘four tigers’) that include Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.
So far only a few efforts have been made to studying how such dynamics between imperialism and disciplinary social sciences have affected ways of thinking about and doing world politics in the Third or formerly colonised world.32 As a consequence, those who were once colonised continue to see themselves and the (former) coloniser through the eyes of empire. Hence Imperial Japan’s ‘Southward Advance’ (Nanshin) discourse in the 1930s was the only available historical foundation for the formulation of Taiwan’s ‘Go South’ (Nanxiang) economic policy toward Southeast Asia in the 1990s.33 The familiar rhetoric used by proponents of ‘Asian values’ such as Confucianism, anti-West, anti-individualism and anti- communism can also be readily found in the wartime Japanese promotion of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’.34 Imperialism lingers where it has always been.
The prospects of non-Western IRT in Asia have likewise been under the shadow of the modernisation and development enterprise, with each state at different stages of ‘catching up’ Western powers. This explains why Chinese scholars are optimistic that reformist China will sooner or later fully exploit its potential for an ‘IR theory with
31
Bruce Cummings, ‘Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 29:1 (1997), pp. 6-27.
32
Chih-yu Shih, ‘Constituting Taiwanese Statehood: The World Timing of Un-Chinese Consciousness’,
Journal of Contemporary China, 16:53 (2007), pp. 699-716, argues that the Taiwan independence movement can be in part understood as an unintended consequence of such dynamics.
33
See, respectively, Mark P. Peattie, ‘Nanshin: The “Southward Advance”, 1931-1941, as a Prelude to the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia’, in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark P. Peattie (eds.), The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 189-242; and Jie Chen, Foreign Policy of the New Taiwan: Pragmatic Diplomacy in Southeast Asia (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002), chap. 3.
34
Maruius B. Jansen, ‘Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives’, in Ramon H. Myers, and Mark P. Peattie (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 61-79; and Mark P. Peattie, ‘Japanese Attitudes towards Colonialism’, in Myers and Peattie,
Chinese characteristics’ to emerge and evolve,35 why Japanese scholars are eager to demonstrate that there are several peculiar theories/theorists of IR in Japan (or at least IR studies as a whole has certain distinctive character) already before the Second World War,36 and why some Indian scholars (thanks to their background in subaltern studies and postcolonial traditions) are wary of the consequences of creating an indigenous Indian IR that remains a nationalist, atavistic, or nativist project.37
The virtual absence of non-Western IRT in Taiwan, which was not examined in the Acharya-Buzan project probably due to the island’s perceived lack of historical and intellectual sources for IRT,38 is also worth noting. The point here is not that some potentially valuable sources are overlooked, but rather why they are overlooked by the local scholarship (unwittingly or not) in post-colonial Taiwan. As Shih Chih-yu observes,
Taiwanese scholars do not want to be different from their Western counterparts so as not to be reduced (in the eyes of the Western academic) to being a pre-modern, non-universal, non-rational actor. To speak the same language is not unlike becoming an equal colleague in the English-speaking academic community.39
The total acceptance of American/Western IRT in Taiwan, then, reflects an identity strategy through which Taiwanese associate themselves with the US/West, which in turn allows them (and indeed the emerging Taiwanese state) to look at China from a presumably universalist, superior position.
Having examined how imperialism has been played into the worldviews of Asian academics and policy makers alike through Western IR, it is important to remember
35
Qin, ‘Why Is There No Chinese International Relations Theory?’; Xinning Song, ‘Building International Relations Theory with Chinese Characteristics’, Journal of Contemporary China, 10:26 (2001), pp. 61-74; and Yaqing Qin, Guoji guanxi lilun Zhongguo pai shengcheng de keneng he biran [The Chinese School of International Relations Theory: Possibility and Necessity], Shijie jingji yu
zhengzhi, 3 (2006), pp. 7-13.
36
Inoguchi, ‘Are There Any Theories of International Relations in Japan?’; Josuke Ikeda, ‘Japanese Vision of International Society: A Historical Exploration’, paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, USA, 27 March, 2008; and Kosuke Shimizu, ‘Culture and International Relations: Why Does Japan’s IR Focus on the Third Dimension?’, paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, USA, 27 March, 2008.
37
Behera, ‘Re-Imagining IR in India’.
38
But see Chih-yu Shih, ‘The Time-Honored Peace Maker for East Asia: A Subaltern Taiwan’s Re- Appropriation of Colonial Narratives’, in I Yuan (ed.), Cross-Strait at the Turning Point: Institution,
Identity and Democracy (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 2008), pp. 349-71.
39
Chih-yu Shih, Democracy (Made in Taiwan): The ‘Success’ State as a Political Theory (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 218. Tzung-he Bau et al., Zhengbianzhong de liangan guanxi lilun [Contending Approaches to Cross-Strait Relations] (Taipei: Wunan, 1999) is indicative of the tendency that Taiwanese scholars are more concerned with demonstrating their familiarity with Western concepts and theories than with exploring potential local sources for the subject matter.
its profound impact on general cultural sphere as well as on specific political, economic, and social practices in Asia and other parts of the Third World. This does not imply that IR scholars should only concern themselves with Western hegemony and the Westphalian system within which it operates. As William Callahan notes, alternative non-Western visions of world order, such as China’s traditional concept of Tianxia (‘All-under-Heaven’) which is increasingly popular among its government- affiliated scholars and public intellectuals,40 may not necessarily lead us toward a post-hegemonic world. Nevertheless, rather than rush to the conclusion that the Tianxia system (or at least the understanding of it popularised by Zhao Tingyang) encourages a violent conversion of difference and thus ‘presents a new hegemony that reproduces China’s hierarchical empire for the twenty-first century’,41 it would be more prudent for us to recognise what appears to be Chinese atavism is more a consequence of the Western dominance in social sciences than an update of imperial China’s hierarchical governance. Zhao argues that to be a ‘true world power’, China needs to excel not just in economic production, but in ‘knowledge production’; to be a knowledge power, China needs to stop simply importing ideas from the West but exploit its own indigenous ‘resources of traditional thought’.42 Zhao’s logic, which is exactly the same as that of Acharya and Buzan’s embedded in the modernisation and development problematique, cannot produce a genuine alternative because he continues to take the West as his reference point. In this sense, Zhao’s Tianxia can be conceived as a Chinese emulation of the Western imperial system. Similarly, Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchukuo was not unlike a demonstration that Japan could behave like – and even fare better than – Western imperialists.
Conclusion: Decolonised IR Theory for Democratic Ontology
Contrary to its proclaimed mission, the discipline of International Relations is a fundamental source of the world’s problems, not their solutions. Dominated by the Western model of universality that is premised upon a self-other binary in which the other’s identity must be negated and agency be denied, IR privileges the claims of state sovereignty over all other kinds of political community and gives overwhelming emphasis on ‘universalisation’ of state building processes, where the liberal, capitalist First World becomes the role model for all. Moreover, the Gramscian hegemonic status of Western IRT precludes one from questioning the West’s assumed right to
40
William A. Callahan, ‘Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-Hegemonic or a New Hegemony?’,
International Studies Review, 10:4 (2008), pp. 749-61. The bulk of his analysis of the Tianxia concept focuses on Tingyang Zhao, Tianxia tixi: Shijie zhidu zhexue daolun [The Tianxia System: A Philosophy for the World Institution] (Nanjing: Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2005).
41
Callahan, ibid, p. 750.
42
determine which ways of producing knowledge are legitimate (or not) and to use the standards of a particular kind of knowledge making enterprise (i.e., positivism) for judging the legitimacy of all other different ways of creating knowledge. This makes the construction of alternative sites of knowledge production on world politics all the more important and pressing.
However, as this paper has shown, current intellectual endeavours to construct non-Western IRT in Asia run the risk of inviting nativism – the mirror image of universalism – which do not involve a critical self-awareness and questioning of the a priori assumptions, procedures and values embedded in the modernisation and development enterprise. Following the trajectory laid down by the West, attempts to ‘catch up’ with Western IR make the discipline turn neither post-Western nor democratic. Indeed, they can never catch up and will remain stuck ‘in the transition narrative that will always remain grievously incomplete’.43 How, then, can we reorient IR toward a non-hegemonic direction (in terms of dismantling the hierarchies between Western and non-Western perspectives)? To borrow from Shih,
Political scientists need an epistemology of democracy that does not assume a fixed ontology or a fixed teleology. This democracy should enable people to resist fixation by any ideology, regime, tradition, or self-consistency. Its form and meaning cannot be determined in advance because the nature of suppression is never fixed.44
This brings us back to Said’s observation that cultural discourses/ideology are complicit in the formation of empire and that the imperial core’s subjectivity is constituted through its power relations with the colony. From this perspective, empire can never really collapse without its core’s cultural decolonisation.45 In the same vein, the IR discipline will remain undemocratic (meaning not all voices are heard and treated with equal respect) if the decolonisation only takes place in non-Western IR. Western IR needs to acknowledge its direct involvement in the lives of those whom it studies and to jointly create non-hegemonic spaces where different perspectives of IR can co-exist and learn from each other. Without such efforts (albeit difficult and even painful), it will be impossible for the discipline to cultivate a political imagination that recognises, understands and encourages differences and fosters alternative ontological possibilities of social and political spaces for interactions between communities criss-crossing the spatial boundaries of nation-states.
43
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’ in Diana Brydon (ed.), Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. IV (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 1510. Cited in Behera, ‘Re-Imagining IR in India’, p. 359.
44
Shih, Democracy (Made in Taiwan), p. 212.
45
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Qu diguo: Yazhou zuowei fangfa [Toward De-Imperialisation: Asia as Method] (Taipei: Xingren, 2006).
