Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan
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Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan
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Overview
This book argues that understanding the diversity of past legal orders helps explain the forms of contemporary conflict, as well as the conflicting historical narratives that animate tensions. Rather than proceed sequentially by way of dynasties, the editors identify three “worlds”—Chingssid Mongol, Tibetan Buddhist, and Confucian Sinic—that represent different forms of civilization authority and legal order. This novel framework enables us to escape the modern tendency to view the international system solely as the interaction of independent states, and instead detect the effects of the complicated history at play between and within regions. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines cover a host of topics: the development of international law, sovereignty, state formation, ruler legitimacy, and imperial expansion, as well as the role of spiritual authority on state behavior, the impact of modernization, and the challenges for peace processes. The culmination of five years of collaborative research, Sacred Mandates will be the definitive historical guide to international and intrastate relations in Asia, of interest to policymakers and scholars alike, for years to come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226562933 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2018 |
| Series: | Silk Roads |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 310,787 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Three Worlds; Three Bodies of International Law
Once upon a time, the world was not as it is. The patterns of inclusion and exclusion we now take for granted are historical conventions. The principle of state sovereignty is the classic expression of those patterns, an expression that encourages us to believe that ... those patterns are permanent.
R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside
A discipline that is often overlooked in the study of international relations in Asia, yet intrinsically connected to it, is history. Specialists in contemporary international affairs are aware of the historical depth on which Asian states act, but few seek to engage with this rich past to explicate and understand the conduct of states today. This nonengagement is reflected in the models on which many rely to explain how states interact, models derived from a different place of origin, western Europe to be precise, and a shallower past, going back no further than the seventeenth century, and more often no further than the twentieth. Of course, most of humanity has been neither European nor modern, so we offer this study to join those who seek to broaden the analysis of international relations by taking Asian historical experience into account. We do so by bringing to light the multiple international legal orders that predated the modern system of international relations and international law in Inner and East Asia, because understanding them is critical to comprehending not only historical relations in Asia but relations within and among states in that region today. It is this broader experience — in particular from Asia — that this book seeks to incorporate into the analysis of international relations.
Historians of Asia have for some time now observed that the reigning theoretical models of political, social, and economic theory, based narrowly on European experience, fall short of guiding us in developing an analysis of today's realities that pertain across much of Asia. A number of scholars are already applying this insight from within the international relations field. We join these efforts from our own areas of specialization, so that the field might evolve to become more global in its foundations and, more important, to enable political leaders to draw from deeper understandings of Asian history when called upon to develop policies and make decisions affecting human welfare.
The past in Asia's present
History is a powerful medium to explain the world and our place in it. How the past is perceived and narrated profoundly informs the attitudes of ordinary people as well as the decisions of political leaders. Nowhere is the tenacity of historical perception more immediately apparent than in situations of conflict, both international conflicts and conflicts within existing states, especially identity-based ones. Here, perceptions of history animate the positions of parties, the claims they make, and the sense of entitlement and righteousness they feel in relation to those positions and claims. Some are prepared to go to war to enforce their claims. Yet the paradigms, concepts, and terminologies used to analyze and explain the past are mostly those of modern international relations and international law. This practice prevents us from appreciating past realities and events on their own merits and within their spatial and temporal contexts, which inevitably augments existing conflicts and hinders their resolution.
To cite an instance currently in the public eye, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Vietnam assert competing claims of sovereignty over islands and expanses of the South China Sea using selective historical narratives, some of them going back centuries. To argue their respective cases, they interpret events and behavior from earlier and very different contexts through the lens of sovereign rights as understood today. They are not the only ones to do so. Many parties to conflicts — states and nonstate actors alike — invoke twenty-first-century concepts of sovereignty, statehood, and territorial integrity and project them onto a very different past, in which those concepts and the paradigms to which they belong have no place. Doing so creates warped understandings of past relations and exacerbates tensions. Today in our single international legal system, sovereignty is exclusive, territorial, and all-encompassing. Observers today commonly associate sovereignty and statehood with exclusive territorial and jurisdictional rights and presume states to be equally sovereign actors. Such concepts obscure Asian historical realities before, and even during, the nineteenth century. Polities and their rulers in Asia were never presumed equal; indeed, relationships were typically unequal. Rulers exercised authority over other rulers who owed allegiance to them and possibly to other stronger rulers as well. "Sovereignty," when the term is applied in Asian history, was mostly divisible, layered, and relative, as were allegiance, loyalty, and subjection. So the package that comes with the modern concepts and language of sovereignty, statehood, legitimacy, and the like impedes real understanding of the past and often only serves to legitimize political agendas in the present.
This book is intended to draw attention to the existence of these problems and to encourage a more effective approach to understanding how Inner and East Asian polities have conducted their relations. Ours is far from the first call for a new approach to international relations theory and practice for reasons of history. The critical wing of international relations theorists has been here before us, as our opening citation from Robert Walker acknowledges. To the extent that our approach is unique, it is because we are coming at the question not from within international relations theory, nor from a single national case, but from as wide a historical base in Asia as we can encompass.
The basic premise of Europeanist international relations theory is that states relate to each other as equal actors coexisting in a state of anarchy. According to this theory, every state is deemed formally equal to every other state, and each is regarded as engaging in relations with other states in pursuit of its interests without deferring or being subordinate to another power. States are territorially defined, and sovereignty is exclusive in relation to that territory and the state's subjects. This theory of state status and interstate relations is regarded as an adequate description of the modern world. It is loosely known as the Westphalian system or theory of international relations because it draws from principles enunciated in the Peace of Westphalia, a set of treaties negotiated in 1648 to bring an end to the Thirty Years' War. Because this moment in European history is considered to have been decisive in terms of the appearance of the modern state and its corresponding system of international relations — "the founding moment of an internationalized modernity," as Robert Walker tags it — theorists have been unable to conceive of what lay before and beyond Europe except in relation to or as opposed to it. As Walker has noted, this Westphalian orientation has "worked to efface more complex histories, and to legitimize a claim about the origins of modernity that resonates with so many other accounts of what must be excluded so as to affirm modern accounts of the achievements and costs of modern inclusions and exclusions."
The modernist term "international relations" is inextricably bound up in a particular teleology attached to European concepts of the nation and the state. This teleology has been one of the obstacles to developing an alternative approach to the conduct of historical states and rulers. For this reason, we prefer the more precise term of "interpolity relations" instead, which we use from time to time so as not to predetermine the entities — "polities," not "nations" — whose relations we analyze. As a model to understand historical interpolity relations in Asia, modern international relations theory is hobbled by three shortcomings. The first is its inability to take account of the persistent, inescapable presence of hierarchy in the conduct of interstate relations or, indeed, to recognize hierarchy as a principle by which states may legitimately relate to each other. The second is its inability to theorize empire, a type of political formation that has erupted regularly throughout history and that has overridden many of the assumptions of international relations theory regarding the capacity and autonomy of polities to act in their own interests — and that may be causatively tied to the ideologies that Europeans subsequently invented to justify the creation of new colonial empires overseas. The third shortcoming is the misfit of the Westphalian model when applied to states that preexisted the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, not just in Europe but all over Eurasia — in fact, when applied to most of history in most parts of the world. Looking for Westphalian ideals or their absence in the past induces misunderstanding of the forms and constitutions of historical states, dressing up such states as botched or inferior versions of the modern state — and, in so doing, confirming the rightness, indeed inevitability, of the modern state to the exclusion of all others.
Asian states today operate broadly within the mechanisms that have been shaped around Westphalian principles, not least by virtue of their participation in the United Nations system, which embodies and codifies them. We hold, however, that focus on these principles alone restricts the possibilities for analyzing the conduct of contemporary Asian states and impedes our understanding of historical Asian states and their relations. Our reservation arises not because of some indelible cultural difference between East and West but because the actual historical experience of state rule has varied so widely between the parts of western Europe that produced the Peace of Westphalia and the rest of Eurasia. We need to bear in mind that Westphalia was a solution to problems particular to conditions that prevailed in Hapsburg Europe at the end of the Thirty Years' War. The intention of its framers was that it be a "universal peace," though in practice it was entirely embedded in the political circumstances prevailing at that moment in the history of the Holy Roman Empire and extended no further. No one at the time pretended to prescribe the rules of state conduct beyond the states they represented at the negotiations at Westphalia. To state our case bluntly, the rules that emerged from those negotiations had no integral relationship to practices governing interpolity relations beyond Europe and indeed had limited salience for much of the conduct of actual interstate relations in Europe. Westphalia's salience for Asian states began only with the imposition of European diplomatic protocols and international law in the wake of Europe's military and economic penetration of Asia during the age of empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Westphalian model does not establish the only norms for a coherent theory of international relations. Every historical regime based in China, to offer the obvious example, conducted its relations according to a coherent system that was explicitly hierarchical and centered on that regime as the system's apex and hegemon. To the extent that the study of international relations is the study of states relating horizontally to each other, can there be a history of international relations of the Sinic world within "international relations"? If there can, it cannot impose the expectation that the same rules apply. Rather than relegate Inner and East Asia to a condition of exceptionalism or dismiss the region as being of "merely" historical interest, we want to take that archive of political and legal experience seriously: first, by broadening the definition of what constitutes a state and, second, by elevating the rules through which states and rulers have interacted to the status of law. We are not merely seeking to rescue historical states from misrecognition and thereby open up a new path for theorizing interstate relations in Asia. On a practical level our ambition is to provide new insights for international relations practitioners to enable them to appreciate and take account of the diversity of historical experience in Inner and East Asia and the role this experience continues to play in decision-making in that region today.
Beyond China
We are not the first to plead for the inclusion of Asian historical experience in our analyses: John Fairbank was an eloquent proponent of this inclusion half a century ago. Fairbank, the impresario of China studies in North America through the third quarter of the twentieth century, published The Chinese World Order: Traditional China's Foreign Relations in 1968. For this ambitious volume, which students of Chinese foreign relations still read, Fairbank solicited essays on aspects of the history of China's foreign relations from thirteen of the finest scholars of his and the next generation. The opening paragraph of his introduction makes explicit to readers that the project worked from the concept of the tribute system, an interpretation he absorbed from his colleagues in the Chinese scholarly world, which was this: that by virtue of its size and power, China imposed a system of tribute submission on other states. This system was developed from practices originally imposed some two millennia ago to manage regional subordination within an expanding Chinese state, but it came to provide a mechanism for organizing international relations as a hierarchy of which the emperor of China occupied the apex. This hierarchy constituted a world order extending across a considerable part of Asia, reaching its height during the Qing dynasty and collapsing under the pressure of the new world order that the European powers imposed through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
To his credit, Fairbank regarded his approach as offering "a preliminary framework," to use the title of the introduction to his book, and nothing more. The tribute system was taken as a starting point for this enterprise, but this was a concept, as he notes in his opening paragraph, burdened with "hoary stereotypes." The intention of his team of colleagues was to scrutinize the system "both in theory and in practice, from without as well as from within." The tribute system gave them a place to begin, but this paradigm did not necessarily provide a complete model for understanding how China has related to the world without. Although some critics invoked the tribute system to disparage China's foreign policies at the turns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, returning to that history "opens the door a bit further on a system that handled the interstate relations of a large part of mankind throughout most of recorded history," according to Fairbank. He did not have his eyes trained solely on the past, however, but went on to propose that the "political experience" of managing relations through this system "even has some indeterminate relevance to the world's China problem of today." He declined to sketch out the implications of Qing foreign policy for the People's Republic, though as China had been effectively closed to all but the socialist world for two decades at the time he was writing, it was clear that something needed to be explained, and that perhaps the tribute system had within it the seeds of that explanation.
It was not our purpose when we set out on this project either to perpetuate Fairbank's approach or to overturn it. But through the course of our inquiry, we became increasingly struck by resemblances in intention, if less in program, between this book and The Chinese World Order. Fairbank's desire to incorporate Asia's experience into the history of how some states have handled their relations with each other is not unlike our concern to develop an Asian-based analysis of interpolity relations that might enlarge current approaches to international relations, at least in Asia. His sense that his interpretation was preliminary is a caution we acknowledge as suitable also for this volume. Significantly, we share with him the sense that what we have found may be relevant to understanding the tensions between China and much of the region today. We live, as did he, in troubled times and would not likely have taken up the questions this project raises were the world otherwise; but then perhaps all times are troubled.
Having conceded that common ground of concern, we suggest that this book departs from the Fairbankian model in several significant ways, of which two deserve immediate notice. The first regards Fairbank's focus on China as what he called the "natural center" of the East Asian world. The second regards his focus on the study of Chinese-language sources on the Qing dynasty, when much of this region was under the sway of the Manchus.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
PrefaceChapter One Three Worlds; Three Bodies of International Law The past in Asia’s present
Beyond China
Marco Polo and the protection of emissaries
International law before “international law”
Sovereignty in Asia before the modern era
The straitjacket of the modern law of nations
Chapter Two Chinggisid Rule and the Mongol Great State The emergence of the Chinggisid state
Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene
Imperial allocation of fiefs and the resilience of Chinggisid law
Koichi Matsuda
Imperial subjugation of polities and extension into Tibet
Koichi Matsuda
Mongol perceptions of “China” and the Yuan dynasty
Hodong Kim
Chinese legitimation of the Mongol regime and the legacy of “unification”
Chapter Three Interpolity Relations and the Tribute System of Ming China Rituals of hierarchy
The tribute system and regime legitimacy
Power and the use of force
Yuan-kang Wang
Civilizational rhetoric and the obfuscation of power politics
Geoff Wade
Convergence and conflict: Dai Viet in the Sinic order
Liam Kelley
Reproduction of the tribute system
Chapter Four The Tibetan Buddhist World The symbiosis of spiritual and temporal authority
Rule by relationship
Mongol pilgrimages and the transfer of wealth to Tibet
Dalizhabu
State building in the Himalayas
John Ardussi
Tibetan-Manchu relations
Imperial directives in the language of chö-yön
Matthew Kapstein
Chapter Five The Manchu Great State State formation and legitimation
Nicola Di Cosmo
Relations with the Mongols
Extension of control over the Mongols
Hiroki Oka
Relations with Tibet
Etiquette and the communication of power relations
Nobuaki Murakami
Manchu positioning in relation to the Chinese civilizational world
Guest ritual and Qing international relations
Pamela Crossley
Chapter Six Transitions to the Modern State System The new paradigm of international relations
Japan’s quest for a place in the new world order
Shogo Suzuki
Korea’s transitions and the impotence of modern law
Kirk Larsen
From mandala to modernity: The breakdown of imperial orders
Alex McKay
Chapter Seven The Presence of the Past Conflicts and the deployment of history
The great reinterpretation
History in play today Authors and Contributors
Notes
Bibliography
Index