East Asia as regional international society: The problem of great power management

This chapter pays specific attention to power in regional international society, focusing on the primary institution of great powermanagement in East Asia. As for inter-state society in general, the need for great power management is deeply internalized while being constantly contested as a principle in this region. This paradox has created an East Asian order in which the small Southeast Asian states play a larger political role than many would expect, but a role that essentially centres on the management of great powers.1 At the same time, regional order remains disproportionately constituted by the United States and its relationships with its allies and with China. Thus, East Asia labours under a complex and evolving great power social structure, which does not lend itself readily to the neat separation of regional from global. Indeed, if we were to privilege the notion of ‘indigenous’ great powers at the regional level, then the place of China and Japan in contemporary East Asia appears to challenge assumptions about the special role of great powers in international society as providers and managers of order. The contemporary East Asian order is best understood as a continuation of a long process of transition that began during the mid nineteenth-century rupture between China and Japan, with Japan’s self-removal from the Sino-centric regional society and China’s decline in the face of Western technological competition and imperial encroachment (Suzuki 2009; Gong 1984). This was followed by the interpolation of the United States as ring-holder in the wake of the Second World War, keeping apart China and Japan by simultaneously assuring each of security against the other by means of its alliance with Japan. Together, these developments deformed regional international society. On the one hand, the unresolved conflict and power transition between China and Japan left East Asia without indigenous great power leadership at best and an eventual return to a conflictual power-political order at worst. On the other hand, the extraordinary penetration of and dependence upon external great powers during the Cold War grafted selected East Asian states on to their global strategic preoccupations and wider security complexes, while leaving other states behind, thus forestalling the creation of social boundaries around a clear ‘region’.