ABSTRACT
This chapter undertakes a fresh examination of state socialization, with particular attention paid to how existing works have studied China and Japan’s entry into European International Society. Standard studies of the expansion of the Society have often described this process ‘as a success story of states in which a society of initially European states expanded “across the rest of the globe” to eventually become the “global international society of today”’.1 Accordingly, the socialization of China and Japan is described primarily in terms of both states adopting international law and European-style diplomacy and fulfilling the ‘standard of civilization’ to be eventually accorded full membership status. However, a cursory survey of the literature of Chinese and Japanese history indicates that there was more to China and Japan’s socialization than these works suggest. Both China and Japan were coerced into European International Society as a result of European powers’ ‘gunboat diplomacy’. Furthermore, there is evidence that Japan’s subsequent imperialism in the late nineteenth century was partly, if not fully, a result of its ‘learning’ process that followed its engagement with the Society. The chapter begins by reviewing conventional works which study the entry
of China and Japan into European International Society. It argues that conventional English School studies cannot provide us with a satisfactory explanation of this process because of their highly structural conceptualization of non-European polities’ socialization into European International Society, as well as their downplaying of the intertwined nature of European imperialism and the expansion of European International Society. They do not sufficiently acknowledge the fact that European imperialism was at its height when the Society expanded to East Asia, and to date they have not adequately considered the possibility that both states may have been exposed to the darker aspects of the Society. Another aim of the chapter is to build on these findings and forward a
more flexible analytical framework that can account for the multifaceted nature of China and Japan’s socialization. I argue that the English School
scholars’ normative commitments to demonstrate International Society as a ‘normative good’ resulted in empirically impoverished accounts of this complex process. I forward an alternative framework that is characterized by two points. First, it takes the role imperialism played in China and Japan’s entry into European International Society seriously and suggests that both states were socialized into a Janus-faced European International Society, where its modes of interactions which governed relations between ‘civilized’ states and between ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ states existed side by side. Second, in order to account for China and Japan’s engagement with the two faces of European International Society, this chapter forwards a process-based account for socialization. It is argued that this framework generates a more agent-centred depiction of China and Japan’s encounter with European International Society, and goes beyond the ‘thin’ accounts of non-European states’ socialization that have characterized conventional studies by English School scholars.
