Community of common destiny: China’s “new assertiveness” and the changing Asian order

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen N. Smith
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Great Power ◽  
English School ◽  
Xi Jinping ◽  
The West ◽  
Normative Basis ◽  
Common Destiny ◽  
Modes Of Governance

This essay will discuss China’s re-emergence as a great power through the lens of the English School. Following Ian Clark, I reconceptualize international society as a set of historically changing principles of legitimacy. I argue that China’s “new assertiveness” under Xi Jinping is best explained by China’s pursuit of legitimacy in an international arena where norms of legitimate modes of governance, development, and ordering principles have long been defined by the West. Furthermore, this essay will examine one recent development in Chinese International Relations theory, gongsheng, which purports to offer an alternative normative basis for interstate order, and probe its relationship to Xi Jinping’s recent declaration to build a “community of common destiny” in Asia.

The Historical Expansion of International Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Richard Little
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Society ◽  
English School ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Planetary Scale ◽  
The World ◽  
Related Line

For most English School writers, the international society is an element that is always present in international relations, but whose depth, character, and influence all fluctuate with historical contingency. The historical wing of the English School focuses on how the contemporary global international society came about as a result of the expansion to planetary scale of what was originally a novel type of international society that emerged in early modern Europe. This is partly a story of power and imposition, and partly one of the successful spread and internalization beyond the West of Western ideas such as sovereignty and nationalism. It is also a story about what happens when international society expands beyond the cultural heartland which gave birth to it. The classical story has been critiqued for being too Eurocentric and underplaying the fact that European international society did not emerge fully formed in Europe and then spread from there to the rest of the world. Rather, it developed as it did substantially because it was already spreading as it emerged, and was thus in its own way as much shaped by the encounter as was the non-European world. A related line of critique points out the conspicuous and Eurocentric failure of the classical story to feature the fact that colonialism was a core institution of European international society.

The nineteenth century liberal tradition and the English School historical narrative

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-189
Author(s):  
Daniel M Green
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Previous Experiment ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
English School ◽  
The West ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
New Imperialism

This article uses the framework of “traditions of thought” and “dilemmas” to problematize and revise the English School’s Expansion Narrative of international relations history in the crucial nineteenth century, when the forms and practices of “European international society” expanded to dominate the world’s international relations. An exercise in historicizing and contextualizing the broader liberal tradition of international thought brings into focus a period of liberal ideas and policies in the first-half of the nineteenth century, before Expansion and the New Imperialism, and a particular “free trade” liberal order project adopted by Britain in the years 1830–1865 in particular. This brings a different perspective to the ES historical narrative of expansion of the European international society into a “global international society.” The article contextualizes ideas in the nineteenth century liberal tradition by highlighting a British global “unipolar moment” and the order project that accompanied it. It discusses the “dilemmas” that prompted the closing of that era and a shift in British thought and policy during the 1860s. These laid the foundation for the Expansion the English School focuses on after 1870, but also constitute a previous experiment in the engagement of the West with the Rest, with different potentialities, before the final onslaught of global-scale conquest.

scholarly journals Abazi, Enika, & Albert Doja (2016) "International Representations of Balkan Wars: A Socio-Anthropological Account in International Relations Perspective" Cambridge Review of International Affairs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enika Abazi ◽  
Albert Doja
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Balkan Wars ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This article introduces the socio-anthropological concept of international representations to examine the relationship between a civilizational rhetoric, the West European and the international politics of otherization and containment of Southeast Europe, and an essentialist and timeless bias in international relations theory, including both radical and constructivist trends. We first explore the different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars from the beginning to the end of twentieth century. Their subsequent problematization is aimed at challenging the way how they have constructed commonplace and time-worn representations, which international society shares with different consequences in international affairs. This is a limited conception since international representations as a socio-anthropological concept are always socially, culturally and politically constructed, contested and negotiated. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. Moreover, this limited conception ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interest international representations are constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way international representations are constructed can be problematized as an example of political and ideological projects that operate in the West as well as in the Southeast European countries that are the object of Western foreign policy.

Chinese Thinking on the Future of International Relations: Realism as the Ti, Rationalism as the Yong?

2009 ◽  
Vol 197 ◽  
pp. 87-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Lynch
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Analytical Techniques ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
English School ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Intellectual Elites

AbstractChina's evidently unstoppable “rise” energizes PRC political and intellectual elites to think seriously about the future of international relations. How will (and should) China's international roles change in the forthcoming decades? How should its leaders put the country's rapidly-increasing power to use? Foreign China specialists have tended to use an overly-streamlined “resisting” the West versus “co-operating” with it (or even simpler “optimistic” versus “pessimistic”) scale to address such questions, partly reflecting the divide between Realism and Neoliberalism in American international relations theory. By 2002, a near-consensus had developed (though never shared universally) that China had become an increasingly co-operative power since the mid-1990s and would continue to pursue the policy prescriptions of Neoliberal international relations theory. But using more nuanced “English school” analytical techniques – and examining the writings of Chinese elites themselves, aimed solely at Chinese audiences – this article discovers an unmistakably cynical Realism to be still at the core of Chinese thinking on the international future. Even elites who appear sincere in their promotion of co-operation firmly reject “solidarism” among the world's leading states and insist upon upholding the difference between China and all others. Many demand – and foresee – China using its future power to pursue world objectives that would depart in significant respects from those of the other leading states and non-state actors.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Youde
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
English School ◽  
Global Health Governance ◽  
Health Governance ◽  
Empirical Reality

The introduction lays out the basic questions at the heart of the book: why has the international community moved from seeing health as a marginal issue to understanding it as something vital and deserving of attention? It presents the notion that this shift can be understood by interpreting global health governance as a secondary institution within international society and as part of a larger notion of moral obligation and responsibility. In this way, it draws on the English School of international relations theory to explain an empirical reality in global politics. Finally, the introduction outlines the rest of the chapters in the book and how they will help build the argument.

Hobbes among International Relations Thinkers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Boucher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
English School ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
International Issues ◽  
Civil Condition ◽  
The Individual

Among philosophers and historians of political thought Hobbes has little or nothing to say about relations among states. For modern realists and representatives of the English School in contemporary international relations theory, however, caricatures of Hobbes abound. There is a tendency to take him too literally, referring to what is called the unmodified philosophical state of nature, ignoring what he has to say about both the modified state of nature and the historical pre-civil condition. They extrapolate from the predicament of the individual conclusions claimed to be pertinent to international relations, and on the whole find his conclusions unconvincing. It is demonstrated that there is a much more restrained and cautious Hobbes, consistent with his timid nature, in which he gives carefully weighed views on a variety of international issues, recommending moderation consistent with the duties of sovereignty.

Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The World ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.

scholarly journals Anarchy in International Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silviya Lechner
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
English School ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Interaction Domain ◽  
Alternative Discourse ◽  
The Third ◽  
Analytical Review ◽  
International Anarchy

The concept of anarchy is seen as the cardinal organizing category of the discipline of International Relations (IR), which differentiates it from cognate disciplines such as Political Science or Political Philosophy. This article provides an analytical review of the scholarly literature on anarchy in IR, on two levels—conceptual and theoretical. First, it distinguishes three senses of the concept of anarchy: (1) lack of a common superior in an interaction domain; (2) chaos or disorder; and (3) horizontal relation between nominally equal entities, sovereign states. The first and the third senses of “anarchy”’ are central to IR. Second, it considers three broad families of IR theory where anarchy figures as a focal assumption—(1) realism and neorealism, (2) English School theory (international society approach), and (3) Kant’s republican peace. Despite normative and conceptual differences otherwise, all three bodies of theory are ultimately based on Hobbes’s argument for a “state of nature.” The article concludes with a summary of the key challenges to the discourse of international anarchy posed by the methodology of economics and economics-based theories that favor the alternative discourse of global hierarchy.

Introduction

After Lavinia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Watkins
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
English School ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Public Theaters

This book examines the role of marriage in the formation, maintenance, and disintegration of a premodern European diplomatic society. The argument develops in dialogue with the so-called English school of international relations theory, with its emphasis on the contemporary international system as a society of states sharing certain values, norms, and common interests rather than as an anarchy driven solely by power struggles. In studying the place of marriage diplomacy in questions of monarchical and national sovereignty, the book draws on interdisciplinary methodologies that have long characterized academic studies of queenship and, more recently, European diplomatic culture. It begins with Virgil, whose epic tells the story of Aeneas's marriage to Lavinia—the paradigmatic interdynastic marriage. It also considers the inseparability of marriage diplomacy from literary production. Finally, it discusses the factors that precipitated the disintegration of marriage diplomacy, including new technologies of print and the large public theaters for promoting diplomatic literacy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document