Conclusion: On the possibility of a non-Western IR theory in Asia

Abstract

1 Why the absence of non-Western IRT in Asia?

The question why there is no non-Western International Relations theory (IRT) required us to look at a number of areas. First, what is meant by IRT in the different countries of Asia under investigation? Second, what is the extent of Western dominance in these countries: are some countries under more such dominance than others? A related issue is to ascertain whether there are Western-inspired theories which are more popular in a given country than in another. A third question is to compare the main non-Western sources of IRT in each country, following our four-fold source matrix: classical ideas, the thinking of modern leaders and elites; attempts by IR scholars to apply Western theory to the local context (looking outside-in), and similar attempts by scholars to generalize from the local experience for an wider audience, but on its own terms (looking inside-out). In this section, we offer some generalizations from the four case-study essays about the reasons for the absence of non-Western IRT, in accordance with our five hypotheses. Perhaps the first point to make is that our driving question seems to be justified. There is not much current IRT to be found in Asia, even when using broad definitions of IR and theory. There is an abundance of pre-theoretical resources, but not all that much has been made of them and in some cases they have been largely forgotten or marginalized. We find Western dominance to be a uniform factor in all cases although it is difficult to rank countries in this way. The real distinction seems to be degree of interest in theoretical work per se, or the distinction between theoretical and atheoretical work. It is reasonable to assume that a great deal of work on international relations in Asia falls into the latter category, although this is changing, as economic and institutional conditions in Asian countries develop. This, however, does not automatically translate into great appeal and room for non-Western IRT; indeed, the reverse may be the case. Scholars are more likely to turn to Western IRT first before they discover the possibility and sources of non-Western IRT. So it is reasonable to look to our five causal hypotheses to see what the case studies reveal.

1. Western IRT has discovered the right path to understanding IR.

2. Western IRT has acquired hegemonic status in the Gramscian sense.

3. Non-Western IR theories do exist, but are hidden.

4. Local conditions discriminate against the production of IR theory.

5. The West has a big head-start, and what we are seeing is a period of catching up.

There is no suggestion in any of the essays that Western IRT is unchallengeable because it has found the right path to understanding IR. In this sense, IRT does not have the same standing as the natural sciences developed in the West. For them, their weight of authority broadly derives from an acceptance of method, agreement on epistemology, and acceptance of the knowledge produced as either true, or able to deliver on explanations and predictions, or at least as the best approach available. At least some of the dissatisfaction and/or disinterest in IRT in Asia arises from the perception that Western IRT does not adequately capture the needs and conditions to be found in Asia. We sense growing realization and dissatisfaction about the lack of fit between Western IRT and the local milieu, and this in turn suggests a clear link to the arguments of Badie (1992) about the highly imperfect way in which the Western state system was imposed on the Third-World. Moreover, there is a realization that the narrowness of Western IRT contributes to the marginalization not just of Asian scholars, but also of their countries. Interestingly, one manifestation of this is a sense of ‘alienation’ (Acharya, 2000), evident in the lack of interest in IRT in Asia. Arguably, this is part of the explanation for the atheoretical nature of work on international relations pertaining to Asia, because of the widespread view that IRT as it stands now has very limited applicability to Asia. Whether this is a matter of perception or reality can be debated, and to some extent, this is certainly a matter of perception (and a perfect excuse for not doing the hard work of mastering the IRT literature, especially in classrooms). But it is also a genuine concern in all the countries studied. The sense that IRT, not only as employed by Western scholars in their study of Asia, but also as used by local scholars in studying their home country, contributes to the marginalization of local scholarship and the country itself is perhaps more acute in India, although a similar sense is evident in Southeast Asia and China.

The case studies suggest that a much more powerful explanation for why there is no non-Western IRT in Asia is the hegemonic standing of Western IRT. Indeed, with the possible exception of China, this hegemony means that the expanding discipline of IR in Asia may generate more and not less Western dominance. The exception in China is qualified, however, because of the peculiar dominance, at least in terms of the four cases studied here, of Marxist and Maoist ideology and worldview. But once China began its process of reform and opened up to the world, its IR community almost naturally and quickly turned to Western theories and texts. It is only when Chinese became increasingly aware and convinced of their emerging and ‘unstoppable’ status as a world power that they started looking to the possibility of a Chinese IRT, or at least at IRT with ‘Chinese characteristics’. This may suggest that the link between power and ideas applies as much to China as to the West, although we do not foresee a Chinese dominance of Asian IRT, in the way Western IRT has shaped global IRT. Apart from the fact, as will be seen later, that national approaches to the development of IRT (including IRT in China, as Qin's essay shows) remain important, Chinese ideational dominance in East Asia, past and future, can be overstated, especially by those who imagine Asia's return to the benign power configurations of a tributary system. (Kang, 2003; Acharya, 2003/04)

The situation is different in Southeast Asia, which has no aspiration to great power status, where IRT has had less appeal (or where writings on IR tend to be more atheoretical than in Northeast Asia). Here, there is a growing realization among the academic community that Western IRT inadequately captures a regional dynamics that centres around efforts by a group of weaker states to construct a regional order binding the great powers of the current international system. This challenges the top-down conception of both power politics and multilateralism that has dominated Western IRT. Moreover, this disjuncture between the power bias of Western IRT and the regional dynamics of Southeast Asia cannot be appreciated by the ‘modernization’ perspective which, as Alan Chong's essay shows, is commonly found in post-war theoretical framings of Southeast Asia's politics and international relations.

The conjecture that non-Western theories exist but are hidden from the public eye (in this case the global community of IR scholars) is only marginally relevant to our overall question. Unless they are very well hidden indeed, even from the eyes of the four case-study authors, it is not the case that an undiscovered horde of IR theoretical riches lies unrecognized in Asia. Language is no doubt a barrier, as much within Asia as between it and the West. IRT relevant material could also still lurk in places where the hegemonic form of IRT would not suggest that one look. But we suspect that while there are no doubt significant cultural barriers to entry from outside into the Western IR discourse, most of what is hidden is pre-theoretical resources rather than fully fledged ‘Asian’ conceptions of international relations.

Our fourth hypothesis about local conditions discriminating against the development of IRT also seems powerful, though very varied in form from place to place. The paucity of institutions, journals, research cultures, career incentives, research resources, and training facilities is especially acute in Southeast Asia (other than Singapore), and is also a major problem in India. It would have been true of China until recently, but now the institutional side of IR is developing rapidly there. The impact of how IR came to develop in particular countries is also influential, particularly in terms of what discipline (e.g. political science, history, law, sociology, area studies) acted as the carrier for IR. Japan offers a quite different take on local conditions, where there is an IR discourse, but it is quite inward looking.

The fifth hypothesis that the West has a head start is also powerful. Perhaps the main test here will be the challenge hypothesized in the China essay about the imminent rise of a ‘Chinese school’ of IR. Playing catch-up does not and need not mean that Asia is in a mere copying mode, whether it comes to developing theories of international relations or practices from which such theories can be derived. Copying may be part of the process, especially in its early phases, but there is room for divergent development. More on this in the next section.

2 Is non-Western IRT possible in Asia?

Our project, the essays included in this special issue and the discussions at the Project Workshop in Singapore, throws up a number of important issues concerning the possibility of a non-Western IRT in a situation where Western IRT has seemingly hegemonic status. In the sections below, we discuss a number of conceptual and practical issues that must be addressed if one is to talk meaningfully about the possibility of non-Western IRT generalizing from the Asian experience (at least that of parts of Asia). For reasons that will become clear below, we are not, repeat not, concerned with identifying or advocating an Asian School of international relations. This would link us to constructs (and debates surrounding them), such as Asian values, Asian democracy, Asian Way, etc. We want to stay clear of such reifications which, while they have their usefulness in building non-Western IRT, are also hugely problematic because of the extent of generalizations they involve, and the suspicions they evoke as an elite-driven and politically motivated exercise. Our main concern here is: can one use Asia as the basis for generalization that could meaningfully address the disjuncture between IRT and the universality of human experience?

The first issue has to do with the fact that the West/non-West distinction may cause some unease as being old-fashioned and confrontational and misleading given the diversity that undoubtedly exists within both camps. It is not possible to give any concrete or precise definition to what constitutes non-Western, not the least because it would involve making judgements about what is ‘West’. Moreover, it can be argued that there exists now a single global conversation (or confrontation in some views) which is impossible to unpick into West/non-West. While acknowledging this reservation, we still believe that a critical review of IRT that highlights the marginal place of non-Western experience, discourses, and up to a point persons, is defensible and important not just because different histories exist, but also because very substantial North–South differences in the ideational and practical world of international relations continue to exist. These differences are not just political (the very unevenly realized transplant of the European state to the rest of the world) and economic (position in the centre-periphery structures of the liberal international economic order), but also cultural (ways of thinking, different conceptions of inside/outside).

Just because International Relations is an increasingly globalized subject of academic teaching and research today, in terms of courses on IR being taught in more countries and in more universities within countries (as is borne out in the China essay in this volume), does not mean it is being universalized. The latter would require greater incorporation of ideas from the non-West and contributions by non-Western scholars from local vantage-points. This clearly has not happened in any general way, though as the essay on Japan suggests, there are some enclaves of localism. If we mean by ‘a single global conversation’ that people are no longer thinking along the lines of West versus the rest or North–South, then this is far from an accomplished project. Contributions like post-colonialism in IR, Indian sub-alternism (e.g. Spivak, 1988) and Mohammed Ayoob's (1998) notion of ‘subaltern realism’ attest to a continuing effort to represent the South as a distinctive political and intellectual space.

Moreover, we see evidence that far from becoming a single global conversation, IRT is developing along regional or sub-regional lines: hence we have a distinctive ideational and constructivist turn in continental Europe, which challenges US dominance of the field. In this context, our focus on Asia suggests that we are not assuming the non-West to be a homogenous category. Recent debates about Asian regionalism contrasting its trajectory from European regional institutions, underscore the importance of the regional focus as a sub-set of non-Western IRT. Peter Katzenstein's recent book A World of Regions, which compares European and Asian regional orders under the assumption that these are the two most ‘important’ regions of the world today, is a good example of such ‘regionalized’ West/non-West differences in thinking and praxis about IR (Katzenstein, 2005). So too is Buzan and Wæver's Regions and Powers, which shows how different the conditions of international security are in different regions (Buzan and Wæver, 2003). And as noted in our introductory essay, studies of Western IR also show significant patterns of differentiation not only between the US and Europe, but also within Europe. On this basis, we should not have high expectations of an Asian approach to IR emerging. The injection of Asian experience and thinking into the global debates about IR seems much more likely to come in more fragmented forms, the nature of which is suggested by the essays on China and Japan.

It is also possible to view (and dismiss) the West/non-West framing of IRT as a matter of simple disjuncture between the modern and the premodern. In this sense, Western IRT reflects a modernist enterprise, while that of the non-West remains mired in pre-modern discourses and practices. We are deeply uncomfortable with such dichotomization. As Alan Chong's essay in this collection shows, the tendency in the West to see Southeast Asia as a pre-modern entity, and as a poor and sometimes laggard student in the process of modernization is highly overstated. International relations in the region, as elsewhere in the developing world, is much more complex and multi-faceted than these simplistic and outdated labels would imply. What, for example, is ‘premodern’ about the non-alignment doctrine, discussed in Behera's essay in this collection, so popular in India during the Cold War? Can China's uncompromising adherence to Westphalian sovereignty, which Qin discusses in his essay here, be considered ‘premodern’? Perhaps we are dealing with the disjuncture between modern and post-modern here, but even these distinctions are problematic: how is the US approach to state sovereignty, especially when it comes to outside role in its own domestic affairs, post-modern?

Following Ayoob (1995), we do not question that there may be a certain element of ‘time lag’ between the international relations of the non-Western world and that of the West, especially in terms of experience in state formation. But in our view, this does not mean that Asian or developing countries are simply in a ‘catch-up’ mode. We allow for the possibility, as raised in all of the case study essays, that the latter could move in entirely different trajectories towards outcomes that are constitutively distinct from the West, or at least could ‘localize’ the pattern of international relations established in the West in ways that injects substantially distinctive local elements which would require a significant broadening of IRT, if it is to become a truly universal discipline.

We would also agree to a certain extent with the view (most strongly developed by Qin in this special issue) that Asian states have been cut off from their own classical intellectual resources and need to rediscover them and reconnect. This means a certain amount of look back or rediscovery of one's past. This is why we have identified classical ideas and experiences as one possible source of non-Western IRT. But this is hardly unique to Asia or to non-Western approaches to IRT. IRT as developed in the West drew heavily, and continues to do so, from the thinking of classical figures, dating back to the Greco-Roman era, and patterns of inter-state relations in the premodern periods of Western history. Why cannot the same happen in the non-West? At the dawn of the post-colonial era in Asia, for example, there was a growing awareness in the region that Asia needed to rediscover its past. More recently, the re-emergence of China and India as world powers has led to a tendency among academics to reassert their historical identities and practices as the basis for thinking about contemporary international relations. Some of it may seem rather controversial and self-serving, for example: attempts to justify India's claim to be a nuclear power from the Vedic notion of the ultimate weapon Brahmastra (Karnad, 2002); or efforts by some Chinese scholars to evoke the ‘peaceful’ voyages of the famous 15th century Ming Dynasty Admiral Zheng Ho as a metaphor for the peaceful rise of China. But such efforts, which have their own parallels in the West, do also underscore the existence of a classical tradition of statecraft in Asia which can be used as the basis for IRT, in support of both power politics and cooperative/communitarian politics.

Another possible objection to our concern with non-Western IRT arises from the fact that many of the leaders we cite as sources of pre-theory were Western educated or heavily influenced by Western ideas. Hence, their contributions cannot legitimately be regarded as non-Western. This is true to some extent, but does not invalidate our approach and interest. We recognize that non-Western IRT can develop in opposition not only to Western ideas and approaches espoused by Western agents, but also non-Western agents who are educated in and influenced by the West. Hence we allow for the possibility that sources of non-Western IRT must also include resistance to Western ideologies espoused by local elites and governments in the non-West. Moreover, although we have looked at the ideas and approaches of anti-colonial and more contemporary leaders in the non-West as but one of a range of possible sources of non-Western IRT, the above generalization does not apply to all the nationalist leaders. Burma's Aung San went to Japan. Sometimes, being in a Western environment could trigger a greater yearning for returning to one's local intellectual roots; a fact illustrated somewhat perversely in the case of some Muslim extremists in the West today. More importantly, those who did not accept or adopt Western ideas about governance or international relations uncritically might, in most cases, engineer considerable adaptations to ideas learnt abroad. One example here is Mahatma Gandhi's concept of non-violence, an idea he initially borrowed from the Western notion of ‘passive resistance’, but which became the basis of his approach to anti-colonial resistance and international relations only after being reshaped as satyagraha. In so doing, Gandhi married ‘passive resistance’ with the ‘traditions of nonviolent resistance and of saints offering political advice, in his native region of Kathiawar,’ in Gujurat, India (Green, 1998).¹ So abstract Western ideas learned by nationalist non-Western leaders or intellectuals are not important in their own right: its how these are ‘localized’ (Acharya, 2004) and developed in practice that constitutes a more authentic source of non-Western IRT.

The contextualization of Western ideas and the importance of praxis is strikingly evident in the case of Marxist IRT. Some argue that much of the first-round response of the non-West to Western hegemony was framed in variations of Marxism, taking a basically oppositional stance using Western intellectual resources against the West. But while Marxism did exercise a considerable appeal in some places, local variations in Marxist ideology, were undoubtedly important, as in Mao's formulations on peasant struggle and the broader three worlds theory that in some ways developed from it. The same applies to nationalism, another Western idea around which not only the first round of Third-World's response to Western hegemony, but the initial foundations of the Third-World's approach to international relations (such as non-alignment) were framed. Nationalism (without Marxist connotations, although the two could be fused in cases such as Vietnam) was a more popular response to Western dominance because it could be more easily grafted onto local historical traditions and even polities, including historical memories of the struggle against foreign invaders and occupiers of all sorts. The ultimate triumph of nationalism over Marxism in places like India and Indonesia was due to the fact that nationalism had more grafting potential onto the indigenous consciousness, and would ultimately prevail not only over imperialism, but also over Marxism itself. Moreover, the defeat of Marxist approaches to resistance to Western hegemony offers another reason why Western IR theory has found little appeal in Asia and why there is now a search for alternatives drawing upon local histories, experiences, and needs. In a very important sense, the Third-World, including much of Asia, thus suffered a double defeat/humiliation: not just the crushing of its own pre-modern traditions and cultural/political legitimacy, but also the defeat of its first choice of ideas (Marxism) around which to build independent post-colonial resistance and legitimacy. This double defeat and weakening in confronting the hegemony of Western ideas is a powerful factor that underlines the growing discomfort with Western IRT in the non-West, including in Japan where, as Inoguchi's essay demonstrates, Marxism had been a popular element in the IRT in the post-war period.

So is a non-Western IRT possible given not just the head-start and pervasive influence of Western IRT, but also the global imposition of the European state and its distinctive form of inside/outside relationships? Yes and no. The four case studies certainly suggest that there are significant non-Western intellectual and historical resources to feed such a development. They also suggest ample motive for such development in the different positions, needs and cultures of countries outside the Western core. Although the four case studies here are all from Asia, their content suggests that similar resources and motives will exist in other parts of the non-West than East and South Asia. Since there is no suggestion in these studies that Western IRT has found all the answers, it should also be possible to envisage the erosion of both the West's intellectual hegemony in this field and the effects of its head-start. As Japanese industrialization has shown, there is no reason to believe that the initiator in any field of human endeavor either possesses all of the answers or can hold their lead indefinitely. So in principle, there is room for non-Western IRT as well as need and sources for it.

That said, however, one must not underestimate the advantages of the first mover or the difficulties of overcoming them. Western IRT has not only built the stage and written the play, but also defined and institutionalized the audience for IR and IRT. Latecomers face not only the brute fact of the post-colonial international political economy, but also the embedded construction of IRT. Most of them will already have been penetrated heavily by both the brute fact and the construction. They do not start with a clean slate. Like second and third phase industrilalizers, new entrants to IRT thus face a range of choices. As suggested earlier, they can simply join in to the existing game seeking to add local color and cases to existing theory. This is perhaps so far the main response in Asia. A bit more ambitiously, they could strive for localist exceptionalism a la ‘Asian values’ and ‘ASEAN way’ of diplomacy. Here the main driver would be the relationship between distinctive local praxis within international society and the local development (or not) of IRT as a distinctive way of thinking about this. Yet more ambitiously, they can construct themselves as rebellions against prevailing orthodoxies (most obviously realism and liberalism) as dependencia theory once sought to do. Doing this would mean increasing the diversity of what is already a very diverse field. Western IRT is not a static target. It already contains many critical strands against its mainstream orthodoxies. Perhaps this is where the emerging ‘Chinese school’, or any other theory driven by the Coxian imperative to be for some purpose and for some interest group, might find their place.

Most ambitious of all, late-comers could seek to replace Western-IRT by offering some alternative way of conceptualizing the world political economy. This seems unlikely. While Western IRT almost certainly does not have all the answers, it does contain a very wide range of approaches, which makes it quite difficult to outflank with something wholly new, especially so long as the hard reality of the Western style of international political economy continues to dominate real existing international relations. The internal dynamism of Western IRT also counts here. There are already many powerful challenges to realist and liberal orthodoxies. The globalization perspective, as noted in our introduction essay, posits a rising tension between territorialist and de-territorializing dynamics in the world political economy, looking forward to a fundamental transformation in the whole inside/outside construction of the world political economy. This perspective might be a natural home for those seeking to bring into IRT the historical resources of Asian models that take a less divided view of domestic and international than that underpinning much Western IRT. If there is to be a wholesale transformation of IRT, it is more likely to come about from a combination of the internal dynamics of the Western debates with the impact on non-Western inputs than from the victory of a wholly outside new construction.

Western IRT does not, in our view, need to be replaced (though some might think that it does). It needs more voices and a wider rooting not just in world history but also in informed representations of both core and periphery perspectives within the ever-evolving world political economy. To resort to the oldest IR theory of them all, the likely role of non-Western IRT is to change the balance of power within the debates, and in so doing change the priorities, perspective and interests that those debates embody. Mainstream IRT may have been for the West and for its interests, and there is no doubt that this skewing needs to be rectified by the inclusion of a wider range of voices. But there is also no doubt 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.

References