Bringing the Ottoman Order Back into International Relations: A Distinct International Order or Part of an Islamic International Society?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Balci
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
International Society ◽  
Large Body ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Tributary System

Abstract Long neglected in international relations (IRs), the Ottoman Empire is now getting the attention it deserves. Leaving its “Westphalian straitjacket” behind, the discipline has finally taken a keen interest in non-Western and historical cases. However, the discipline has long focused disproportionately on the Chinese tributary system and produced a large body of literature about it. Spruyt's The World Imagined presents two crucial innovations. The book, on the one hand, introduces the “Islamic international society” into the mainstream, and on the other hand, balances the dominance of the Chinese tributary system in the historical IR subfield. When Spruyt's book is read together with Mikhail's God's Shadow and White's Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean, it becomes clear that the Ottoman Empire should be treated as a distinct international order. By including another book in the debate (Casale's The Ottoman Age of Exploration), this study aims to problematize “Islamic international society” and introduce the Ottoman Empire as a distinct international order.

The Strange Journey of the Tributary System

2021 ◽  
pp. 030582982110506
Author(s):  
Yuan-kang Wang
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
East Asia ◽  
International Society ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Tributary System ◽  
Material Power

Scholars of international relations have embraced the tributary system as the dominant lens to studying historical orders of East Asia. Hendrik Spruyt’s The World Imagined, a rare gem in the study of comparative international orders, argues that the tributary system articulated the ontology of the historical East Asia international society. This article cautions against two common pitfalls. First, the tributary system is a modern conceptual construct that can blind researchers to other types of political orders existing throughout East Asia’s diverse landscape and history, thus contributing to a Sinocentric bias. Both the Mongols and the Tibetans adopted a distinctive set of rules of inter-polity conduct that have little to do with the Chinese tributary system. Second, the tributary system perpetuates the myth that East Asia has been historically peaceful, while glossing over the numerous interpolity warfare that took place in the region as well as internal conflicts within the same cultural sphere of a state. I argue that our understanding of international orders can be substantially enriched when we take material power seriously and study its interplay with ideational factors.

scholarly journals Urakami Memory and the Two Popes: The Disrupting of an Abstracted Nuclear Discourse

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 950
Author(s):  
Gwyn McClelland
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Initial Visit ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Since 1945, official Catholic discourse around nuclear weapons has condemned their existence on the one hand and supported them as deterrents on the other. This paper argues the largely abstracted discourse on nuclear weapons within the World Church has been disrupted by voices of Urakami in Nagasaki since at least 1981, as the Vatican has re-considered both memory and Catholic treatments of the bombing of this city since the end of World War II. On 9 August 1945, a plutonium A-bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’, was detonated by the United States over the northern suburb of Nagasaki known as Urakami. Approximately 8500 Catholics were killed by the deployment of the bomb in this place that was once known as the Rome of the East. Many years on, two popes visited Nagasaki, the first in 1981 and the second in 2019. Throughout the period from John Paul II’s initial visit to Pope Francis’s visit in 2019, the Catholic Church’s official stance on nuclear weapons evolved significantly. Pope John Paul II’s contribution to the involvement in peace discourses of Catholics who had suffered the bombing attack in Nagasaki has been noted by scholars previously, but we should not assume influence in 1981 was unidirectional. Drawing upon interviews conducted in the Catholic community in Nagasaki between 2014 and 2019, and by reference to the two papal visits, this article re-evaluates the ongoing potentialities and concomitant weaknesses of religious discourse. Such discourses continue to exert an influence on international relations in the enduring atomic age.

A coming Age of Micro Game of Power

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-112
Author(s):  
Zhang Jiadong
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
The Other ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
Competitive Advantages ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

The traditional theory of international relations, whether it is realism, liberalism, constructivism, or scientific behaviorism, define sovereign states as a unified body in international arena. It has consistent interests, and naturally also has consistent foreign policy goals and means. In the 20th century, and especially during the two World Wars and the Cold War, this conceptual abstraction was very accurate. But after the end of the Cold War, especially in the 21st century, this concept gradually went against the reality of international relations. On the one hand, the comprehensive strength of a country cannot directly transform competitive advantages in specific areas; on the other hand, the main resistance of many countries, including superpowers, may not be another power, but different domestic interest groups as well as international non state actors. This has caused traditional international relations theories, from hypotheses to conceptual and inferential levels, to be unable to explain the world today.

The Politics of Transnational Economic Relations

1971 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 398-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gilpin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The One

These two statements—the first by a Canadian nationalist, the second by a former United States undersecretary of state—express a dominant theme of contemporary wrïtings on international relations. International society, we are told, is increasingly rent between its economic and its political organization. On the one hand, powerful economic and technical forces are creating a highly integrated transnational economy, blurring the traditional significance of national boundaries. On the other hand, the nationstate continues to command men's loyalties and to be the basic unit of political decision. As one writer has put the issue, “The conflict of our era is between ethnocentric nationalism and geocentric technology.”

A Basic Condition of International Reconstruction: Freedom of Opinion and Press

1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 838-850
Author(s):  
Carlo Sforza
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
The Other ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Po Valley ◽  
The World ◽  
Plane Trees ◽  
Napoleon Iii ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
The One ◽  
Personal Importance

IDistinguished American and foreign scholars are studying in this symposium various aspects of the weighty problem of international reconstruction. All of the other writers have chosen problems that are essentially political, and on that account it has seemed to me appropriate that I discuss a topic of a more broadly moral nature, i.e., the issue of freedom of opinion and press in the world of tomorrow. The fact that I have spent my life in diplomacy and politics may make up for my lack of personal importance if I can demonstrate that cynics and profiteers will prevail in politics unless we comprehend that in any sphere of international relations only those solutions will be adequate that are grounded upon the most complete security of opinion and press.IIExiled pretenders to thrones nearly always exhibit a liberalism both promising and reassuring. But this was not true in the case of Prince Victor-Napoleon, whom I knew quite well because of his ties with Italy—ties that consisted more in his vast estates in the Po valley than in his dynastic alliances. Faithful to the princely rule according to which the son has to affect views different from those of his father, Prince Victor was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. His father had acquired a well-known reputation for liberalism (or even Jacobinism?) during the Second Empire—and afterwards. But Prince Victor-Napoleon had assumed the habit of speaking to me in frankness. And I did not doubt for a moment his sincerity on that evening when, listening under plane trees to an open air concert in Constantinople, he made the following remark on the founder of his family: “There is one thing about the Emperor (like all the Bonapartes, he said “Emperor” only when referring to the first; the one of December 2, he called Napoleon III) which is more inexplicable to me than anything else: that with his wonderful perspicacity, with his mistrust of men, whether flatterers or not, he should have attributed so much importance, at a certain moment, to the manifestation of lyrical enthusiasm of which he read summaries.

International Order Beneath an Empty Sky

2020 ◽  
pp. 212-228
Author(s):  
William Bain
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Critical Point ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
The One

This chapter lays out a tension that arises in a world that is dominated by the theory of imposed order, yet makes room for the theory of immanent order as a rhetoric that is set against what it done in the name of will and artifice. Theorizing international order in contemporary international relations can be interpreted as an attempt to negotiate these rival positions. However, the chapter makes the critical point that these theories of order represent incommensurable positions. The one cannot be assimilated to the other to form a coherent composite theory of order. The chapter discusses the implications of a world that is torn between these incommensurable positions. The theory of immanent order provides a sense of transcendent truth that conditions what human beings make and do, but in a constructed world, consistent with the theory of imposed order, this transcendent truth is an artefact of the same freedom it seeks to regulate. This is a consequence of substituting human decision in place of God to secure the regularity of international order. Secular alternatives to God are sustained in the same way that nominalist theologians repose confidence in God: through faith or belief. The chapter concludes by arguing that this theological inheritance begins to unravel at a certain point because, unlike God, human beings are conditionally, rather than absolutely, good. The danger is that abiding uncertainty exposes the regularity of international order to the arbitrary whims of power.

The Epic Cycle and the uniqueness of Homer

1977 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 39-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Large Body ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Short Account ◽  
Heroic Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

The Homeric poems are the subject of such a flood of print that a definite justification is needed by one who adds to it. Especially perhaps is this so if the Epic Cycle is to be involved; ‘enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle’, said T. W. Allen in 1908. My argument will be that the Cycle has still not been fully exploited as a source to show, by comparison and contrast, the particular character and style of the two great epics, particularly the Iliad. With the domination of Homeric scholarship in English by formulaic studies on the one hand and archaeology on the other, the poems themselves have perhaps been less discussed than might have been expected, and the uniqueness of the Homeric style and picture of the world has not been fully brought out. Most treatments of the Cycle have been concerned to assert or to deny that it contained poems or incidents earlier than the surviving epics, a question which will not be raised here. Most recent writers on Homer have more or less ignored the Cycle; even Hermann Fränkel, the first part of whose book Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (2nd edition 1962; now available in English, Poetry and Philosophy in Early Greece [1975]), is perhaps the most illuminating single work to have appeared on Homer in this century, does not discuss it, although it could have been made to support many of his arguments. No inferences are based on it, for example, in Wace and Stubbings, Companion to Homer, nor by Sir Maurice Bowra in his posthumous Homer. ‘My remarks are restricted to the two epics’, says J. B. Hainsworth in his short account; and G. S. Kirk, who does refer to the style of the fragments, does so summarily and without quotation. Yet after all the Cycle was a large body of early Greek heroic poetry, composed at a time not too far removed from that of the great epics, and at least passing as being in the same manner. We have some 120 lines quoted in the original, and a good deal of information about the content of the poems. If it proves possible to draw from this material any clear contrast with the Iliad, it may be felt that this will bring out the individuality of the latter even more strikingly than does the epic poetry, currently more often invoked, of the ancient Hittites or the modern Yugoslavs.

Indonesian Literature’s Position in World Literature

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Western World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.

Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808-1908

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Point Model ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Tanzimat Reforms ◽  
The One

‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethno-national mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’ This is the central question of a book arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies. The book discusses the themes of public space/sphere, the Tanzimat reforms, millet, modernity, nationalism, governmentality, and the modern state, among others. It offers a new, thirteen-point model of modern belonging based on the concept of ruler visibility.

The 1945 World Order – Process with «Open» Continuation

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-79
Author(s):  
V. T. Yungblud
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
International Order ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Bipolar Structure ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations, established by culmination of World War II, was created to maintain the security and cooperation of states in the post-war world. Leaders of the Big Three, who ensured the Victory over the fascist-militarist bloc in 1945, made decisive contribution to its creation. This system cemented the world order during the Cold War years until the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the destruction of the bipolar structure of the organization of international relations. Post-Cold War changes stimulated the search for new structures of the international order. Article purpose is to characterize circumstances of foundations formation of postwar world and to show how the historical decisions made by the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition powers in 1945 are projected onto modern political processes. Study focuses on interrelated questions: what was the post-war world order and how integral it was? How did the political decisions of 1945 affect the origins of the Cold War? Does the American-centrist international order, that prevailed at the end of the 20th century, genetically linked to the Atlantic Charter and the goals of the anti- Hitler coalition in the war, have a future?Many elements of the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations in the 1990s survived and proved their viability. The end of the Cold War and globalization created conditions for widespread democracy in the world. The liberal system of international relations, which expanded in the late XX - early XXI century, is currently experiencing a crisis. It will be necessary to strengthen existing international institutions that ensure stability and security, primarily to create barriers to the spread of national egoism, radicalism and international terrorism, for have a chance to continue the liberal principles based world order (not necessarily within a unipolar system). Prerequisite for promoting idea of a liberal system of international relations is the adjustment of liberalism as such, refusal to unilaterally impose its principles on peoples with a different set of values. This will also require that all main participants in modern in-ternational life be able to develop a unilateral agenda for common problems and interstate relations, interact in a dialogue mode, delving into the arguments of opponents and taking into account their vital interests.

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