Few have interrogated the seeming inevitability of the Westphalian or modern system of international relations. The starting point of enquiry for this project is to question our Westphalian reality historically. It locates the birth of the modern international relations system in the death and erasure of its last viable alternative – the East Asian tribute system, which I call Eastphalia. The analytical focal point of this article is a critical case study of the 1875 Un'yō crisis between Japan and Korea. Like many other systemic changes, East Asia’s induction into Westphalian international relations is most legible retrospectively. The kind of “systems encounter” of interest to this chapter comprises a collision between two constitutive sets of interlinked conceptual and legal regimes, institutional apparatuses, and bureaucratic protocol. Often moving at a glacial pace, such systemic changes are not easily visible to a human eye in the midst of unfolding events, partly because our capacities for observation are not calibrated to appreciate changes that occur at such speeds. I consider these frustrated instances of misrecognition as the fricative encounter of two different systems of knowledge and power. I have specifically chosen a confrontation between two East Asian neighbors with a long history of relations, rather than one between an Eastern and a Western entity in order to reveal the Westphalian transition as a systemic harmonization. Such an approach rejects a triumphant modernist narrative of the so-called “West” and Western values over the East.

Nineteenth-century international lawyers inherited a discipline in flux and inhabited a world of rapid change. As capitalism entered a period of crisis and Western imperial adventures intensified, the first generation of professional international lawyers grappled with the need to construct order. The ‘standard of civilisation’ arose as a disciplinary response to the contradictions of global capitalism. This chapter provides a detailed account of the contours of the ‘logic of biology’ and the ‘logic of improvement’. It details both the constant presence of racialised, gendered and infantilising tropes in the writings of the discipline’s ‘fathers’ and their insistence that capitalist modernity was the only path to civilisation and, by implication, to equal rights and duties under international law. The struggles over extraterritoriality demonstrate the concrete stakes of these theoretical constructions as well as the role of semi-peripheral lawyers who adopted and transformed ‘civilisation’ in order to serve the interests of their own domestic ruling classes.

This chapter discusses the two wars between Great Britain and the Qing Empire in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. Usually viewed separately it makes sense to consider the two together. Both conflicts were about two sets of concerns: First, the British wanted a framework where British merchants had access to multiple ports, limited taxes, no restrictions on who they could trade with, and legalized imports of opium. Second, the British wanted a new system of diplomatic and political relations.Rejecting existing Qing systems of diplomatic relations such as the tribute system, the British wanted to utilize European diplomatic practices and international law as an institutional framework. Victory in both wars allowed Britain to redefine the frameworks of both trade and diplomacy in the manner they saw fit, creating the treaty system that would last until World War II.

In 1400 Vietnamese leader and radical reformer Hồ Quý Ly (ca. 1350–1410) usurped the Vietnamese throne from the declining Trần leadership. Hồ Quý Ly’s reign, although fueled by regional rivalries, managed to provoke a military response by the neighboring Ming that displaced the dominant Đông Kinh elite of the Red River Delta long enough for the Thanh Hóa elite of upper central Vietnam under Lê Lợi (1385–1433) to unify a political force that would borrow heavily from the Chinese model, but stress essential cultural differences between the two sides of the Sino-Vietnamese frontier. The Ming occupation of Vietnam would last only two decades, but this period continues to have an influence on the modern-day relationship between the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This chapter draws connections between Hồ Quý Ly’s radical reforms, the failed Ming response, and Sino-Vietnamese relations today.

This chapter examines the fall of Dutch Taiwan to a Chinese state (the Zheng family maritime state) in 1662, suggesting that that event can be understood by focusing on two things. First, the VOC, although the most powerful maritime structure of Europe, was successful in East Asia largely because East Asian states were less interested in controlling maritime space and ports than were European states. The Zheng state, born in the 1650s, was an anomaly in East Asia: a Chinese state oriented toward seaborne commerce. Second, Zheng military power was high, although Dutch military techniques and technologies proved instrumental in holding off his numerically superior army for nearly a year. The chapter ends with counterfactual speculations about what would have happened had the Dutch held Taiwan: the Qing dynasty, which eventually defeated the Zheng family and took Taiwan, would not have incorporated Taiwan into its empire.

This chapter looks at the grand strategic implications of the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s, which was successfully thwarted by a Sino-Korean alliance that emerged out of China’s obligations to Korea as part of the so-called tributary system of foreign relations. The Great East Asian War of 1592–1598, known to Koreans as the Imjin War, was the largest conflict on the globe in the sixteenth century yet it is still barely known outside of East Asia. The chapter will offer an overview of how the war fit into the ongoing grand strategy of Ming-dynasty China as it sought to preserve its hegemonic position in East Asia. It will also examine the motivations and strategic calculations of the Japanese hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), who sought to overturn the longstanding Ming order and create a new international system that could have fundamentally altered the course of Asian, if not world, history had it succeeded. In the end, the defeat of Hideyoshi’s ambitions preserved the East Asian world order and China’s hegemonic position therein for another 250 years. In addition to examining the motivations and ramifications of the war through primary research, this chapter touches upon some of the recent historical and political science literature concerning the war and its broader implications for the study of international relations and power politics in the early modern East Asian context.

This chapter maps the reasons why scientific arguments do not lend themselves to straightforward judicial appraisal. The study identifies epistemic, doctrinal, and legitimacy challenges, which generate difficulties in using science in an adjudicatory setting. Epistemic challenges stem from the fact that science and law are both capable of lending cognitive authority to knowledge claims, and these authorities may be in conflict with each other. Doctrinal challenges emerge from the fundamental differences in the ways in which law and science conceive basic concepts and their different levels of tolerance towards probabilistic evidence and uncertainty. Legitimacy challenges entail difficulties for judges to preserve their monopoly over the resolution of disputes and to select the appropriate rationality to justify their reasoning. This chapter also introduces the analytic framework of the book, which is designed to evaluate the varied judicial reactions given to the intrusion of science into the adjudicatory process. It therefore introduces and discusses the framing of disputes, the scientific fact-finding process, the causal inquiry, and the standard of review.

This chapter identifies an evolving trend in the ICJ’s engagement with science, which has started with the marginalization of scientific evidence, continued with making superficial evidentiary assessments, but ultimately demonstrated an increasing willingness to engage with science. As to framing techniques, mandating the parties’ negotiations in science-intensive questions, the prevalence of finding procedural breaches as well as decoupling the notion of ’risk’ from substantive, scientific criteria will be discussed. In terms of fact-finding, the chapter addresses evolving procedures for taking expert evidence, and applicable standards of proof. The causal analysis evidences the Court’s struggle with establishing the requisite proof in cases of uncertain causation. As to the standard and extent of review, the study examines the reasonableness test, and defends the majority's solution in the Whaling in the Antarctic case based on insights from Science and Technology Studies.

Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan would have profound consequences for Japanese and world history. Ultimately it would impress Japanese officials on the need to reorient their nation’s geography to modern advantage. At the time of Perry’s arrival, for nearly two centuries Japanese leaders had attempted to isolate Japanese from the rest of the world, using the country’s island nature to keep the outside world at bay and Japanese at home. Important exceptions notwithstanding: Japanese were allowed to leave Japan; return meant their execution.

Leading explanations for the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 using international relations theory adopt some version of the “rise of Japan” narrative. The focus of these studies is to explain the outbreak of war in 1894 as a result of the disruption in the systemic status quo or as an early warning signal toward Japan’s expansionism by highlighting the newly acquired military power and status of Japan – and the challenge this posed to China. Rather than treating the war as a purely bilateral interstate conflict, I instead characterize the clash between China and Japan in the late nineteenth century as part of a series of militarized crises involving multiple stakeholders from both in and out of the region during the breakdown of the treaty port system in East Asia. I also show how the Sino-Japanese War had both immediate and enduring consequences for East Asian international relations: intensified strategic competition over East Asian territories among not only Japan and China but Western powers such as Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States.