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This paper discusses the impacts of the "rise of China" on European integration. Challenges facing European integration are now among the most important issues followed closely by those who are interested in the development of the European Union. This paper, regarding European integration as a process in which a European "international society" emerges and then evolves, proposes an analytical framework to analyze the rise of China as both a centripetal force for and a centrifugal force against European integration by examining how common interests and conflicts of interests among European countries over such controversial issues as human rights in China, arms embargo against China, and increasing Chinese investment in Europe would affect European countries' efforts to turn Europe into a highly integrated international society. As this paper demonstrates, whether and how either of the two forces for and against European integration will become stronger than the other would determine the direction where European integration might move and therefore is worth more examination in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese foreign policy has multiple sources, and the incentives that are driving its behaviour have grown from the domestic/international, as well as from regional, economic, normative, multilateral, and cultural levels. Foreign policy-making in China is becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated. This special issue is drawn from some edited papers presented in the joint workshop between Fudan and Durham Universities on Chinese foreign policy on 29-30 March 2010. By assessing the economic, domestic, regional, global and cultural sources of Chinese foreign policy, we aim to illustrate the various sources and to locate possible ways to consolidate the transitional process, and to spur future endeavour facing China's foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to develop a theoretical framework that associates 'socialization' with the English School's elaboration of 'international society' and then applies it to the assessment of China's socialization in East Asian international society in post-Cold War era by using two indicators, namely internalization and institutionalization. Case studies, on the one hand, indicate that China has highly internalized regional common interests and rules into its political discourse. On the other hand, China has a high degree of institutionalization regarding with South China Sea dispute while remain a relatively low degree in dealing with the Taiwan issue. China tends to settle the dispute over Taiwan unilaterally. However, by examining recent trends, China has implicitly accepted US role in cross-strait relationship and also has downplayed the use of force as an instrument by enhancing its economic ties with Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The on-going dispute over the ownership of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands between China and Japan has often been ridiculed by observers as an unwise struggle for rocks. One must question, however, why so much significance has been attached to those "trivial specks" in the first place. This paper maintains that the seed of contemporary Sino-Japanese rivalry cannot be separated from the "expansion" of European international society, after which China and Japan came to be obsessed with sovereign independence and territorial integrity. Following the demise of the Ryukyu Kingdom, Qing Chinese officials realised that Meiji Japan was no longer within the borders of a once-shared civilisation, which prepared the ground for a series of violent conflicts between them, unusual in their millennium-old, largely peaceful interactions. A sustainable resolution of the Diaoyu/Senkaku issue, then, should move from calls for putting aside sovereignty differences towards a more inclusive, post-Westphalian bordering practice in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While pre-modern China’s relations with her Sinic neighbours have been described as a distinctive variant of the English School’s international society based on a shared Confucian culture and a China-centred tributary system, her relations with her nomadic neighbours, including the Hsiung-nu, Turks, Uighurs and Mongols, have often been characterized as purely power-political, Hobbesian and lacking any societal foundation. This article argues that China and the nomads formed an international society for much of their history, one based not on a common Confucian heritage or China’s immutable centrality, but on the principle of an adaptable hierarchy based on common diplomatic norms and practices that allowed its members to affirm and contest their status within this hierarchy. The case of China and the nomads extends and enriches the concept of international society in three ways. First, it is a historical example of a non-European international society not composed of sovereign states or based on the principle of sovereign equality, but based on the principle of adaptable hierarchy and the ranking of powers. Second, it shows that international society can exist and develop between units as culturally and politically dissimilar as China and the nomads. Finally, it provides us with a unique model of how pre-modern international society in East Asia was stratified, which markedly differs from how modern international society is stratified. This last point has contemporary relevance in relation to China’s rise as a great power, and its frustration at what it feels is the unfair denial of a status commensurate with its growing power and influence by the US and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In responding to piracy in the Gulf of Aden, both Chinese and Japanese policymakers have acted as norm entrepreneurs who intend to transform the dominant norms of international society. Chinese and Japanese norm entrepreneurship is grounded in the ways in which foreign policy actors construct and reconstruct their state identity. In China’s case, policymakers have projected China’s self-image as a responsible and benevolent Great Power that derives from the Chinese conception of Tianxia. Japanese foreign policy actors, on the other hand, have advanced the notion of Japan as a bridge that mediates between East and West, developing and developed states, members and non-members of international society. Although we do not advocate that Chinese or Japanese norm entrepreneurship should be accepted uncritically, we do maintain that there exist opportunities to combine and develop the multiple approaches that different states promote to problems. This article has shown that dealing with Somali piracy is one such case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional accounts of international society’s expansion have traditionally emphasized the role played by ‘civilizing missions’ in facilitating and legitimating European aggression and imperial expansion. Conversely, in this article, I demonstrate that the relationship between imperial violence and the rhetoric of ‘civilizing missions’ was far more contested and contingent than International Relations scholars have generally assumed. Using the parliamentary debate surrounding Britain’s involvement in the Second Opium War as a case study, I reveal that civilizational rhetoric in the 1857 ‘China debate’ was equally implicated in both anti-imperialist and imperialist agendas. Richard Cobden’s victory in the debate over Palmerston’s pro-war ministry further illustrates the political potency of appeals to civilization as a brake — however temporary — on Britain’s imperial expansion. An appreciation of civilization’s janus-faced character — as a rhetorical commonplace that at different times abetted and inhibited imperial aggression — is therefore critical if we are to comprehend the halting and arrhythmic pattern of international society’s progressive expansion under British leadership in the mid-Victorian period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The category of superpower , as distinct from great power, has become naturalized in the discourses about international relations. But ‘superpower’ has only become common usage since the end of the Second World War and in modern history cannot meaningfully be applied much further than the 19th century. This article argues that superpowers are a historically contingent phenomenon whose emergence rested on the huge inequality of power between the West and the rest of the world that developed during the 19th century. As this inequality diminishes, the most likely scenario for world politics is decentred globalism, in which there will be no superpowers, only great powers. The largest section of the article uses a framework of material and social factors to show why the US is unlikely to remain a superpower, and why China and the EU are unlikely to become superpowers. The following three sections use the same framework to look more briefly at why a world with only great powers is likely to take a more regionalized form; why this might produce a quite workable, decentralized, coexistence international society with some elements of cooperation; and what the possible downsides of a more regionalized international order might be, focusing particularly on the problem of regional hegemony. The conclusions offer five policy prescriptions for living in a decentred globalist world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]