'Emperor at Home, King Abroad': Managing Competing Order-Building Projects through Spatial Organisation in Early Modern East Asia
Creators: name: Varnay, Michael
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2024

description: Accounts of historical East Asia within International Relations (IR) underplay the tensions resulting from competing order-building projects. Singular focus on Chinese hierarchy overlooks concurrent hierarchical orders pursued by Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Focusing on the early modern period, I identify a key puzzle associated with this situation - the lack of a singular organising logic produced competing efforts at hierarchical stratification contradicting one another. Furthermore, it produces confusion over where authority derives from and how it is legitimised. As seen across the international system, the existence of competing orders at best produces instability and at worst results in conflict. Yet the situation in East Asia remained stable and endured long-term. How did competing order-building projects in early modern East Asia co-exist despite the tensions their mutually exclusive claims generated? Rather than attribute early modern East Asia's stability to hierarchical order, this project sees the endurance of hierarchy as something requiring explanation. I argue an underexplored spatial dimension explains how actors legitimised the authority of their competing order-building projects and allowed them to co-exist despite their mutually exclusive claims. Their authority operated on an inside/outside dynamic within distinct locations as reflected in the contemporaneous phrase 'wai wang nei di' or 'emperor at home, king abroad'. This captures how East Asian rulers took on different roles through contradictory performances within their own order and those of competing actors. To demonstrate this, I explore the relative success of the order-building projects of Tokugawa Japan, Joseon Korea, and Dai Viet in constructing their own hierarchy and departing from the prevailing Sinocentric order. I begin by conceptualising early modern East Asia as a polycentric hierarchy - a heterarchical formation consisting of multiple centres not resting on a shared organising logic. Each actor established hierarchy in practice through interaction rituals at the micro-level that constituted how order was experienced by actors. Together, these produced competing authority claims and diverging normative agendas throughout the East Asian system. I explain the endurance of this formation by introducing the segmentation of space that ensured contradictory understandings remained separate. Through spatial organisation, actors could dictate when, where, and how the interaction rituals structuring relations between actors occurred in a particular space. Doing so established a logic of appropriateness and demands on behaviour within physical locations aligning performances with that actor's vision of order. On the inside, authority was expressed on an autonomous basis whereas outside authority was recognised as hierarchically delegated. Nevertheless, in light of the tensions associated with participating in interaction rituals conveying a status at odds with an actor's understanding, performance strategies allowed this to be managed. Here, avoidance, manipulation, accommodation, and confrontation could alter performances on the ground to distance an actor or ensure compliance with particular understandings. Together, they highlight how management, not resolution, of competing order-building projects is secured on an ongoing basis.