Abstract
The theoretical framework focuses on the interlocking relationship between order-building, ontological security and legitimation practices for both incumbent and aspiring hegemons. It conceptualises international order as a hierarchical political formation that requires a constantly renegotiated social compact among member states to legitimately settle the rules and arrangements. Renegotiation is open to contestation when an emergent aspiring power harbours intentions to dislodge the existing leading state. An ontological security lens exposes the need for consistency in the narratives and routines that states use to sustain predictability and certainty in the (re)production of collective self-identity. Since order-building reflects the identity and preferences of the incumbent and aspiring hegemons, problems arise when one’s identity is not recognised by the other, creating ontological dissonance in autobiographical narratives and forcing an emotional reaction to perceptions of past unjust treatment. Ontological security-seeking states are compelled to order territorial space to maintain their own ontological security.
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Notes
- 1.
By ‘self’, we mean a state’s collective (self) identity, which, through narratives and routines, seeks to establish and maintain a sense of internal ‘we-ness’ which can be projected onto the world as a unified identity. More will be said on this throughout this chapter.
- 2.
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, third edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 8, 16–19.
- 3.
Andrew Hurrell, “Foreword to the Third Edition: The Anarchical Society 25 Years On,” in Bull, The Anarchical Society, vii–xxiii at x–xi, xiii. Quotation on p. xiii and emphasis added.
- 4.
Catherine Jones, China’s Challenge to Liberal Norms: The Durability of Liberal Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 29. See also Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (2009): 58–85, at 61.
- 5.
Bull, The Anarchical Society, Chaps. 3, 5–9. For similar critiques about English School’s theorising of order-building, see Goh, The Struggle for Order, 21, no. 64; Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 40–42.
- 6.
We draw primarily on Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 36 (emphasis added); Goh, The Struggle for Order, 6, 202; Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 30–31; Lebow, The Rise and Fall of Political Orders, 8 (emphasis added). Note that universal membership is not necessarily required for international order. Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 30.
- 7.
Michael O. Slobodchikoff, Building Hegemonic Order Russian Way: Order, Stability, and Predictability in the Post-Soviet Space (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 3; Robert Stewart-Ingersoll and Derrick Frazier, Regional Powers and Security Orders (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 8. The notion of ‘ordering moments’ come from Ikenberry, After Victory.
- 8.
Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 28, 47–66.
- 9.
Charles A. Kupchan, “The Normative Foundations of Hegemony and the Coming Challenge to Pax Americana,” Security Studies 23, no. 2 (2014): 219–257 at 221.
- 10.
Ikenberry, After Victory, 3–20, 22–23; Stewart-Ingersoll and Frazier, Regional Powers and Security Orders, 18.
- 11.
Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 11.
- 12.
Michael Mastanduno, “Incomplete Hegemony and Security Order in the Asia-Pacific,” in America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, ed. G. John Ikenberry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 181–210 at 182. For a similar discussion of the primary goals of international order, see Bull, The Anarchical Society, 16–19.
- 13.
For more on the concept of delegitimation in the realist purview, see Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 160–178.
- 14.
Lebow, The Rise and Fall of Political Orders, 5.
- 15.
Lebow, The Rise and Fall of Political Orders, 86–90.
- 16.
Goddard, When Right Makes Might.
- 17.
A typical proposition is hegemonic stability theory. See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
- 18.
Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 3.
- 19.
Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 4.
- 20.
Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 4. Identity, according to Mitzen and Larson, is not ‘a set of properties or core essence that we simply have, but… a social construct, formed and sustained via practices and relations with others, including our embeddedness in social structures’. Jennifer Mitzen and Kyle Larson, “Ontological Security and Foreign Policy,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.458
- 21.
Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 7.
- 22.
Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics, 30–31.
- 23.
Ian Clark, Hegemony in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
- 24.
Clark, Hegemony in International Society, 6, 8. His approach is similar to the Gramscian and neo-Gramscian approaches to hegemony. See also Bentley B. Allan, Srdjan Vucetic and Ted Hopf, “The Distribution of Identity and the Future of International Order: China’s Hegemonic Prospects,” International Organization 72, no. 4 (2018): 839–869, for a constructivist account of hegemonic transition in light of China’s rise. We agree with them that hegemonic orders are not only shaped by material power (a thin conception of hegemony) but also built on legitimating ideologies that are consistent with the distribution of identity at the elite and mass levels among great powers (a thick conception of hegemony); however, we express in terms of legitimation strategy below.
- 25.
The emotional context of the formation of subjectivity and identity is highlighted by Mitzen, who posits that our self-understandings are formulated against the backdrop of existential anxiety. Ontological security-seeking is a means to avoid that anxiety. Ontological security strategies are thus concerned with anxiety avoidance and/or anxiety management. See Jennifer Mitzen, “Anxious Community: EU as (In)security Community,” European Security 27, no. 3 (2018): 393–413 at 395–6.
- 26.
Trine Flockhart, “The Problem of Change in Constructivist Theory: Ontological Security Seeking and Agent Motivation,” Review of International Studies 42, no. 5 (2016): 799–820.
- 27.
Marco A. Vieira, “Understanding Resilience in International Relations: The Non-Aligned Movement and Ontological Security,” International Studies Review 18, no. 2 (2016): 290–311 at 293.
- 28.
Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (2006): 341–370.
- 29.
Karl Gustafsson, “Routinised Recognition and Anxiety: Understanding the Deterioration in Sino-Japanese Relations,” Review of International Studies 42, no. 4 (2016): 613–633 at 616.
- 30.
Vincent Della Sala, ‘Narrating Europe: The EU’s Ontological Security Dilemma,’ European Security 27, no. 3 (2018): 266–279.
- 31.
Mitzen and Larson, “Ontological Security and Foreign Policy,” 3.
- 32.
Brent J. Steele, “Welcome Home! Routines, Ontological Insecurity and the Politics of US Military Reunion Videos,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32, no. 3 (2019): 322–343 at 324.
- 33.
Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2008). Mitzen argues that intrinsic identities can be maintained within a society, while roles are expressed in behaviour that must be recognised by others as fulfilling that particular role. This role must be externally validated and recognised. Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics,” 358.
- 34.
Alexandria Innes and Brent J. Steele, “Memory, Trauma and Ontological Security,” in Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates, eds. Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 15–29 at 17.
- 35.
Kinnvall and Mitzen, “An Introduction to the Special Issue,” 6, 7. For China, the most traumatic event that disrupted its linear narrative as a regional hegemon of East Asia was the ‘Century of Humiliation’ (c. 1839–1945) during which China was invaded by European powers and Japan, and territories were lost to them. To secure a self-identity as a great power through space is essential for China to confront the anxiety caused by the loss of China’s great-power status. It may also be argued that the Obama administration’s strategic rebalance and the succeeding Trump administration’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific represented an obstruction to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s centenary celebrations in 2049, which should see the efforts of rejuvenation of the past 100 years (1949–2049) come to fruition.
- 36.
Emphasis in the original. Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2–3. Narratives expound, for instance, a shared sense of ‘destiny’, history and territorial integrity. Narratives about territories and borders are often used by political elites for social construction of collective identities. Narratives are more emotional if the territorial sovereignty is disputed. See Kinnvall et al., ‘Introduction to 2018 Special Issue of European Security,’ 253.
- 37.
Ayşe Zarakol, “Ontological (in)security and State Denial of Historical Crimes: Turkey and Japan,” International Relations 24, no. 1 (2010): 3–23 at 6.
- 38.
Vieira, “Understanding Resilience in International Relations,” 295.
- 39.
See, for example, Vieira, “Understanding Resilience in International Relations”; Catarina Kinnvall, “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity and the Search for Ontological Security,” Political Psychology 25, no. 5 (2004): 741–767.
- 40.
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 245.
- 41.
Jenena Subotić and Ayşe Zarakol, “Cultural Intimacy in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 4 (2012): 915–938 at 918.
- 42.
Vieira, “Understanding Resilience in International Relations,” 295.
- 43.
Innes and Steele, “Memory, Trauma and Ontological Security,” 17.
- 44.
We consider the various understandings of trauma later in this chapter.
- 45.
To secure certainty of its independent existence, including its value system and self-beliefs, and to avoid feelings of shame in an anarchical international environment, states desire, although may not often be able to attain, ‘positive freedom’—the wish to be one’s own master. Isiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty, ed., Isiah Berlin (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–172, at 131, cited in Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 67.
- 46.
Jens Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” International Theory: A Journal of International Politics, Law and Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2013): 107–129 at 109.
- 47.
Paul Ricœur, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 25.
- 48.
Ricœur, The Course of Recognition, 69–149.
- 49.
Ricœur, The Course of Recognition, 150–218.
- 50.
Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 108.
- 51.
Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 109.
- 52.
Theories of political recognition explore the constitution of states through interaction, the emergence of the modern international system as a by-product of those processes, and change and continuity in international social structures. In the struggle for political recognition, which occurs predominantly between superordinate and subordinate states, it is the stronger state that has the power to grant or withhold recognition from the weaker one. Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 109, 111.
- 53.
Legal theories emphasise the norm of sovereign equality, providing the legal framework that determines qualification as a member of international society based on precise and commonly shared criterial of statehood. Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 114.
- 54.
Moral recognition moves beyond the recognition of equal rights to emphasise the ‘mutual recognition of collective identities’. Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 110, 118.
- 55.
While analytically distinct, these concepts also logically and historically interrelate due to the inherent ambiguities in the concept of recognition. Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 107–129.
- 56.
Subotić and Zarakol, “Cultural Intimacy in International Relations,” 920.
- 57.
Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 121.
- 58.
Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 121. See also Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society.
- 59.
Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 124 (emphasis added). See also Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat, especially Chap. 2.
- 60.
Zarakol, After Defeat, 38.
- 61.
The interrelatedness of the three mechanisms of recognition is discussed in Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 121–2. Recognition presupposes prior identification and identification presupposes the ability to distinguish between those actors fit for recognition from those who are not. The nature of classification determines who is to be included and who is to be excluded, and is typically based on the ideas, interests and values of the dominant powers.
- 62.
Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society.
- 63.
Zarakol, After Defeat, 94.
- 64.
If partially excluded outsider states attempt to create their own norms, or contest existing norms, they may be labelled as revisionist.
- 65.
Zarakol, After Defeat, 97–98.
- 66.
Subotić and Zarakol, “Cultural Intimacy in International Relations,” 920.
- 67.
Subotić and Zarakol, “Cultural Intimacy in International Relations,” 916.
- 68.
Jennifer Gronau and Henning Schmidtke, “The Quest for Legitimacy in World Politics – International Institutions’ Legitimation Strategies,” Review of International Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 535–557 at 539.
- 69.
Gronau and Schmidtke, “The Quest for Legitimacy in World Politics,” 541; Stacie E. Goddard, “When Right Makes Might: How Prussia Overturned the European Balance of Power,” International Security 33, no. 3 (2008/09): 110–142, at 121; Stacie E. Goddard, “Rhetoric of Appeasement: Hitler’s Legitimation and British Foreign Policy, 1938–39,” Security Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 95–130, at 107. Jackson argues that legitimation claims are ‘through and through rhetorical, in that they are forms of speech designed to achieve victory in a public discussion’. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 27 (emphasis in original).
- 70.
Expansion through coercive force, even if successful, often carries considerable cost to major powers, especially to rising powers. Goddard, When Right Makes Might, 21.
- 71.
This is also in line with Goddard’s argument that “Although all states justify their foreign policies, a rising power’s legitimation strategy is particular significant. There is no more uncertain time in international politics than during a power transition.” Goddard, “When Right Makes Might,” 122.
- 72.
Gustafsson, “Routinised Recognition and Anxiety,” 618.
- 73.
Bartelson, “Three Concepts of Recognition,” 110; see also: Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, 27.
- 74.
Drawing on Finnermore’s remark about attacks on legitimacy as the ‘weapons of the weak’, we may expect that the secondary states in Southeast Asia may try to undercut the legitimacy of China’s order-building because they are unable to balance against China’s military and economic power. Finnermore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity,” 66.
- 75.
Goddard, “Rhetoric of Appeasement,” 108–109.
- 76.
Goddard, “When Right Makes Might,” 123; Goddard, When Right Makes Might, 28–29.
- 77.
Goddard, When Right Makes Might, 27.
- 78.
See Chap. 6 for more details.
- 79.
Thomas Lindemann, “Concluding Remarks on the Empirical Study of International Recognition,” in The International Politics of Recognition, eds. Thomas Lindemann and Erik Ringmar (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 209–223 at 209–10.
- 80.
This approach is utilised by the contributors to The International Politics of Recognition, eds. Thomas Lindemann and Erik Ringmar (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012).
- 81.
Thomas Lindemann, “The Case for an Empirical and Social-Psychological Study of Recognition in International Relations,” International Theory: A Journal of International Politics, Law and Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2013): 150–155 at 152 (emphasis added).
- 82.
Lindemann, “The Case for an Empirical and Social-Psychological Study of Recognition in International Relations,” 152.
- 83.
Lindemann, “The Case for an Empirical and Social-Psychological Study of Recognition in International Relations,” 151.
- 84.
Thomas Lindemann, Causes of War: The Struggle for Recognition (Colchester: ECPR, 2010), 28.
- 85.
How are emotions of non-recognition detectable? Non-recognition and emotional responses are inherently difficult to empirically grasp. A state’s emotional reaction to perceived non-recognition is dependent on the level of anxiety, or on how ontologically secure it feels. See Lindemann, “The Case for an Empirical and Social-Psychological Study of Recognition in International Relations,” 153.
- 86.
For an in-depth study of the manifestation of shame, guilt and embarrassment, see Subotić and Zarakol, “Cultural Intimacy in International Relations,” especially 916.
- 87.
Innes and Steele, “Memory, Trauma and Ontological Security,” 19.
- 88.
Zarakol, “Ontological (in)security and State Denial of Historical Crimes: Turkey and Japan,” 100.
- 89.
Gustafsson, “Routinised Recognition and Anxiety,” 617.
- 90.
Steele , in contrast, discusses the role of trauma in disrupting collective memories, since they disrupt the ability to channel certain events into a coherent narrative, leading to a contested or reinstalled memory that is realigned through biographical narrative. See Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations, 56.
- 91.
Berenskoetter, “Parameters of a National Biography,” 271–2. These collective experiences/memories/myths do not speak for themselves—meaning is projected onto them.
- 92.
Honneth refers to these as ‘types of degradation’. Axel Honneth (trans. Joel Anderson), The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 116.
- 93.
Rosemary Foot explores the potent legacies of the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919, after World War I, on China’s perceptions of world order and the effects of trauma and exploitation by Chinese governments of its victimhood identity in Rosemary Foot, “Remembering the Past to Secure the Present,” International Affairs 95, no. 1 (2019): 143–160.
- 94.
Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 117.
- 95.
Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 119.
- 96.
Douglas J. Becker, “Memory and Trauma as Elements of Identity in Foreign Policymaking,” in Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates, eds. Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 57–73, at 62.
- 97.
Jeffrey Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser and Piotr Sztompa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 1–30, at 1.
- 98.
Innes and Steele, “Memory, Trauma and Ontological Security,” 15–29.
- 99.
Memory contestation can be felt both internally and externally. States may be more willing to accept an internal trauma memory but are likely to refuse to acknowledge their part in a trauma against another. Or states may simply deny their role in a trauma against another. Becker, “Memory and Trauma as Elements of Identity in Foreign Policymaking,” 71–72.
- 100.
Richard Ned Lebow, “Spirit, Recognition and Foreign Policy: Germany and World War II,” in The International Politics of Recognition, eds. Thomas Lindemann and Erik Ringmar (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 87–108.
- 101.
Foot, “Remembering the Past to Secure the Present,” 148.
- 102.
But they are not necessarily led and undertaken by the single incumbent leading state.
- 103.
An epistemic community can be loosely defined as a network of knowledge-based experts. Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 1–35, at 2. We hold that China has regarded epistemic community as one of its key target audiences because the literature on China’s ‘legitimate’ claims by domestic and overseas Chinese scholars in both Chinese and English languages is voluminous. There are ample grounds for us to believe that Chinese scholars want to interact with their non-Chinese counterparts to persuade them of the legality and legitimacy of China’s claims. See Chap. 5 for details.
- 104.
Historians of Asian maritime affairs and international law of the sea scholars form the bulk of this particular group of knowledge-based experts.
- 105.
Bially Mattern and Zarakol, “Hierarchies in World Politics,” 637.
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Heritage, A., Lee, P.K. (2020). Theoretical Framework: International Order-Building, Ontological Security and Legitimation. In: Order, Contestation and Ontological Security-Seeking in the South China Sea. Governance, Security and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34807-6_2
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