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The nomadic other: Ontological security and the Inner Asian steppe in historical East Asian international politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2015

Joseph MacKay
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Abstract

A growing literature in IR addresses the historical international politics of East Asia prior to Western influence. However, this literature has taken little note of the role of Eurasian steppe societies and empires in these dynamics. This article offers a corrective, showing that relations between China and the steppe played an important role in regional politics. I argue that Chinese elite conceptions of the steppe as other played an important role in maintaining China’s ontological security. Imperial Chinese elites pursued a deliberate strategy of ‘othering’ steppe societies, presenting them as China’s political-cultural opposite. Doing so both provided a source of stable identity to China and justified their exclusion from the Chinese ‘world order’. Empirically, I proceed in three sections. First, I consider Chinese identity building, framed in terms of ontological security, both under the founding Qin and Han dynasties, and under the later Ming dynasty. Second, I address recent historiography of the steppe, showing Chinese conceptions of it were inaccurate. Third, I address the long history of hybridity between the two regions.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 471 - 491
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Simon Pratt, Christopher David LaRoche, Lincoln Rathnam, three extremely helpful reviewers, and the editors of the RIS for help in preparing this article.

References

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15 Ibid., p. 10.

16 Kelly, ‘A “Confucian long peace” in pre-Western East Asia?’ The peace was nonetheless puzzling. In contrast, the same period in Europe (roughly the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries) included all the Reformationary wars, including the Thirty Years War, as well as the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. It was an extraordinarily bloody period. Alternately, the East Asian peace was more than ten times as long as, and considerably less violent than, the original ‘long peace’ – the Cold War.

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18 Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics’; Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations.

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23 Mitzen treats ontological (in)security as a property of states as unitary actors. Others, such a Krolikowski, are sceptical. I focus on Chinese elite individual efforts to construct a collective identity, eliding the methodological problem of treating states as unitary, but nonetheless focusing on the collective identity of the state. Subotic adopts a similar approach. Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics’; Krolikowski, Alanna, ‘State personhood in ontological security theories of International Relations and Chinese nationalism: A sceptical view’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2:1 (2008), pp. 109–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subotić, ‘Narrative, ontological security, and foreign policy change’.

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25 See, for example, Rumelili, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia.

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27 Not all ontological security frameworks in IR emphasise self/other relations. While Mitzen makes no direct reference to it, the concept is important to Steele’s account. Ibid., pp. 26–7, 30–2.

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29 As Neumann and Wigen have recently argued, steppe societies have been ‘roundly neglected’ in IR, in terms of understanding relations both between steppe polities, and between steppe and settled peoples. Neumann and Wigen, ‘The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of International Relations’.

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44 A Song dynasty historian took an analogous view of steppe peoples: ‘Let us not seek victory over them … They are like unto all manner of insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards. How could we “receive them with courtesy and deference”?’ quoted in Wright, David C., ‘The northern frontier’, in David Andrew Graff and Robin D. S. Higham (eds), A Military History of China (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p. 57Google Scholar.

45 This view was not limited to the steppe – it applied to multiple peripheral peoples. See Scott’s account of imperial relations with Southeast Asian hill tribes. Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed. Tellingly, Scott references Barfield’s ‘shadow empires’ in framing his account. Barfield, Thomas J., ‘The shadow empires: Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier’, in Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Only the steppe both received this rhetorical treatment and presented a military threat. Exceptionally, Ming and Qing authorities had difficulty dealing with pirate polities on the Chinese coast. Being relatively short-lived, institutionally adaptable, and opposed to Chinese rule, they had striking parallels with the steppe. MacKay, Joseph, ‘Pirate nations: Maritime pirates as escape societies in late Imperial China’, Social Science History, 37:4 (2013), pp. 551–573Google Scholar.

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47 By this time, the states were states, in the sense of being centralised and bureaucratised. For example, civil service exams dated from the Han dynasty, and were formalised during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Woodside, Alexander, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 1–2Google Scholar. East Asian state consolidation thus predates equivalent processes in Europe. It occurred in China, Korea, and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in Japan, where a feudal warrior aristocracy persisted. Kang, , East Asia Before the West, pp. 25–53Google Scholar.

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58 Chiefly Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian of China.

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79 Ibid., p. 306.

80 Sneath, The Headless State, pp. 23, 181.

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84 Skrynnikova, Tatyana D., ‘Relations of domination and submission: Political practice in the Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan’, in David Sneath (ed.), Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth-Twentieth Centuries (Bellingham, WA: East Asian Studies Press, 2006), p. 86Google Scholar.

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91 Thus, for example, Honeychurch cites positively elements of Lattimore’s and Barfield’s arguments.

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