Consideraciones técnico – económicas

The diffusion of modern political theory is generally understood in an oxymoronic way. While it is an artefact of a particular culture—European, to be precise—it has

been claimed to hold universal character. This prevailing view contends that any global diffusion of scientific theories, not only political theories, is fundamentally a one-way development from the West to the rest of the world, affirming the cultural and political superiority of the West. This view has only begun to be questioned by English-speaking scholars recently, who argue that a large number of powerful ideas and inventions that have enabled Western civilisation to claim its universality actually arrived from all over the world (Hobson, 2004, 2012a, 2012b). Among those ideas, political theory, whose origin was considered to be Greco-Roman and therefore ‘Western’ (Gress, 1998), still holds a special position with the copyright of the West, and its universal applicability is yet to be questioned more thoroughly. However, as Adriana Cavarero (2002) notes, the term political theory itself is an oxymoron because ‘theory’ denotes something universal whereas ‘politics’ requires continuous action. A corollary of this must be twofold: theory can be continuously interpreted through different practices; amendments in the course of interpretation are more practical and subtle, and less formal and evident. In order to clarify the subtle conversions, a comparative approach is needed, not in a conventional sense, but in the sense to which Fred Dallmayr (2004) alludes: that is, in search for universality in difference. A Cognitive Gap?

For this approach, the issue is not only what to learn but also how to enact the learning at each local site. This ‘how’ can gradually change the theory itself, engendering a neglected cognitive gap in traveling theories. Even if, as Anssi Paasi (2009: 222) states, theorising is ‘the human intellect to explain or understand phenomena by rational means’, the rationality can be context-dependent. Inoguchi Takashi (2007: 369) defines theory as ‘an amalgam of proposition, paradigm, perspective, and ism’. A crucial question follows: whose theory, or theory for whom, as this can differ among societies. Nevertheless, this potential antilogy between theory, practice, and context in relation to political subjectivity has received relatively little attention in the studies of international politics. Because an essential premise of international politics is the embrace of the modern European state system by diverse cultures (Qin, 2016: 11), it sees the European state as the subject. Such a view renders political theory highly rigid. John Agnew (1999, 2003, 2015, 2016) calls such dominant assumption a ‘territorial trap’, whereby the state is considered to exert exclusive power within its bounded territory. Whilst the insistence is insightful, there is however another way of

questioning this preoccupation: has the trap been active everywhere in the world as a spaceless and timeless ‘conception of statehood as the unique font of power in the modern world’ (Agnew, 1999: 176)1, even when the concept has moved to a society that has a different way of organising space? This is not to merely argue that there have been different international systems (Ringmar, 2012; Qin, 2016). My question is whether the expansive implementation of the apparently identical concept can really be equalised as the expansion of the very system that gave birth to the concept. A system can become divergent only if ‘different types of relationships’, and not necessarily different constituent units, are acknowledged (Qin, 2016: 12). Even in the West, as Stuart Elden (2009: xxv-xxvii) has pointed out, boundary, which forms territory, is a relatively new notion that ‘only become[s] possible in their modern sense through a notion of space’. The modern European state as the standard may then merely nominal as the concept travels globally, since spatiality when perceived differently can generate indispensable differences.

In a 2001 paper, Barry Buzan and Richard Little pose a challenging question to the discipline of IR: Why has the concept of ‘international systems’ ‘failed to travel beyond disciplinary boundaries and address popular debates’ (Buzan and Little, 2001: 26; see also Wilkinson, 2007)? A more pressing question is: Did the European international system, together with the concept of the state, really reach beyond regional boundaries, replacing and expunging indigenous political practices as well as formal institutions in other regions? Do theory and politics always go hand in hand even when it is transplanted into a new site that has been organised around different political values and systems? More than a decade later, Buzan, together with George Lawson, ask also to what extent the analytical tools developed in contemporary Western academic world are applicable to other times and places (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: 378; see also Kang, 2003). The modern diffusion of political knowledge from Europe is often considered to be a source of Western domination in world politics. This view has been enhanced further by the fact that even in non-Western scholarship, the gap between local practices and theories of foreign origin tends to be neglected in the name of the universal applicability of (Western) science (Nakamura, 1971). Critical perspectives, notably post-colonial studies, has attempted to unearth this

1 _{Elden (2013: 3) makes the interesting observation that while Agnew’s claim is insightful, it has}

tendency as power-knowledge relations, in which the subject of the action is invariably the West. Although this is certainly an important aspect in postcolonial settings, my attempt here is to re-examine this unexamined premise of asymmetric power and knowledge by thoroughly interrogating why and how knowledge has been applied by locals. As Foucault suggests, ‘to begin the analysis with a “how” is to suggest that power as such does not exist’ (1982b: 786). The appropriation of Western knowledge is readily seen as having influenced a systemic transformation of the non-Western world. However, for the recipient community, the application was a necessary evil to sustain their own community (Maruyama, 1986, 47-56).

As Leigh Jenco (2007, 2015) notes, contemporary critical and cross-cultural investigations on political theory tend to take a dialogical path, largely motivated by scholars’ aspiration to expose the parochial nature of Western universal claims. Although this in itself is a necessary exercise, it tends to facilitate another parochialism which may induce a ‘danger of congealment’ (Dallmyr, 2004: 254). As it often stresses the passivity of locals (most ironically), it is likely to ignore the question of enactment of the theory in the end. Yet, ‘theory is itself constituted by the process of generalising from one particular context to another’ for any culture (Jenco, 2015: 19). Another constructive question has to be asked, then: What helps the locals recontextualise as well as decontextualise, enabling the generalisation of a particular theory from elsewhere notwithstanding the possible contradictions? Here, at the heart of the inquiry is locality, which is understood as ‘uniqueness in plural’ (Cavarero, 2002: 514; see also Massey, 1993). The dialogical path does not account sufficiently for this question of locality, because it focuses largely on inter-cultural negotiations by treating knowledge, rather than locality, as an object, hastily premising on not only the asymmetric power relations, but also on common awareness and ways of thinking that often aspire for universality (which is ultimately inherent in modernity). Accordingly, investigations under this dialogical approach only propose the alternative, and tend to be trapped by logocentrism without paying sufficient attention to divergent methods of inquiry developed by the local community over the course of time (Jenco, 2007). By contrast, this thesis is interested in the diverse ways of recontextualisation by the locals—which is an issue of where, who, what and how— questioning the efficacy of the alternative. This interrogation highlights ‘knowing’ as a process. It is an inquiry into power and subjectivity. It aims to portray the internal logic of a community and explicates the ‘uniqueness in plural’ of interpretation that

arises in the gap between the analytical space of original theory and that of local politics.

Localisation of Theory

Indeed, this gap can be facilitative and productive, linking up the old and the new in the process of knowledge dissemination. In IR, major concepts such as the state and region are geographical. However, as James Sidaway (1997) has already pointed out some time ago, the contribution of indigenous knowledge to these ideas is still habitually out of sight, despite the growing concern on Euro-centrism. In Japan, the notion of the state (kokka) itself was first imported from China, having localised into an administrative term during the Edo Period (1603-1868) before being re-imported from the West (Ogawa, 1928a). The term ‘the state’ was not newly created, but was doubly translated into an indigenous term. Moreover, other related concepts, such as nation, state, and nation-state, tend to be interpreted into this one word, reflecting the alleged homogeneity in its usage.2

As can be seen, imported ideas are in many cases accepted by the indigenous community through unique interpretations, negotiations and domestications. The reception of foreign knowledge therefore has to be understood not only as a vindication of change but also a proof of its continuity. It indicates that in an imported concept, such as ‘the state’, conflictual ideas can stand abreast. As Nigel Thrift (1999: 304) argues, concepts are indefinite. It is open-ended, not just temporally but also spatially. Despite this argument, local readings rarely come to the surface, except a few notable investigations to date (e.g. Ringmar, 2012). The historical experiences of Japan as the first non-Western modern nation-state may offer scholars of world politics some nuanced and comprehensive insights on this conundrum.