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Normative convergence and cross-Strait divergence
Westphalian sovereignty as an ideational source of the Taiwan conflict *
Chengxin Pan
Every imagination of a community becomes overcoded as a nation, and hence our conception of community is severely impoverished.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri1
Introduction
Ever since its inception more than six decades ago, the Taiwan question has continued to attract attention in scholarly and policy-making circles. As a potential flashpoint, a war between mainland China (the People’s Republic of China [PRC]) and Taiwan (officially the Republic of China [ROC]) would spell disaster for regional stability and international security, and never more so than in the twenty-first century. It is thus vital to come to grips with the root causes of this almost intractable problem. For some observers, it has much to do with the wide political gap between authoritarianism and democracy across the Taiwan Strait. Other analysts focus on clashing views between Beijing and Taipei about their historical ties and Taiwan’s legal status or place in the world. Still others accentuate their differences in identity construction as a main contributing factor in this ongoing standoff.2 It has been noted, for example, that the mainland places emphasis on commonality and unity across the Taiwan Strait, treating Taiwan as an inalienable part of China and “an essential element of [China’s] national identity.”3 Taiwan, by contrast, seems to increasingly stress its distinctiveness in terms of “Taiwaneseness,” which is “largely conditioned on ‘de-Sinicization’ ” and “often set against Chineseness.”4 As a result, the Taiwan conflict is “not about power but about identity,” or more precisely, about two diverging visions of national identity.5
While scholars differ over the specific causes of the Taiwan question, there exists a tacit consensus that at its core is cross-Strait divergence and that its solution lies in reducing difference and fostering normative/identity convergence. John Copper, for example, argues that to find a lasting settlement on the Taiwan issue, Beijing and Taipei should “make some genuine efforts to understand their differences and endeavor to ameliorate them.”6 From a neoliberal standpoint, ameliorating differences entails trade and greater economic integration.7 According to “democratic peace” theory, the key is China’s democratization and its eventual political convergence with Taiwan. Realists, meanwhile, are simply pessimistic about bridging the gap across the Taiwan Strait and focus instead on maintaining the status quo through a delicate power-balancing act.8
The Taiwan conundrum is indeed inseparable from cross-Strait difference. This point is not in dispute. My concern here, however, is that it cannot be fully explained by difference alone. Although conflict is less likely in the absence of difference, difference per se is not the sole source of conflict. Conversely, while cooperation and peace are often associated with sameness and commonality, sameness and commonality do not always result in peace and harmony. According to Confucius, for the superior man, there can be harmony among difference, whereas for the inferior man, discord may arise in spite of, or even because of, commonality.9 For this reason, a study of cross-Strait convergence, as well as cross-Strait difference, should be an integral part of a better understanding of the Taiwan question.
Though divided by the Taiwan Strait and a host of differences, the Chinese mainland and Taiwan do share much in common: culture, language, ancestry, and trade, to name but a few. But among their many similarities, this chapter focuses on a particular common ground between the two sides, namely, their shared belief in Westphalian sovereignty as a fundamental international principle. Drawing on a valuable body of literature on the normative and constitutive roles of the concept of sovereignty,10 and echoing Stephen Krasner’s question of “to what extent do existing institutional arrangements, rules, and principles associated with the concept of sovereignty inhibit the solution to some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order?,”11 the chapter looks at the overlooked connection between Westphalian sovereignty and the Taiwan conundrum.
Of course, many scholars are well aware of the centrality of the issue of sovereignty to the Taiwan dispute.12 For example, in his survey of sovereignty in the Asian historical context, Michel Oksenberg illustrates how cross-Strait relations have been confined by “the concept of sovereignty and its associated ideas.” But despite this important insight, his emphasis remains on differences rather than commonalities. The major constraints on the Taiwan question, as Oksenberg puts it, are “deep distrust and animosity between the two and their different understandings of the meaning of sovereignty [emphasis added].”13 In a special issue of China Perspectives, several authors correctly point out that the rigid notion of absolute sovereignty shared by both Beijing and Taipei is at the core of the Taiwan dispute. However, their main focus is on practical, legal, and institutional solutions to the stalemate, rather than on the theoretical linkage between the shared norm of Westphalian sovereignty and the Taiwan conflict.14 Yet, in the absence of a closer examination of this linkage, cross-Strait interaction is likely to continue to operate on the basis of Westphalian sovereignty, thereby hindering the emergence of effective, meaningful, and innovative solutions.
In the pages that follow, this chapter aims to fill this gap. First, it will provide a brief account of the concept of Westphalian sovereignty and its constitutive effect in international politics, which is followed by an analysis of how this normative ideal has been shared by mainland China and Taiwan. It then traces how such a normative convergence is linked to violence and conflict in general and to the intractability of the Taiwan issue in particular. In conclusion, the chapter explores both the need to go beyond the Westphalian model and the possibility of finding alternative ways of conceptualizing sovereignty across the Taiwan Strait.
Westphalian Sovereignty: a Normative Convergence Across the Taiwan Strait
Westphalian Sovereignty as a Normative Score Sheet
What we now know as the Westphalian model of sovereignty owes its name to the Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648. Though some have challenged the actual significance of this event for the emergence of the ideal of Westphalian sovereignty in international relations,15 this historic treaty has been commonly associated with, among other things, being responsible for according states a kind of final authority—otherwise known as the legal status of sovereignty— over all internal matters within their own borders. Like most concepts in political science, Westphalian sovereignty is fuzzy and often contested. Richard Falk suggests that:
the Westphalian rubric is ambiguous in its usage as it serves both as a shorthand to designate a state-centric, sovereignty-oriented, territorially bounded global order and to identify a hierarchically structured world order shaped and managed by dominant or hegemonic political actors.16
To complicate things further, the term is also “simultaneously used to identify an event, an idea, a process, and a normative score sheet.”17
In this chapter, Westphalian sovereignty is referred to primarily as a political idea and, relatedly, a normative score sheet. As shorthand for a set of normative ideas, it represents a particular ontological view of the modern world that is supposedly constituted and organized on the basis of sovereign territorial states. As such, Westphalian sovereignty frequently serves as a normative score sheet, which comprises four interconnected dimensions. First and foremost, it denotes a type of final authority which can be best understood through Max Weber’s classic definition of the state in terms of its legitimate monopoly over violence.18 As the term monopoly may imply here, sovereign authority in the Westphalian sense means that there can be only one supreme authority (the sovereign) and that such authority is exclusionary, with no equal within the territory, and no superior without.19
A second dimension of Westphalian sovereignty concerns territoriality, which is a particular way of realizing and organizing final authority. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia, political authority in Europe frequently cut across territorial boundaries.20 But after Westphalia, those translocal or universalist claims to authority gradually gave way to the Westphalian norm of tying the exercise of final authority to specific territoriality. With the congruence between final authority and a bounded territory, the prototypical Westphalian sovereign, territorial state came into existence, not as a preexisting natural entity, but as essentially a sociohistorical construct.21
Just as the Westphalian sovereign state is a social construct, the emergence of the nation, which is “an imagined political community,”22 may be seen as a historical by-product of the sovereign state. Integral to this nation-imagining or nation-building process was, on the one hand, technological change, such as the advent of print technology, which enabled the emergence of national consciousness. Another driving force behind nation-building was the emergence of powerful bourgeois groups, which began to systematically challenge the king or monarch’s alleged final authority over the relevant territory. Taken together, these historical forces compelled the dynastic sovereign state to transform or at least reinvent itself into the nation-state, where the nation, rather than the monarch, was formally regarded as the ultimate subject of state sovereignty. This transformation is deemed necessary to legitimate or even expand state authority: once state sovereignty is believed to rest in the nation (the people), it takes on a democratic veneer of popular sovereignty. This popular aspect, though absent in the original Westphalian model, constitutes a third characteristic of the modern notion of sovereignty.
While an evolving historical product of the ideal of Westphalian sovereignty, the sovereign nation-state, especially through its unprecedented ability to collect taxes and maintain a standing army, proved to be best able to exercise and indeed institutionalize its exclusive authority over both a bounded territory and its population. It was much more economically efficient and militarily competitive than the loosely organized feudal state. Such advantages of the Westphalian sovereign state, always at a premium amidst endemic interstate conflict, contributed to its wide adoption, initially in Europe and subsequently the non-European world.23 Concurrent with the almost universal acceptance of the Westphalian model of the nation-state, there has been the diffusion of the norms of sovereign equality and nonintervention in the international system, which adds a fourth, international dimension of reciprocity and legality to the meaning of Westphalian sovereignty.
This “internal” congruence of final authority, territory, and the nation, as well as the “finishing touch” of external legal recognition, symbolizes the existence of “full” Westphalian sovereignty. These four dimensions make up a powerful normative score sheet in international relations, serving not only as the benchmark against which established states measure their success in statehood, but also as the ultimate political goal to which many stateless political communities aspire. The importance of this score sheet has been reinforced and institutionalized by international law and various international organizations, whose membership is reserved exclusively for sovereign states. As a consequence, Westphalian sovereignty has established itself as the most dominant international normative structure, underpinning “an international society that is structured to deal with the neat entities of states.”24 This is the internationa...
