Korea and Japan continued to borrow from China throughout their histories. Japan is often mistakenly viewed as "feudal" and not a state; despite the fact that this "warring states" era in Japan was only 150 years of its total existence. The Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868) had far more centralized control over its land than did contemporaneous European states, for example. in Korea, the Choson dynasty intensified its borrowing of Confucinan ideas and Chinese culture.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of the book before reflecting on the costs involved in remaining welded to the old, conventional story of Gentili, the state, and “modern” war.

This chapter asks whether the Sustainable Development Goals have advanced planetary ecological integrity, that is, strengthened policies towards the preservation of global commons at various levels of governance. We start with a brief account of the concept of planetary integrity, before engaging in a theoretical debate about the potential role of the Sustainable Development Goals in advancing planetary integrity, drawing on a literature survey. Finally, we assess the transformative potential of the goals for planetary integrity by focusing on governance interventions at international, regional, local and transnational levels. Our research shows that while the Sustainable Development Goals have raised concern about environmental protection, they do not motivate transformative change towards planetary integrity. Specifically, the literature raises doubts about the actual steering effects of the goals owing to their poor additionality with respect to existing environmental agreements, their inherent contradictions, and their weak ambition when it comes to planetary integrity.

A massive debate over the origins of the East Asian economic miracles has focused primarily on political and economic decisions taken in the last fifty years. In searching for the origins of strong developmental states, the farthest back in history some have gone is to credit Japanese imperialism of the early 20th century as creating developmental states in Korea and Taiwan. Yet the Japanese colonial experience cannot explain China’s phenomenal economic growth in the past four decades. We move the arguments for organized, institutionalized, orderly East Asian societies back at least one thousand years. In this concluding chapter, we show that many of the “institutionalist” arguments from North, Weingast, and others that purport to explain European economic success over the centuries are totally wrong in the East Asian context. Not only do these East Asian countries have states far earlier than in Europe, they also did not develop central banks or external finance: their massive state operations were financed solely by tax revenues over more than one thousand years. This is a challenge to almost all economic history.

This book interrogates justifications, techniques and legal forms that arose in the past and continue to resonate in the international regime to protect foreign investment. What is striking is how past practices resemble suppositions relied upon at present by investment law’s norm entrepreneurs. This matrix of practices is characterized as ‘alibis’ in so far as they provide cover for a set of international investment law rules and institutions that are increasingly difficult to defend. The method employed conjoins discursive practices with understandings about power, expressed in legal-institutional and processual forms. It is analogous to what Foucault describes as ‘archaeology’ which, when partnered with ‘genealogy,’ produces something akin to dispositif: an ensemble of discourse, institutions, legislation and ‘authoritative phenomena’, incorporating ‘the said as much as the unsaid’. By uncovering investment law’s normative ends, and connecting them to this indefensible past, the book reveals how investment law aims to dampen the political aspirations of states and citizens of the Global South. The object of the book is to imagine new ways forward that are less ruinous to those left outside of investment law’s solicitude.

Many elements of current positive public international law (PIL) originated in theories of natural law, including both rules – of the law of the sea and of war, of refugee and asylum law – and constitutive conceptions of sovereignty. Several scholars argue that PIL has improved upon and replaced those origins, leaving the old natural law theories dead. PIL has come of age – indeed, laments about the need for natural law to fill its lacunae are replaced by frustrations about PIL’s ungoverned growth and fragmentation. Some say it is time for PIL to kick the ladder of natural law away.*

This chapter seeks to give voice to the other side. Proclamations of the death of natural law theories are premature. More plausible versions of natural law theory may still contribute as PIL continues to evolve, by treaty agreements and interpretations.

To be sure, many historical natural law theories are implausible by our standards.

The previous chapter outlined the personal, institutional, and political dynamics that played a part in Alberico Gentili’s nineteenth-century revival, in particular the emergence of the academic discipline of international law and the crafting of a historical narrative about its past. What we have yet to uncover is the specific story that emerged about Gentili’s greatness in his nineteenth-century context. In Chapter 3, we saw that in the aftermath of his death, Gentili had been remembered primarily for his absolutist writings. Two and a half centuries later, what story did his revivers tell to justify celebrating him as a founder of international law? This chapter argues that nineteenth-century international lawyers painted Gentili as the man who had invented the modern definition of war. In doing so, they gave us a popular narrative about the history of the laws of war that has prevented us from appreciating the profound changes that occurred in the regulation of war in course of the nineteenth century.

This chapter focuses on the national level and studies interlinkages, institutional integration and policy coherence in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. After defining key terms, the chapter reviews how perspectives on interlinkages have shaped a new discourse, followed by an analysis of the steering effects of the global goals on institutional integration and policy coherence. The chapter finds that some measures have been taken by national governments to advance institutional integration through coordination by central agencies and inter-ministerial exchanges. Growing policy coherence, however, is not clearly observable. Existing barriers in political-administrative systems preventing institutional integration and policy coherence have not vanished with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. Although recent studies have considerably enhanced knowledge on the conceptual understanding of interlinkages, integration and coherence, empirical data about how these concepts play out in practice at national level is still very limited.

A state is most centrally composed of an administrative bureaucracy. An enormous literature extrapolates the European experience as universal and, with various modifications, asserts that the demands of war drive states to create institutions that can extract resources from society. There is remarkably little scholarship on state formation in East Asia that engages the social science literature. Most state formation occurred centuries after the initial emergence of centralized Chinese rule in the 2nd century BC, but scant scholarship explores it. Furthermore, much of the bellicist literature does not address the question of diffusion, implying diffusion through natural selection or market forces: those units that adapted best survived, those that didn’t were “winnowed.” In contrast to Europe, in East Asia there was clearly diffusion from core to periphery. Emulation, learning, and competition are all potentially present at the same time. The bellicist theory is possibly limited in that it selectively focuses its attention on a single mechanism of diffusion and institutional isomorphism at the expense of non-coercive mechanisms such as emulation.

There are three pillars of jurisprudence: moral theorizing (reflected in natural law, but not exclusive to it); analytic theorizing (reflected in positivism); and sociolegal theorizing (reflected in legal realism). Legal realism exemplifies this third approach to international law theory beyond natural law and positive law covered in Chapters 2 and 3, and it provides a foundation for many theoretical approaches in the chapters that follow. For legal realists, jurisprudence should be conceived not just in terms of what law “is” or “ought” to be, but also in terms of how law obtains meaning, operates, and changes through practice.

In the United States (US), legal realism grew out of and continues to have parallels with European sociolegal thought (sometimes referred to as European legal realism), as well as sociolegal thought around the world. It built from sociological jurisprudence that developed in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century.

We show the absence of bellicist pressures during “Phase II.” Between the fourth and eighth centuries specifically, there was only one war involving Korea, Japan, and China: the Korean War of Unification from 660-668. Most importantly, during the fourth to sixth centuries, China was divided and posed no military threat to the peninsula or Japan. Indeed, centuries of initial state formation in both Korea and Japan occurred without any threat from China at all and without any war between these countries. The one war between Korea, Japan, and China during the four centuries under consideration here was the Korean war of unification, 660–668. This evolution of the East Asian world marked the emergence of political units in Korea and Japan that would endure until the modern era. Neither China nor Japan had territorial ambitions on the peninsula. There is almost nothing in the historical record to link state formation with this war. Silla did not expand further than the peninsula, and China and Japan before and after the Korean Unification war had quite clear boundaries that did not include continental expansion.

Describing and explaining state formation in Korea and Japan is fundamentally about understanding the transformative, enduring, and massive impact of Chinese civilization on its neighbors throughout the entire East Asian region and across literally thousands of years. The best way to understand Chinese civilization and its neighbors is as core and periphery – a massive hegemon’s influence. In the 4th century, the Korean peninsula contained three kingdoms: Silla, Paekche, and Koguryo. All three Korean states learned from and emulated China extensively and intensively. In Japan, historians call the new, centralized order built in Japan during the 4th to 8th century theritsuryo state, because it was based on Chinese-style penal (ritsu) and administrative (ryo) codes. The impact of Chinese civilization was comprehensive, including language, education, writing, poetry, art, mathematics, science, religion, philosophy, social and family structure, political and administrative institutions and ideas, and more. The strands of this civilization that had to do with government are almost impossible to understand outside of this larger civilizational context.