The first volume of the East Asia in the World project (Haggard and Kang Reference Kang2020) sought to bring Asia more squarely into the canon of international relations, and that remains our purpose in this second volume. We did not attempt a history of the region, which would have been impossible given our consideration of the longue durée running from the foundations of the Sinitic order to its gradual unwinding over the course of the nineteenth century (Kang and Swope Reference Kang, Swope, Haggard and Kang2020). Rather, we solicited contributions from historians of Asia influenced by a dynamic new international history movement that situated national developments in their larger global context (Manela Reference Manela2020). We brought them together with political scientists pursuing a complementary project: to decenter the history of international relations from a dominant, and often triumphalist, European narrative (see, for example, Hobson Reference Hobson2004, Reference Hobson2012; Acharya and Buzan Reference Acharya and Buzan2007; Kang Reference Kang2010, Reference Kang2013; Goh Reference Goh2013a, Reference Goh2013b; Kang and Ma Reference Kang and Xinru2018; Kang and Lin Reference Kang and Yu-Ting Lin2019; Buzan and Goh Reference Buzan and Goh2020). The objective was to stimulate a fresh look at how international relations theory fared in the face of new historical material on – and from – the region.

The project was also motivated by disagreements we had with structural or systemic international relations theories. These largely grew out of Western experience, initially multipolar during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and bipolar during the Cold War. We considered the Sinitic order and its imperialist aftermath as alternative international systems that could be used for broader comparative effect.

The first volume devoted roughly half of its contributions to the Sino-centered political order. We advanced a number of descriptive as well as causal propositions, particularly in the conclusion by Andrew Coe and Scott Wolford (Reference Coe, Wolford, Haggard and Kang2020). First, the hierarchical structure of what Coe and Wolford called “historical East Asia” was quite different than the European one of competing great powers of roughly equal military and economic heft. Second, the normative foundations of the tribute system were quite different than the European state system as well, later characterized – controversially as we will see – as the Westphalian model of equal sovereign states. These differences could be traced back to processes of state formation. Early East Asian states were formed less by war than by emulation of the Chinese model (Huang and Kang Reference Huang and Kang2022). Partly as a result, international relations were explicitly hierarchical and embedded in complex normative and even performative structures that sustained legitimacy (see Ji-Young Lee’s Reference Lee, Haggard and Kang2020 contribution on the Chosun dynasty in particular).

The final difference was the existence of long periods of relative peace, at least among a cluster of the system’s constitutive states (Kang Reference Kang2010; Rosenthal and Wong Reference Rosenthal and Bin Wong2011; Zhang Reference Zhang2015; Lee Reference Lee2016; Kang, Shaw and Fu Reference Kang, Tse-min Fu and Shaw2016; Park Reference Park2017; Dincecco and Wang Reference Dincecco and Wang2018). We drew attention to several important – even systemic – wars, looking at both their causes and consequences (Kanagawa Reference Kanagawa, Haggard and Kang2020; Swope Reference Swope, Haggard and Kang2020). But the finding with respect to the incidence of war in a hierarchical system was of theoretical significance. Until recently, little empirical attention has been given to the distinctive properties of hierarchies (Lake Reference Lake2009, Reference Lake2024; Zarakol Reference Zarakol2017). This lacuna arose in part because balance of power theory would suggest that hierarchies were unlikely to arise in the first place, in part because of the failure to exploit examples outside of Europe, such as historical East Asia.

The treatment of the Sinitic order was by no means limited to the logic of the state system and conflict; contributions also reflected a new revisionism with respect to the political economy of the region prior to the nineteenth century (von Glahn Reference Von Glahn, Haggard and Kang2020). It is often assumed that the tributary system subjected commercial relations to the rigidities of ritualized diplomatic process, and that early commercial relations with Europe played an important role in dissolving these ties and “opening” the region. Yet despite some periods of commercial closure, a dense network of trading ties extended from the Indian Ocean through Southeast Asia to the Chinese coast and Japan well before the arrival of European powers on the scene. Moreover, it rested on a quite distinctive “port polity” political model that has echoes to this day in small trading states. Yet another important network extending to China centered on Manila and the Spanish galleon trade in silver with the new world.

Europe’s role in Asian trade was not dominant, however. In an essay on early Dutch contact, Tonio Andrade (Reference Amdrade, Haggard and Kang2020) showed how the Dutch East India Company operated as only one among many players in the regional political economy, which included prominent Chinese and Japanese groups. The broader lesson – developed by J. P. Sharman (Reference Sharman2019) in particular – is that early European imperialism reflected the strategies of states and trading companies that were much weaker than the standard imperial narrative suggests. That changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century when force was increasingly deployed by the imperial powers to advance their commercial interests; this theme returns with a vengeance in the current volume.

Our interest in the Sino-centered order was not only theoretical. The idea of such an order has proven an enduring trope in China’s self-conception (Allan et al. Reference Allan, Vucetic and Hopf2018). It constitutes a crucial backdrop to the relative decline associated with imperialism and the “one hundred years of humiliation” that typically dates to the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) and ends with the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. It is highly unlikely that China could reconstruct such an order today given the ongoing role of the United States in the region, the stakes of other extra-regional actors and the preferences of the countries on China’s extensive periphery. Yet China’s “neighborhood diplomacy” and projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative have made the idea of a China-centered regional order an issue of serious debate. Realists as well as analysts of Chinese foreign policy without their theoretical priors have pondered what a hierarchical regional order centered on Beijing might look like (Allan et al. Reference Allan, Vucetic and Hopf2018; Yan Reference Yan and Qin2020).

The second half of the first volume of the project took up the gradual unwinding of the Sino-centered order over the course of the nineteenth century, the legacies of which persist to this day (Buzan and Goh Reference Buzan and Goh2020; Chapter 2, this volume). The root causes of this systemic transition included both external and internal factors. On the one hand was imperialism: the willingness and capacity of the European powers to seize colonies directly, use coercive diplomacy for achieving strategic and commercial objectives, and to impose various forms of indirect rule. With important exceptions such as the Spanish assertion of control over the Philippines and the Portuguese concession on Macao, the majority of direct and indirect imperial claims in East and Southeast Asia occurred in the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, the shifting balance of power reflected the complex of domestic weaknesses – political and institutional as well as economic – that prevented countries in the region from countering external pressures by mounting an effective defense of traditional forms of rule. Despite the persistent focus of the PRC leadership on the role of external actors, revisionist Chinese scholarship has plumbed these institutional factors in great depth (e.g., Mao Haijian Reference Mao2016 on the collapse of the Qing dynasty) and they figure in discussions of the vulnerability of Korea and the pre-European Southeast Asian political systems as well. Of all the many states and other political formations in the region, only Japan and Thailand managed to evade these external pressures, in Japan’s case only gradually and in Thailand’s case by bringing domestic policy in line with British and French preferences.

We dealt with a number of important episodes in this new imperial phase of the region’s history in the first volume of the project. We started with the political economy of the Opium Wars (1839–60; Horowitz Reference Horowitz, Haggard and Kang2020), which set in train the system of treaty ports and extraterritoriality which were at the heart of China’s “one hundred years of humiliation.” In addition to the European scramble, we placed particular emphasis on the entry of new imperial powers onto the scene. America’s presence was considered via Matthew Perry’s foray into Japan (1852–54; Dudden Reference Dudden, Haggard and Kang2020) and the brutal American response to the Philippine nationalist movement and insurgency (Yeo Reference Yeo, Haggard and Kang2020). Two essays detailed Japan’s increasingly imperial interactions with China and Korea from the 1870s (Saeyoung Park Reference Park, Haggard and Kang2020) to the Sino-Japanese War 1894–95 (S.-H. Park Reference Park, Haggard and Kang2020) and the important role Russian expansionism played in those episodes. We conceived the decline of the Sinitic order and nineteenth-century imperialism as two sides of the same coin. As Saeyoung Park (Reference Park, Haggard and Kang2020) showed in her fine-grained dissection of Japanese–Korean diplomatic relations, the new imperialism marked “the death of Eastphalia.”

The focus on imperialism also raised issues about how to theorize the most fundamental characteristics of international relations, and we return to those themes in this volume as well. Over the long run, it was certainly true that the idea of nominally equal sovereign states was a European export to the world, and got seized by nationalist movements and newly independent governments in subversive ways. Yet the emergence of this long-run political equilibrium worked through a very long period of imperial domination that extended well into the postwar world. Nor can it be considered Westphalian, at least as that term has come to be used. No less than the Sinitic order, the new imperialism was a hierarchical system, albeit generated in part by pressures stemming from intra-imperialist rivalry. The imperial “system,” such as it was, rested on constant threats of the use of force, indirect as well as direct rule, and the complex use of law and diplomacy to advance commercial interests, including in the system of extraterritoriality imposed on both Japan and China.

1.1 An Outline

This second volume of the project builds on the first, and we invite readers to consider them in tandem. With no self-evident historical cut points, we concluded East Asia in the World I around 1900. We pick up from that point here and extend our analysis into the first fifteen years or so of the Cold War era.

Following two introductory chapters, Part II extends the discussion of imperialism, the breakdown of the Sinitic order, and the roles that two newcomers – Japan and the United States – played in the emerging regional order. We start with the case of Thailand, which proves an instructive introduction to the fundamental issues. Even though it managed to avoid formal colonial rule, it did so only by adjusting its domestic political economy in ways that conformed with British and French interests (Chapter 3). We then extend the consideration of Japanese imperialism in the nineteenth century into the twentieth, looking at the causes and consequences of the Russo-Japanese war (Chapter 4). We close Part II by considering the complicated role of race in the imperial order, with essays on America’s Chinese Exclusion Acts (Chapter 5) and the politics of Japan’s racial equality proposal at the Versailles conference (Chapter 6).

Part III takes up the interwar period. It may seem strange in a book of this sort to sidestep the proximate causes of World War II or the Pacific War in Asia. But we think it is appropriate. The events leading up to Pearl Harbor, the conduct of the war itself and its endgame in the entry of the Soviets, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been treated in extraordinary detail elsewhere. Rather, we focus primary attention on Japan–China relations over a somewhat longer time frame. The liberal project outlined by Wilson held out the promise of a new order “after imperialism” to draw on the title of Akira Iriye’s (Reference Iriye1965) influential overview of the 1920s. Components of this initiative – although pursued inconsistently – included resistance to the continued carve-up of China, commitment to principles of nondiscrimination and the effort to manage changes in the balance of power through multilateral agreements such as the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and its ill-fated successors. Yet this liberal project proved unable to forestall Soviet intervention in Chinese politics and the more fateful imperial ambitions of Japan (Iriye Reference Iriye1965; Beasley Reference Beasley1987; Paine Reference Paine2017 for useful overviews of Japanese imperialism), to which the League had no answers.

We draw particular attention, however, to the perverse effects of imperialism on Chinese politics, manifest in its fateful descent into warlordism and the implications of these domestic political developments for regional order (Horowitz, Chapter 7). In Chapter 8, Jeremy Yellen underlines the irony of Japanese grand strategy: that the new type of thinking about empire – what he calls “total war thought” – emerged in the Japanese army through observation of the demands placed on the great power combatants in World War I. In Chapter 8, Amy King takes up the political economy of the empire in more detail and considers how – contrary to liberal theories – war did not necessarily derail the growing economic integration between the two countries, in part precisely because of the growth of imperial ties.

In Part IV, we contribute to the literature – now vast – on the emergence of the Cold War order in Asia. We know from that literature, syllabi, and personal experience that contemporary research and teaching on the international relations of East Asia typically starts with the relations among the great powers, victorious and defeated. In this telling, the foundational events leading to the Cold War order in Asia include the strategic bargains implicit in the fateful disposition of military forces in the region and the trifecta of shocks in 1949–50: the first Soviet nuclear test, the Chinese revolution, and particularly the Korean War. As in Europe, if following a somewhat different timeline, great power rivalry was interpreted through the lens of a new red scare and McCarthyism in the United States, with distinct Asian components centered on the question of who “lost” China and the shock of the Korean War.

The postwar settlement in Asia has been dubbed “the San Francisco system,” with its origin story in the conference that produced both the peace agreement and security treaty with Japan in 1951. The wider system of which those agreements were a part included the hub-and-spokes alliances, naval dominance, and the gradual integration of allies into the US market and with one another (Schaller Reference Schaller1985).

A second introductory chapter by Evelyn Goh, Chapter 2 challenges this orthodoxy. For starters, several important players did not even attend the San Francisco conference – most notably China and Korea – and the Soviet Union did not ultimately sign the peace treaty. Far from resolving key issues – including territorial ones – Goh and others argue that the postwar settlement locked them in place (Hara Reference Hara2001, Reference Hara2006, Reference Hara2007; Lee Reference Lee2002; Lee and Van Dyke Reference Lee and Van Dyke2010; Dower Reference Dower and Hara2015). The issues that went unresolved in San Francisco constitute a proverbial laundry list of every outstanding territorial dispute that the region is grappling with this to this day: the Dokdo/Takeshima and Senkakus/Diaoyus disputes between Japan and Korea and China, respectively; the disposition of the Kuriles and the ongoing failure of Japan and Russia to reach a legal conclusion to the war; the contested legal and political status of Taiwan; and the competing claims that continue to roil the South China Sea.

Part IV takes up the early Cold War period. There can be little doubt that the Cold War in Asia was driven by the strategic interactions among the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. Again, we do not have comparative advantage in addressing the missed opportunities in US-China relations and their consequences, a topic that has received extensive treatment not only from historians but from prominent political scientists as well (e.g., Foot Reference Foot1995; Christensen Reference Christensen1996).

Rather, the contributions in Part IV all refocus on how American ambitions in the region were shaped by political coalitions in both allies and adversaries. Whether the American presence is conceived in terms of a new hegemony or as a defensive balancing coalition, its foundations ultimately rested on choices made not only in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow but in other Asian capitals as well. David Fields in Chapter 10 shows how the division of Korea, often attributed to Soviet and American designs, had much more to do with political pressures from South Korean actors and the personal political ambitions of Syngman Rhee in particular. Hsiao-ting Lin’s reinterpretation in Chapter 11 of the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s shows, drawing on newly retrieved documents, how the moderation of conflict hinged on negotiations between the PRC and the KMT as much as Washington’s role. In Chapter 12, James Lee’s political economy of the alliance system in Asia emphasizes how states in the region exploited US strategic interests to pursue quite independent economic policies, including those associated with the so-called developmental state (Haggard Reference Haggard2018).

Perhaps no other event in postwar Asia has received as much thoughtful treatment from American historians and political scientists as Vietnam, and even research on the origins of American involvement in the 1940s – the relevant literature for our purposes – would constitute a small library (starting with Schaller Reference Schaller1985 and Rotter Reference Rotter1987). Two contributions take up the fateful question of American commitments in Southeast Asia. Yueng Foong Khong in Chapter 13 develops the argument that reputational concerns played a crucial role in American engagement, but precisely because the United States was fearful about its capacity to effectively project force. Ngoei Wen-Qing in Chapter 14 by contrast believes that while this dynamic might have operated with respect to Vietnam, that case was the anomaly rather than the rule in the region. He shows that domestic political coalitions favorable to a continuing American and European presence – for example, in Malaysia and the Philippines – had already formed prior to independence, providing the domestic political foundations not only for the alliance system but also for American hegemony more broadly conceived. These domestic political configurations also help explain later developments in the region such as the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967.

The empirical chapters conclude with a fascinating chapter on the Pacific Islands by Joanne Wallis and Jack Corbett (Chapter 15) that returns to the exact same questions raised by the Thai case with which we begin. From World War I to the present, the islands cycled through a variety of different institutional arrangements: as mandates, under trusteeship and through hybrid sovereignties such as “free association” and formal independence. Yet, precisely because of their extreme dependency, these cases raise deep theoretical issues about empire, hegemony and hierarchy, and the real significance of Westphalian norms where asymmetries in power are large.

1.2 Using This Book: Some Themes

This second volume in the project covers a more limited time span, less than a hundred years. As a result, it is more amenable to being read as an historical introduction of the period. How did we get from a post-Sinitic imperial order to the Cold War? Yet we do not pretend to cover every development of significance and as noted have purposefully omitted crucial events – Pearl Harbor and the onset and termination of the Pacific War; the causes of the Korean War – which have been addressed extensively elsewhere. Rather, in choosing cases we thought in terms of recurrent questions in international politics. In the remainder of this Introduction, we briefly prime several of these overarching themes. We close with a preview of the conclusion to the book by Coe and Wolford, which as in the first volume returns to some central theoretical debates in the study of both comparative politics and international relations.

We start in the remainder of the Introduction by revisiting the concept of imperialism, which until recently has gone fallow in international relations. We touch on the relative weight of economic as opposed to strategic causes, the central role of war, coercion and violence in colonial rule, and the variety of institutional forms the empire took. We do this not solely out of historical interest but to engage an important strand of work on hierarchies as a distinctive type of international or regional system and how political orders structured by the European imperial powers – Japan, the United States, and ultimately China – might vary.

We then turn to competing views of how historical time is broken up and the narratives behind apparently innocuous efforts at periodization. These choices are not neutral analytic ones; they often reflect national mythologies and in turn affect the construction of collective memories. Third, we bring out the role that domestic factors played in structuring the Cold War order in the region. We close with our enduring interest in ideational factors in international politics by revisiting the role of race in Asia’s relationship with the advanced industrial states, another topic that is sadly enduring. Across all these issues, we reference new scholarship on the region that is chipping away at similar problems, whether from the new international history or from political science.

Coe and Wolford add to this list of themes by drawing out a number of broader implications of the project for debates in political science. As the project seeks to trace a long arc from the Sinitic order, through the European colonial presence to the rise of Japan and the United States, it is not surprising that power transition approaches get attention. However, Coe and Wolford seek to ground such theories in a political economy of growth: why some countries were able to modernize while others – particularly China – were not. We close this Introduction with a summary of several themes they introduce that are relevant for the current conjuncture, including shifting economic strategies and the nature of ideological competition.

1.3 Theme I: Imperialism Revisited

Our focus on imperialism is not simply the result of the period covered by the two volumes of this project nor the weight that historical issues play in the international relations of the region. We also want to revive a theoretical conversation that has – with a limited number of recent exceptions (Blanken Reference Blanken2012; Sharman Reference Sharman2019; Kohli Reference Kohli2019; McNamee Reference McNamee2023; Lake Reference Lake2024) – gone nearly dead in academic political science and international relations. In the 1970s and 1980s, classic theories of imperialism would appear regularly on graduate international relations syllabi, including not only the classics such as Hobson, Lenin, and Schumpeter but also Marxist, dependency, and world-systems approaches that emerged in the postwar period. Yet the last attempts to provide broad theoretical treatment of imperialism for mainstream IR audiences date to the 1980s, for example, in Tony Smith’s The Pattern of Imperialism (Reference Smith1981) and Michael Doyle’s Empires (Reference Doyle1986). Ironically, this silence descended just as the imperial, colonial, and postcolonial turns were completely transforming the humanities (inter alia, Said Reference Said1979; Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988; Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000; Bhabha Reference Bhabha2012) and reviving – and reinventing – a hidebound study of colonial history (for reviews, see, for example, Kennedy Reference Kennedy and Huggan2013 and Manela Reference Manela2020; on the link to IR theory and postcolonialism, see Seth Reference Seth2012; on Asia see Farrell Reference Farrell2018). While much of this work centered on the European colonial powers, revisionist historians had long offered economic interpretations of American foreign policy over the long run and the Japanese empire now has a dense literature (see Beasley Reference Beasley1987 and Paine Reference Paine2017 for overviews from different periods).

This turn away from imperialism may have to do with concerns about the term’s normative baggage, although this is hardly unique to that concept; most important concepts in political science – including war, peace, and democracy – are also normatively laden and contested. Moreover, conceptual alternatives to the imperial lens have consequences too, such as subsuming the study of empire and colonialism under more generic covering concepts such as “hierarchy.” Particularly in its social-contractarian form, the concept of hierarchy can elide important components of imperialism, from its complex political economy to the central role of power and violence to the international legal agreements reflected in the exercise of a kind of ideational power: rule by – rather than of – law. At worst, the concept of hierarchy can drift into a kind of academic euphemism, a problem some of its proponents have recognized and sought to remedy (compare, for example, Lake Reference Lake2009 and Lake Reference Lake2024).

In short, the study of imperialism is relevant because it is not clear that it completely went away (see, for example, Chapter 14, this volume). Imperialism was never coterminous with outright colonial rule, but encompassed a variety of informal as well as formal arrangements that students of hierarchy are continuing to mine.

We adopt a relatively expansive approach to the concept of imperialism, but with an important disciplinary caveat. We see it not simply as a set of economic processes – as some structural Marxist approaches do – but requiring political control over another state or people. As Gallagher and Robinson (Reference Robinson and Gallagher1953) outlined in their famous essay on the imperialism of free trade, however, such control may be formal (involving the creation of colonies or other truncated state forms such as protectorates and mandates) or informal. In the latter, the metropole exercises veto power over policies that infringe on the metropole’s interests, often through client political forces, but always under the threat of outright coercion. This last component of the definition would fit with some conceptions of American hegemony, particularly those emphasizing the long history of American interventions in the developing world. But in our view, the shadow of violence is important in differentiating imperialism from more routine efforts at influence (Kohli Reference Kohli2019, 7).

It is far beyond the scope of this Introduction to review the vast historical literature on imperialism in Asia. But we can touch on three issues around which the history and political science literatures join forces in this volume: the question of the causes of empire, including strategic ones; a reminder of the role of force and coercion in initiating and sustaining imperial rule; and the variety of institutional forms imperialism took in Asia. Over these more discrete questions hangs the much larger one of whether the American postwar order in the region should be seen as a kind of neo-imperial project, as Ngoei does most explicitly in this volume.

1.4 Theme II: Time, History, and Periodization

A second analytic theme that preoccupies many of the papers in this volume is competing conceptions of historical time and periodization. The contributions repeatedly point out how the dates that animate Western views of world politics and the region often bear little resemblance to those that are important within it. Moreover, these historical differences are not merely academic; they shape national narratives in ways which are surprisingly enduring (see Simpser, Slater, and Wittenberg Reference Simpser, Slater and Wittenberg2018 on historical “legacies”). These divergent periodizations center on the differences between Westphalian and colonial and postcolonial tropes, on the significance of World War I and the Wilsonian moment, how we think about the timing of war in the Asia-Pacific, and the meaning – and timing – of the Cold War.

One narrative in the IR literature is how Westphalian norms gradually diffused and by the early twentieth century had become the de facto normative foundation of international order. Yet for virtually all countries in the region, the storyline focuses not on Westphalian norms but on the issue of imperialism and colonialism addressed in the previous section. The Opium Wars were fought in 1839–42 and 1856–60, but the cycle of foreign pressure, violence, and treaty concessions extended well into the twentieth century. Extraterritoriality in China did not end until 1943.

We know that the idea of a “century of humiliation” served domestic political purposes in China (Wang Reference Wang2008). China, perhaps more than any other country in the region, has managed to keep the resentments of the colonial era alive precisely as it has enjoyed unprecedented growth and a rise in international stature (Wang Reference Wang2008; Miller Reference Miller2013). More broadly, we know that such legacies are almost always manufactured by political elites. Yet, are those preoccupations any less accurate than the Westphalian mythology of equal sovereign states?

To say that regional views of the current security architecture, international institutions and law, and key bilateral relationship were shaped by colonial history is an understatement. Asia’s “history issues” – particularly those related to Japan – have spawned a rich literature in political science, including on the logic of apologies (Dudden Reference Dudden2008; Lind Reference Lind2010; Berger Reference Berger2012; Smith Reference Smith2015, Chapter Three; Kimura Reference Kimura2019). We are still learning how events such as the Tokyo war crimes trials are read very differently – and were read very differently at the time – by victors and vanquished (Bass Reference Bass2023). Whatever domestic sources nationalism in Asia has tapped, it always posits itself in part as the antithesis to a thesis posed by foreign powers: China vis-à-vis the European powers; Southeast Asia in its struggle for independence against the British, French, Dutch, and Americans; and the persistent role of Japan as an historical protagonist across the region but particularly vis-à-vis China and Korea. The social and political forces carrying and advancing these historical narratives are to be reckoned with, and they continue to locate contemporary conflicts within an imperial, postimperial, or neo-imperial frame.

The imperial era is by no means the only example of these divergent views of well-known historical markers. Consider the case of World War I, typically taught as an object lesson on how wars can start inadvertently. In terms of impact, World War I was significant because it finished off three long-standing land-based empires – Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian – fundamentally reshuffled territory and constituted a failed US effort to rewrite the rules of global governance. The direct effects of the Versailles settlement were more consequential for Europe than for Asia, however, where it redistributed a handful of German holdings. The imperial order also shifted in East Asia, but because of new challengers to the aging colonial powers there: the British, French, and Dutch. New histories emphasize how it was World War I that ushered in the era of US dominance that is usually seen as a feature of the post-World War II order (Tooze Reference Tooze2015); that holds in East Asia as well. Japan, however, was also a beneficiary of these shifts and its rise and expanding imperial ambitions are arguably the most important consequence of World War I in Asia.

As Erez Manela (Reference Manela2009) and other historians have shown, the flag of self-determination that Wilson held out – as well as the Soviet identification with anti-colonial struggles – provided a rallying point for nationalist movements across Asia no less than they did in Europe (Aydin Reference Aydin2007; Mishra Reference Mishra2012; Streets-Salter Reference Streets-Salter2017; Guan Reference Ang2018, Chapter One; Harper Reference Harper2020). These nationalist forces were disappointed at Versailles and by the capitulation of the United States to European imperial interests. Nonetheless, the crucial concept of self-determination was now on the table.

An interesting question about periodization is whether there was a post-Versailles liberal moment in Asia as there was in Europe, and if so whether it bears consideration as a precursor or comparator to the postwar liberal order. As a latecomer, the United States had a somewhat different colonial project than the European states, for example, in its nominal commitment to “open door” norms of nondiscrimination and the potential for multilateral solutions to the region’s security problems. These included the League itself but also the projects set in train by the Washington Conference in 1921–22, the Four- and Nine-Party Treaties, and the nod to negotiating tariff autonomy for China. Iriye (Reference Iriye1965) outlines the rise and fall of that project but Dickinson (Reference Dickinson2013) goes farther, making the case for a “new Japan” in the 1920s that moderated the country’s imperial ambitions. We are skeptical, seeing more continuity across the period, including US support for the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia (Foster 2010). But the 1920s does raise the complex counterfactual of whether the more overt tensions and conflicts of the 1930s might have been avoided and if so how.

Collective memories of war also operate on very different timelines across the Pacific. Pearl Harbor may have been the triggering event in the onset of the Pacific War for the United States. But when that war – or wars – really started remains a matter of debate to this day. At a minimum, we need to go back to the typical dating of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. But a strong case can be made that the onset of regional wars should be pushed back to the Mukden incident of 1931. S. C. M. Paine (Reference Paine2014) titles her overview of what might be called the long interwar period The Wars for Asia: 1911–1949, a subversive periodization whose beginning and end dates are associated with two Chinese revolutions. But why not go back further to the incorporation of Korea as a protectorate in 1905 – a prelude to its annexation in 1910 – or Japan’s initial push to exercise more decisive influence in Manchuria? Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka (Reference Matsusaka2001) opens his history of the making of Japanese Manchuria by claiming that “Japan’s subjugation of Northeast China … began in 1905,” with the rail concessions secured in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war (see also Young Reference Young1998; Matsusaka Reference Matsusaka2001; Chapter 4, this volume).

Finally, we are continually reevaluating the Cold War, mining it for comparative insights into the growing polarization between the United States and China and Russia. But while the Cold War trope may appear a logical – and even self-evident – framing for our understanding of the postwar period, it is by no means as obvious as Western scholars might think. Such periodization is not innocent. Under the Cold War narrative, the defining puzzles center on American grand strategy and the idea of a “postwar settlement” or “order” (Chapter 2, this volume). This framing naturally poses questions about the components of that order and how states allied, aligned, or hedged vis-à-vis great power patrons; in effect, what the lineup of the red and blue teams looked like.

But for virtually the entire developing world, the arc is quite different. The global South’s timelines focus on the emergence of nationalist movements, which reached back into the 1910s and 1920s, and in a number of cases in Asia only achieved their goals well into the postwar period. In these colonial narratives and their postcolonial successors, the problems are not the preoccupations of the great powers and the emergence of competing Cold War coalitions. Nor are they completely captured by those interpretations of the Cold War that rightly focus attention on the developing world as the main arena of great power competition (e.g., Westad Reference Westad2005).

Rather they center on a much longer arc and literatures that were central to political science at one point but have wrongly dropped from the research radar: the articulation of national identities, the mobilization of opposition to colonial rule, the civil wars that are at the heart of virtually all national movements, and the efforts of newly independent states to manage risks emanating from all large powers, regardless of their ideological camp. There is little doubt that World War II had decisively corrosive effects on the European empires. But those processes were by no means automatic, and the US role was by no means always a liberal progressive one; it sided with nationalist forces in Southeast Asia in some cases (such as Indonesia) while supporting European allies in their effort to reenter the region, most fatefully with respect to the French in Indo-China (e.g., Lawrence Reference Lawrence2005).

The important point to make here is that these temporal-cum-analytic frameworks have important interpretive consequences. The Cold War narrative of the postwar period naturally hones in on such important developments as the alliance systems, to which political scientists have made important historical as well as theoretical contributions (Christensen Reference Christensen2011; Henry Reference Henry2022). Yet it sits uncomfortably with other aspects of the historical record in which large swaths of the developing world – including key Asian states at the time such as Indonesia and Burma – were in fact nonaligned or seeking a third way (Lee Reference Lee2010; Miskovic, Fischer-Tine and Boskovska Reference Miskovic, Fischer-Tiné and Boskovska2014; Getachew Reference Getachew2019). The implications carry through all the way into the present. The current controversy about hedging in Southeast Asia is little more than a replay of strategic debates in developing countries about how to carve out independent foreign policies in the early Cold War era (Goh Reference Goh2007; Kuik Reference Kuik2008).

1.5 Themes III: The Domestic Political Foundations of Regional Order

Domestic political factors are a recurring theme in any consideration of regional order, but which ones and how should they be theorized? At the most basic level we are interested in those political factors that generate capabilities and weaknesses. One of the great puzzles of the period under review is the divergence between the political and economic trajectory of China and Japan. That divergence sets the stage for the central conflict of the interwar period – Japan’s inextricable commitment to its mainland empire, which in turn drew in the United States. Coe and Wolford return to this fundamental problem in the conclusion, and we summarize their take in more detail next.

Here, however, we complicate the picture. In this volume, Sawasdipakdi shows how the Thai court pursued reforms that gave it bargaining leverage vis-à-vis the imperial powers. However, “reform” is not typically of a single piece. Joe Esherick’s (Reference Esherick1976) classic treatment of the 1911 revolution in Hunan and Hubei suggests how hard it is to get these domestic political stories right:

Esherick points out that in the context of China, “reforms” tended to benefit elites while exposing the masses to extraordinary risks, most notably in higher taxes and price inflation.

Nor is the “traditional and modern” binary necessarily useful for understanding the choices made by reforming elites. New accounts of the Meiji era such as Ravina (Reference Ravina2017) show that far from Meiji reforms mimicking Western models, they drew on highly traditional justifications and reflected odd amalgams. And there is certainly no way that crude factors such as a regime type were decisive; Japan was also oligarchic. The failure of republicanism to take root and rapid descent into what would now be called competitive authoritarian rule and ultimately warlordism is also clearly more complicated than that.

It goes far beyond the scope of this volume to litigate an historical comparison of the complexity of Japan and China from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth. But the international causes and consequences are worth underscoring. First, as Horowitz shows, the problems China faced lay in the contradictions of the imperial system itself: that outside powers made demands on the Chinese system that made it less rather than more capable, even with respect to defending imperial interests. The imperial powers simultaneously wanted a Qing court that could protect foreign interests yet was not strong enough to stand up forcefully to imperial depredation. This ambivalence arguably persisted into the KMT era on the mainland and into the deepening civil war.

Second, the contribution by King highlights the role of economic factors in the Sino-Japanese relationship. Perfectly aware of the threat Japan posed, the Nationalist government had little choice but to accommodate continued trade and investment from Japan because of the need for capital, inputs, and technology. As with any international economic relationship, imperial ties generated their own sources of political support.

Domestic political factors play an equally important role in our consideration of Cold War dynamics, and we can think of them most broadly in coalitional terms: who held power, to whom were they accountable, and what were the foreign policy implications of these political relationships? We observe significant heterogeneity in the governments that emerged in the postwar period. In Northeast Asia – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – conservative anti-communist governments dominated and allied with the United States; in South Korea and Taiwan, these governments were authoritarian, labor-repressive right-wing dictatorships. In China and North Korea, virtually opposite regimes emerged, led by Communist parties that were aligned with the Soviet Union. We do not need to imagine the counterfactual: if the Nationalists had prevailed in the Chinese Civil War and the United States had occupied the entirety of the Korean peninsula, we would have had completely different alignment patterns.

Southeast Asia by contrast was characterized by much greater diversity and generated more diverse foreign policies as a result. These ranged from the socialist commitments of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and its subsequent ties with the Soviet Union and China, through the nonaligned cases of Burma and Indonesia to the conservative coalitions that assumed power in Singapore, Malaysia, South Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. This latter group clearly tilted toward Europe and the United States. Ngoei makes the case that these domestic political alignments constituted the political foundations for American hegemony in the region. It is worth noting that political convergence in the region also provided the foundation for the formation of ASEAN in 1967, which subsequently played a surprisingly important role in structuring the organizational architecture of the entire region. In their contribution on the Pacific Islands, Wallis and Corbett play out how domestic political alignments similarly influenced the extent to which semi-sovereign states would pursue closer or more arm’s-length ties to the United States and more recently with China as well.

However domestic political forces aligned, it is worth noting how the strategic environment could generate bargaining leverage for governments in their relationships with the great powers. James Lee makes this point most clearly in his political economy take on the alliance system. To be sure, the conservative political coalitions that emerged in the Cold War era were more likely to gravitate toward close relations with the United States, including through the conclusion of formal alliances in mutual defense treaties. But he shows that they also used concerns about domestic subversion to extract aid commitments. Moreover, the appearance of patron–client relationships did not imply that the Asian alliance partners moved in lockstep with American policy preferences. A second important theme of Lee’s paper is how the economic models adopted by newly independent governments were by no means liberal in orientation; to the contrary, the region proved a test bed for interventionist economic policies that were subsequently identified with developmental states (Haggard Reference Haggard2018).

1.6 Theme IV: Ideational Factors and the Role of Race

A fourth and final theoretical theme that follows on the first volume is the renewed effort to give due weight to ideational factors in international relations. We argued that normative structures were not only crucial to the Sinitic order but were also equally important in sustaining subsequent imperial projects. In that volume and here, we note the role that treaty law and extraterritoriality played in that regard and – following Park (Reference Park, Haggard and Kang2020) – see them as embodying a kind of discursive power.

Here we add an additional dimension into the mix: the role that race plays in international politics and in relations between Europe and the United States and Asia in particular. As with the literature on imperialism, the topic is not a new one: classic works on colonialism and race can be found in the interwar and early postwar period (e.g., Du Bois Reference Du Bois2014; Fanon Reference Fanon1965); the “colonial turn” noted here has deep roots. Moreover, prominent historians have highlighted the role of racial tropes as a handmaiden to wartime mobilization (e.g., Dower Reference Dower1986). Yet attention to race in international relations has lagged, in part because of the difficulty of incorporating it into models in which states – rather than their polities and societies – are conceived of as the dominant actors (Freeman, Kim and Lake Reference Freeman, Kim and Lake2022; Brown Reference Brown2024).

In this volume, Han and Kim provide a political economy explanation for the emergence of anti-Chinese racism in the United States, focusing on the migration that accompanied the opening of China, the demand for labor arising from the gold rush and railroad-building in the United States, and the inevitable conflicts that arose with American labor as a result. They trace the politicization of race in the second half of the nineteenth century that culminated in a succession of exclusionary acts, first passed in 1882 and not ultimately repealed until 1943.

However, they are clear that material factors were not the only ones at work. We can do no better than to cite from their contribution:

However, restrictive immigration policies are not the only contact point with international relations: equally if not more important is the reaction to these strictures in Asia and the opening of additional political fissures. Chinese nationalism was spurred not only by the reaction against imperialism but also by the institutionalized slight of the Exclusion Acts and the systematic mistreatment of co-nationals; the anti-foreign boycotts of 1905 in China were a direct result of the Exclusion Acts.

In his contribution to the project, Manela extends this discussion by considering the Japanese reaction to similar constraints in its failed effort to introduce a racial equality provision into the League covenant at Versailles. As he notes, the effort was a minimalist one: less to define a new global principle than to address the ill treatment of Japanese citizens abroad. He traces the diplomatic embarrassment that followed as Japan made revision after revision to sway Wilson and avoid a veto from the British empire, all to no avail. John Dower has drawn the through line to the Pacific War, and to both fronts of the global conflagration:

1.7 Conclusion

The conclusion by Coe and Wolford returns us to theories of international relations and comparative politics. They start with a basic political economy model in which the capacity to modernize is the underlying factor driving the long arc of power transitions we have traced in this project: from a Sino-centered order through a European imperial one to the rise of Japan and the United States, Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, and the onset of an order anchored by the United States. However, they ground power transitions in a domestic political economy in which the gains from reform and the capacity of dominant coalitions to introduce them play a central role.

The relevance of this story line should be obvious. If the postwar order in the region left numerous territorial issues unresolved – as Goh argues convincingly – there can be little doubt that it played a significant role in the subsequent transformation of the region’s political economy. The Asian peace that set in shortly after this volume concludes was clearly related to the path of what was later known as “reform and opening,” even if modified by interventionist impulses (Chapter 12, this volume): first in Japan, then in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and ultimately spreading to the rest of Southeast Asia as well.

However, clearly the most important and consequential change in the late-Cold War in East Asia was the return of China to a position of greater centrality in the region. China’s dramatic opening under Deng Xiaoping, beginning in 1978, is the point of departure, preceded by a gradual thawing of relations with the United States and followed by diplomatic normalization in 1979. Following Coe and Wolford, however, what transformed China was not only the change in the country’s external relations but also the decision by Deng to pursue economic reform.

These developments fall outside the scope of this book, which ends in the early Cold War period. Nonetheless, there are some openings for comparative analysis. The chapters in this volume have explored a weak China that was internally divided and beset by external actors attempting to take advantage of its weakness. The return of China to economic predominance in East Asia was as unanticipated as it was blindingly fast. Within a few short decades, the debate switched from how to accommodate a relatively weak and inward-looking China – riven by the Cultural Revolution – to managing a China capable of challenging the United States and the so-called liberal international order that the United States has championed.

Our historical overview provides a reminder of the risks of facile historical analogies that have characterized the debate over China’s rise. Even with its current polarization and political dysfunction, there is little to suggest that the relative decline of the United States will pose the same systemic challenges that the gradual disintegration of the Chinese order did. Conversely, nor is it likely that China will be able to restore the type of dominance it enjoyed in what Coe and Wolford (Reference Coe, Wolford, Haggard and Kang2020) call “historical East Asia.” Despite the unresolved territorial conflicts of the San Francisco system outlined by Goh, it is not clear whether China or the US alliance system has the incentive or capability to fundamentally alter the territorial status quo.

Nonetheless, Coe and Wolford’s conclusion to this volume suggests several lines of inquiry that are somewhat more discomfiting. A first point they make is that divergence in economic strategies can easily set the stage for recurring conflict. China’s economic path since the mid-Hu Jintao years has clearly diverged more and more from its earlier reform and opening path. Some of the most challenging political issues confronting the region now center on whether fundamental differences in economic strategies can be reconciled and whether long-standing economic commitments on the part of the United States can be sustained. The differences between the United States and China are increasingly seen as fundamental differences in economic system that may not be amenable to negotiated settlement. Rather, we are seeing a turn in the direction of state intervention and protectionist policies as the United States and Europe confront the negative externalities of China’s increasingly statist growth strategy.

However, the economic geography is also shifting in ways which limit decoupling. Not only does the United States remain dependent on China – and vice versa – the countries in the region are rapidly integrating with each other in ways that only partly engage the United States. Southeast Asian nations in particular were never as engaged in a bipolar competition as was the case in Europe (Chapter 2, this volume) and continue to engage in close relations with both the United States and China. Even more than during the early Cold War period, we expect domestic political alignments in the countries of the region to continue to shape the nature of the post-Cold War order.

Second, Coe and Wolford provide a promising way to think about the emerging ideological conflict that is occurring between the United States and China. They are worth quoting at length:

Throughout this project, we have sought to give due weight to shifting power balances while always paying equal attention to the complicated and sometimes idiosyncratic ideational factors that sustain order: in the tribute system, in the complex negotiations and coercions of the European and Japanese imperial orders, in the racial ordering of interactions across the Pacific, in the early postwar Pax Americana, and now in the increasing Chinese commitment to reforming global and regional governance. Given political developments in both the United States and China, we see few reasons to believe that the ideological jousting outlined by Coe and Wolford is likely to attenuate; the analytic task is to map its evolution.