Post-Western International Relations Reconsidered

The Pre-Modern Politics of Gongsun Long

Chih-yu Shih, Po-tsan Yu

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137493200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137493217
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study offers a critique of international relations from the perspective of a pre-modern Chinese thinker, Gongsun Long. It explores both the potential and the danger of the post-Western quest for geo-cultural distinction.

Part I

Teaching for the Time

1

Engaging in Our Time

Abstract: Gongsun denounced artificial intervention based on ideas and reasons. He could debate the liberal global governance as he did Confucianism because his criticism of the Confucian ritual and would-be criticism of the liberal due process could rest upon the same sensibility toward individualized condition. Gongsun and post-Western quest are in line with each other in that they shared alert to any overarching claim of legitimacy for interventionary action. However, Gongsun was not interested in detecting the geo-cultural root as the “objective” foundation – and thus, legitimacy – of a declared distinctive hybridity. For him, a distinctive claim based on sited objectivity could be either redundant or dangerous because of various manipulative purposes that such a claim is meant to achieve. He was suspicious toward the naming of any claimed hybridity.

Shih, Chih-yu and Po-tsan Yu. Post-Western International Relations Reconsidered: The Pre-Modern Politics of Gongsun Long. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137493217.0004.

One immediate practical relevance of Gongsun’s pre-modern debate to the post-Western pursuit is humanitarian intervention. For Gongsun, the originality of things coming from heaven and earth is the ultimate guide. Gongsun’s preaching for both distinction and originality deconstructs the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention embedded in the global liberal order. His argumentation would be a conceptual advice to seek a circumstantial arrangement without directly challenging the overarching principle of social and political order in a so-called failing state. An original order is to be restored if it corresponds to a spontaneous order that is existent and naturally evolving. Gongsun denounced artificial intervention based on ideas and reasons. He debated liberal global governance as he did Confucianism: his criticism of the Confucian ritual and would-be criticism of the liberal due process rested upon the same sensibility toward the individual’s situation. This particular sympathy toward the individualized condition easily allies with the contemporary quest of post-Western international relations, which emphasizes the geo-cultural characteristics of sited and distinctive identities that do not naturally fit into the liberal order.

However, geo-cultural characteristics presuppose development away from the original order because all geo-cultural trajectories exhibit their own genealogy, in which traits are combined because of encounter, choice, coincidence, and constant innovation. Gongsun’s original order refers to the objective condition produced by heaven and earth. In the 21st century, determining which order is spontaneously evolving from heaven and earth is difficult. None of the contemporary orders can be exempted from serious human manipulation or external intervention, and Gongsun’s respect for heaven and earth can be taken as a philosophical metaphor in a pre-modern condition. Gongsun proceeded with his anxiety toward the mixing of original things that produced neither–nor relationships. In contrast, the post-Western quest aimed to acknowledge that hybridity is one of a kind.¹ During Gongsun’s time, only powerful kings were capable of manipulating symbols and names to create their favored amalgam.

In one sense, Gongsun and the post-Western quest are in line with each other, in that they were both alert to any overarching claim of legitimacy for intervention. The post-Western quest is premised upon a geo-cultural trajectory that is distinctive from Western intellectual history: hence the epistemological objectivity of each post-Western site. For Gongsun, a geo-cultural trajectory should develop an expressible language that specifically acknowledges its distinctive reality to be entitled to self-claimed identity, distinctive policy, and institutional and spiritual arrangements. However, Gongsun was not interested in detecting the geo-cultural root as the “objective” foundation – and thus, legitimacy – of a declared distinctive hybridity. For him, a distinctive claim based on sited objectivity could be either redundant or dangerous because of various manipulative purposes that such a claim is meant to achieve. He was suspicious of naming any claimed hybridity. Instead, he preferred to think of the claimed hybridity as a non-synthetic composition of the original components that cannot be re-named.

Gongsun demanded that distinction be provided in all post-Western conditions to each specific site, without sacrificing or subduing the original components that jointly made the new, synthesized identity. In other words, a hybrid condition cannot eliminate the original order upon additionally acquiring a hybrid identity. For Gongsun, legitimately winning the acknowledgment of its sitedness would require the preservation and coexistence of the original reality as a separate category. However, the post-Western notion of sitedness is similar to the postmodern condition prescribed in Roland Barthes’ formula, in which the author is always dead once a word is uttered. In Gongsun’s debate, no geo-cultural tradition can legitimately monopolize a population into a singularly similar, if not identical, post-Western identity. Gongsun is interested in how the population is different from itself: the two original identities and the emerging hybridity coexist separately.

The post-Western quest further pursues why the population is inevitably different from the hegemonic specification. As long as a reason is provided, the reason will be tantamount to a source of legitimacy. Post-Western International Relations (IR) uses this legitimacy to resist hegemony.² Gongsun wanted to keep pre-hybrid things in the referable condition without being superseded and as a rhetoric base of criticism against the potential abuse of hybridity. Such abuse took place frequently in his time because the sited leadership invented its own politically correct image and title by mixing symbols and rituals at will. The global hegemony could re-appropriate any alleged hybridity into a marketable symbol in mainstream IR to the effect of freezing a hybrid identity through naming.³

According to Gongsun’s perspective, a hybrid identity arising out of the mix of global influence and the indigenous condition must be recognized as a parallel rather than a new identity. Logically and practically, a creative mix of the indigenous and the imported/hegemonic cannot replace each of the individual components. Logically, the hybrid kind must be a third kind; Gongsun is with the post-Western quest in this regard. Practically, Gongsun refused the possibility of mixing and argued instead a quick back-and-forth movement between the two sides. This condition creates a delicate difference from the post-Western quest because the restoration is unlikely in the latter, whereas the original state is never lost in the process of a site becoming hybrid in Gongsun’s argument. Gongsun acknowledged that the hybrid could be a paralleling third kind. The very concept of hybridity in itself meant to Gongsun that neither side could win over the other – both sides could still be referred to as realities by utterers who would remain attached or return to the original order.

In the postmodern condition, the difference is individualized and – according to Roland Barthes – constantly and momentarily giving rise to yet another difference.⁴ Gongsun could be politically incorrect in light of the post-Western quest in that his insistence on preserving the original reality could be a reason for nationalist or fundamentalist appeals to an imagined, spontaneously, and indigenously pure state. Fundamentalism would be functionally useful to Gongsun if it does not subdue non-fundamentalist conditions during the resistance to hegemonic indoctrination of global liberalism. All claims, through the language of naming, should be understood by analyzing their purposes in the mind of utterers who enlist the language.⁵ Non-fundamentalism should acknowledge the reality of fundamentalism, with or without the latter’s acknowledgement, in return for the reality of non-fundamentalism. According to Gongsun, acknowledgement of reality would not be treated as an exchange of favor, although fundamentalism should likewise acknowledge the reality of non-fundamentalism.

Compared with the proponents of post-modern deconstruction, Gongsun was more empirical than philosophical, because he was practically devoted to discovering the reality defined by the purpose of the utterer in his or her own condition. Such a reality would be a suspect construction in the 21st century because of its coincidental characteristics, and not a thing produced by heaven and earth under the postmodern condition. Although a postmodern interpretation – with which post-Western IR resonate in terms of shared desire for an anti-hegemonic order – is devoted to an author’s subjectivity and difference,⁶ Gongsun was more interested in subjectivity than difference. For Gongsun, the difference of one’s reality from that of others is, by definition, true and needs no extra effort to prove. Thus, the difference between each one is a secondary issue. A self-denying method (i.e., the author dying instantaneously) does not exist in Gongsun’s thought to deny the validity or convenience of an entitlement, which Gongsun found practically useful to win acknowledgement of one’s reality.⁷ Gongsun granted legitimacy to a stable place, where all subsets of the population could develop and live on an entitlement that is distinctively uttered for their reality. However, because Gongsun was not interested in scientific “why” questions, the specification of a subset would incur no duty to demonstrate the geo-cultural distinction presumed in the hybrid situation of its own; thus, no rationalization or justification would be needed to claim sitedness. Entitlement to a different policy arrangement can be merely social and psychological, rather than geologically embedded. The practicality of Gongsun’s sensibility toward each person’s own reality is captured in several contemporary illustrations.

Entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a tedious negotiation that requires every two countries to negotiate on every item of goods, in line with Gongsun’s methodology; no universal arrangement is automatically applicable to all goods or countries. The case of the WTO is reminiscent of old-fashioned tributary systems, wherein specific arrangements between the central state and the vassal state depend on the situation of the latter. No such tributary model could be universally applied to Chinese history;⁸ even China could be a vassal state granted that a strong northern power could request China pay tribute.⁹ This kind of bilateral arrangement is usually incompatible with a rule-based international relationship because it acknowledges the reality of both parties and involves mutual adjustment, preferably by disregarding the discrepancy between the bilateral settlement and the international rules. Instead, there is a universal rule, which transcends reality. The tributary relationship thus resembles the kind of bilateral relationship adopted by the WTO – both relaxing the universal rule so that the two parties could proceed to amend that rule. Nevertheless, the WTO has the long-term goal of moving toward a shared global liberal order. Gongsun would not appreciate this imposition of a future destiny.

Notes

1 Nathan Andrews, “Globalization, Global Governance, and Cosmopolitanism: A Critical Exploration of European Practice,” CEU Political Science Journal 7, 4 (2012): 411–433.

2 Mustapha Kamal Pasha, “Islam, ‘Soft’ Orientalism and Hegemony: A Gramscian Rereading,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8, 4 (2005): 543–558.

3 Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry, 20, 2 (Winter, 1994): 328–356.

4 Rolan Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” (trans.) Richard Howard, Aspen 5–6 (Fall–Winter 1967): n.p.

5 Chunpo Zhang, and Jialong Zhang, “Logic and Language in Chinese Philosophy,” in Brian Carr, (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997); Hubert Schleichert, “Gong-sun Long on the Semantics of ‘World’,” in Lenk and Paul (eds.), Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 1993): 113–117; Ernst Joachim Vierheller, “Object Language and Meta-Language in the Gongsun-long-zi,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 20, 2 (1993): 181–210.

6 Pauline Rosenau, Post-Modernism and Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

7 Daoism is echoed by Bather indeed in a peculiar way. According to the Daoist debate, the self should be always ready to jettison any particular form of subjectivity that the self is taking at the time. “I could leave myself behind anytime,” said Zhuang Zi. The chapter on “Things Equalized” (qi wu) in Zhuang Zi.

8 Bongjin Kim, “Rethinking of the Pre-Modern East Asian Region Order,” Journal of East Asian Studies 2, 2 (August 2002): 67–101.

9 For example, the Southern Song Dynasty was a tributary state of the Jin Dynasty.

2

Engaging in His Time

Abstract: If rationalism reflects human confidence in relying on pure logic and the abstract value to design or improve human systems, Confucianism was no less enlightened during the early Zhou Dynasty than the Renaissance and modernity in Europe or early Republica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: A Pre-Modern Thinker on International Relations
• Part I  Teaching for the Time
• Part II  Reality Instead of Name
• Part III  Post-Western Issues
• Conclusion: Post-Post-Western International Relations
• Appendix: A Methodological Note
• Glossary
• References
• Index