The Historical Background

The Crimean War (1853–6) played an infl uential role in shaping the geopolitical order of large parts of the Middle East up to the First World War. It forced the Ottomans to become indebted to the European powers, pushed the region into the world economy, and served as a watershed in the history of several Mediterranean countries. It can be associated with the fi rst protodemocratic reforms to be introduced in some countries with Muslim majorities (in 1861, the bey of Tunis introduced – for the fi rst time in the Islamic world – a written constitution; fi ve years later, the fi rst elections were held in Egypt; in 1876, the fi rst Ottoman constitution was enacted).

Furthermore, it was the fi rst war in which Ottoman and European soldiers fought side by side against a common enemy; it was the fi rst time, in fact, that a Protestant power (Britain) sided with a Muslim empire (Ottoman) in fi ghting a Christian empire (Russia). Moreover, it represented the fi rst major armed clash in which news from the fronts was communicated by telegraph and printed in newspapers almost in real time: a novelty that, thanks also to the fi rst photographs taken on battlefi elds, gave an unprecedented weight in the public consciousness to the victories of the Western powers against the ‘despotic’ Russian Empire.

Within the novel, there is no doubt about the origin and symptoms of Don Quixote's madness. The narrator unequivocally affi rms that the gentleman read so many tales of chivalry that he took them to be real, and then cast himself as a knight errant and his present world as that of the epic. Quixote is not alone in his diffi culties in judging the ‘truth value’ of texts; all of the characters in Don Quixote share a confusion between historical truth, poetic or moral truth, entertaining fi ction and outright forgeries and lies, yet only Don Quixote is considered mad because of it. Nor can his decision to participate in a fi ctional lifestyle be viewed as proof of madness per se; Don Quixote moves in a world of students and courtesans playing at shepherds, of dukes and duchesses playing at God. What symptom, or conjunction of symptoms, within the novel marks Don Quixote as mad, while others are merely opportunistic, gullible or bored? Do these symptoms resonate at all with those that similarly marked sixteenth-century historical subjects?

Quijano's movement from ingenuousness to true madness is found in his shift from a passive credulity about the past to an active imposition of that past world on the present and future, in situations where it is entirely out of context, and often when it will cause him harm. He assumes for himself not just a new identity but an impossible one: not just a modern-day knight but the greatest, noblest, bravest knight in history (or, more accurately, in literature), in love with a similarly superlative Dulcinea. He is obsessed with this grandiose identity and the feats he feels it compels him to accomplish, regardless of the obstacles in his way or the attempts to convince him otherwise.

World politics is marked by tales of great power competition. From the Britain–Russia ‘Great Game’ (1830s–90s), US–Britain competition in the Western Hemisphere (1890s) and Russia–Japan competition in Northeast Asia (1880s–1900s) to Britain–Germany competition in Europe (1890s–1910s), US–Japan competition in the Pacific (1920s–30s) and US–Soviet Cold War (1945–91), great powers may rise and fall but great power competition will endure. Currently, historical episodes of great power competition are replaying across the Indo-Pacific region. A tale of two hegemons – China as a potential hegemon seeking centrality in the Indo-Pacific and the US as a distant hegemon coming onshore to restore regional power balance – is now transforming the world politics of the twenty-first century.

How should we understand US–China competition in the Indo-Pacific? In this book, I intend to address the following three interrelated sets of research questions:

• • Why to compete: Why does US–China competition unfold in the Indo-Pacific? Why do Japan, Australia, India and South Korea engage in US–China competition at different paces?

• • Where and how to compete: Where do the US and China compete for influence in the Indo-Pacific region? How do the US and China compete for influence in the Indo-Pacific region?

• • Whither the competition: Whither US–China competition in the Indo-Pacific region?

I aim to achieve several aims in this introductory chapter. First, I will put the study of US–China competition in perspective with the theories and histories of great power competition. Second, I will discuss the research scope of this book, making the case for conducting an in-depth, empirical investigation on the Indo-Pacific region. Finally, I will outline the organisation of the subsequent chapters.

GENERAL

Most, if not all, arbitrating parties choosing arbitration as the means of resolving their disputes want a speedy and an efficient way to reach a binding decision between them and, ultimately, to have an enforceable arbitral award. To ensure the enforceability of an arbitral award, it is important to make sure that: (1) procedural formalities required in the relevant arbitration laws are fulfilled; (2) the award does not fall into the grounds for setting aside; and/or (3) the recognition and enforcement procedures are fulfilled under the New York Convention 1958. All these three aspects are covered in Pt 6 of the Scottish Arbitration Rules, ss 11– 15 and ss 18–22 of the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010 respectively, and will be discussed below.

PROCEDURAL FORMALITY REQUIRED IN MAKING AN AWARD

Law applied to make an award

As discussed in Chapter 9, the tribunal is required to apply the substantive law agreed by the parties to determine the merits of the dispute when making an award in order to decide the rights and obligations of the parties involved in the dispute. In the absence of agreement on the substantive law, the default rule is that the tribunal shall take commercial or trade usage, custom or practices into consideration and apply the law which appears to be the most appropriate. Rule 47 of the Scottish Arbitration Rules provides that an arbitrator is to apply the substantive law agreed by the parties (either by expression or implication) to the merits of the dispute.

Red Flags on the Red Carpet

At one time, I truly disliked horror films. In the late 1980s Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) was shown on television. I did not want to watch it, but my friends and sister convinced me that I should stay in the living room and watch with them. It was a nerve-wracking experience. I had no way of distancing myself from this poor girl covered in blood on her prom night, and from her humiliation and the unbridled fury unleashed from within. I did not see the point of the gruesome images, shocking suspense and the fear and disgust that Noël Carroll identified as the dominant emotions of the horror genre in his seminal book Philosophy of Horror (1990). Some years later, however, after I had discovered the powers of cinema, studied film at university and worked in a film-oriented book shop named Cinequanon in Amsterdam, I had a change of heart. In a small corner of the store there was a cult video section. One day a most angelic-looking boy entered, asking me with the kindest shy smile: ‘Excuse me, but do you have I Drink your Blood and Eat your Skin?’ Baffled by the contrast between his timid and friendly looks and the ferociousness of the title he requested, I handed over David Durston's 1970 cult film.

There and then I decided to give the horror genre another try. In the meantime both Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chain Saws (1992) and Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) had appeared. Since I had also begun to teach, I designed a course on horror film around these feminists’ interpretations of the genre, and took my students to the carnivalesque Night of Terror in the Tuschinski theatre.

In the atrium of Justinian's Hagia Sophia, there stood a lead-covered canopy over a great stone vessel. ‘Wash your sins, not just your face’, the inscription admonished. The message was straightforward. This study, however, dwells on another, more oblique architectural inscription: the Qasida al-Burda (‘Poem of the Mantle’), composed by the eminent Sufi poet and mystic Imam Sharafaddin al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294), whose verses adorn the ablution fountain added to the atrium of Hagia Sophia in 1740.

Just like Byzantine holy wells, ablution fountains (şadırvan) allow congregants to perform the cleansing rituals required in the practice of worship – both were monuments erected in honour of the sanctity of water. The decorative sensibilities of the fountains placed in the courtyards of Ottoman mosques underlined this theme, proclaiming the virtues attributed to water in Islamic mysticism. The qasida decorating the entablature of Hagia Sophia's ablution fountain is not about water per se, however, but rather love for the Prophet Muhammad (Figure 2.1).

Eighteenth-century Istanbul was a hub for diplomats, dervishes and dealers – all drawn to the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital from across the Empire and beyond: Cairo, Damascus, Tabriz, Isfahan, Bukhara, and even India. Some of those were pilgrims who, striving to fulfil one of the five pillars of Islam, chose to travel to the Ottoman capital with the intention of visiting the Tomb of al-Ayyub and Hagia Sophia before continuing to the Hijaz, visiting other ‘Second Meccas’ and ‘Sufi Ka‘bas’ along the way.4 For both Istanbullus and those Muslims visiting the Ottoman capital, the public display of the Qasida al-Burda must have been understood as a deliberate choice. The motivations and stimuli that lay behind the choice of al-Būṣīrī's qasida for this prominent location have, however, not yet been adequately explained.

In 1908, the French architect Marcel Le Tourneau gave a lecture at the Académie des Inscriptions on the Byzantine architecture present in Thessaloniki. By that point, Le Tourneau had visited the Ottoman port city twice, on stipends given to him by the French Ministry of Public Instruction and the Fine Arts. The purpose of his trips was to catalogue and sketch the city's monuments in the wake of destruction caused by the fire of 1890 and the earthquake of 1902. After his return from Thessaloniki, Le Tourneau described to a rapt audience how he had entered the deserted church of Hagia Sophia, or the mosque of Ayasofya to the Ottomans, and discovered its amazing mosaic decorations now revealed thanks to the fire, having been covered with plaster since the building's conversion to a mosque in the sixteenth century (Figure 5.1). In his account, Le Tourneau described how he approached the Ottoman authorities with these findings, impressing upon them the importance of his discovery and inspiring them to finally repair the damaged monument. His lecture was received warmly, and Le Tourneau published two articles on Thessaloniki's extant Byzantine monuments together with prominent Byzantinist Charles Diehl before his untimely death on the eve of the First World War.

Le Tourneau's foray into Thessaloniki's damaged mosque was but a single incident in the building's long history. In this chapter, I will trace Ayasofya's restoration by the Ottoman authorities at the turn of the twentieth century, a transitory period that covers the final years of Ottoman rule over the city and the wider region. Ayasofya is representative of the Ottomans’ engagement with the Byzantine past, in terms both of its historical symbolism and the monumental remnants of that history within the empire's cityscapes.

GENERAL

Before the enactment of the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010, arbitration laws in Scotland were criticised for being scattered among various elements of common law, cases and statutes dating as far back as 1695. With the aim of putting Scotland on the map of international arbitration and persuading international businessmen to choose Scotland as the place of their arbitration in order to generate revenue, the Scottish Government promulgated the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010 which is designed to offer a “one-stop shop” providing a single track of arbitration law corresponding with the modern trends in arbitration, covering both domestic and international arbitration.

PRE-ARBITRATION (SCOTLAND) ACT 2010

A combination of common law and piecemeal statutory provisions

Before the enactment of the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010, an arbitration held within Scotland or subject to the Scottish arbitration laws was subject to a dual track of arbitration law. Leaving aside international commercial arbitration, the law of arbitration in Scotland was based almost entirely on the common law, with piecemeal statutory provisions dealing with specific points.