State Personhood in Ontological Security Theories of International Relations and Chinese Nationalism: A Sceptical View*
Corresponding author. Email: alanna.krolikowski{at}gmail.com
International Relations theory continues to grapple with the question of how to account for the behaviour of corporate actors, such as ethnic groups, social classes or, more often than not, states.1 The viability of certain theoretical approaches that are potentially relevant to explaining contemporary international relations, including theories of socialization, learning and persuasion, partly hinges on resolving this problem. Although it is widely acknowledged that extrapolating theoretical concepts from the individual level to states operating in an international system can be problematic, International Relations theorists continue to use and defend this approach. They often justify this theoretical position using a Friedman-style instrumental rationale: treating the state as a person is theoretically productive because it generates empirically supported hypotheses.2
But the theories that these and other assumptions generate often remain untested, thus creating situations in which a primarily deductive model of enquiry rests upon an instrumental resort to assumptions that lacks the empirical tests necessary to establish its usefulness.3 Other theorists defend extrapolating from individual to state actors with reference to rival theories that use this approach, or to a more general pragmatic defence of the practice, whereby it is both useful and intuitive to regard the state as a unitary actor.4 Without empirical scrutiny, however, none of these justifications for assuming state personhood is completely satisfactory.
The evolving debates on how to model corporate actorhood are far-ranging and engage a number of disciplines.5 Rather than offering a critique of or an alternative to prevailing models,6 this essay is broadly concerned with identifying the conditions under which theoretical extrapolation from individual to state is more or less effective. It specifically addresses the problems that arise when concepts are imported from other disciplines or social theories to International Relations and scaled up from individual to state, without due consideration for their theoretical origins. To illustrate these difficulties, this article applies a theory that uses one form of this type of extrapolation to an empirical case. It therefore attempts a substantive or empirical criticism of one type of state-as-actor assumption, suggesting specific pitfalls to be avoided in the development of theories based on a state-as-actor assumption.
Among the newer variants of contemporary International Relations theory that treat the state as actor is Jennifer Mitzen's version of ontological security theory, which draws on Anthony Giddens's original development of this concept as applicable to individual persons. Both Giddens's concept and Mitzen's extension of it have been influential in International Relations, and more generally in the study of nationalism. At first glance, the concept of ontological security offers a potentially compelling account of contemporary Chinese foreign relations and other phenomena related to Chinese national identity. Although the China case should be an easy one for a state-actor theory such as Mitzen's, several significant departures from the predictions it generates are observed.7 Rather than discard ontological security as a concept, however, this essay proposes that this idea can, after substantial modification to its current usage, illuminate important phenomena in international relations. Instead of taking a state-as-actor approach, the assumption taken here is that it is individuals, not states, who experience ontological insecurity. This premise makes it possible to explore the analytical value of applying the ontological security concept as Giddens originally proposed it—with the individual as actor—to the case of contemporary China. Ontological security is shown to be relevant to the Chinese context and to explain observations with implications for international politics, such as routinized practices associated with nationalism. The essay then explores in greater depth why the individual-as-actor approach finds more empirical support than one that treats the state as actor. It proposes that resorting to the assumption of state personhood obscures important aspects of how the state, as an evolving institution, affects individuals’ sense of ontological security.8 I conclude that this contextual aspect of individual ontological insecurity is an integral part of Giddens's thought and that ignoring it impoverishes the concept, failing to recognize its necessary dependence on the broader theory in which it originated.
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Ontological Security Theory in International Relations |
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Anthony Giddens, in his sociological analysis of high modernity, defines ontological security as a basic need of individuals for ‘a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual environment of the individual’.9 ‘To be ontologically secure is to possess, on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, "answers" to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses.’10 Ontological security is a prerequisite for agency and self-identity, which Giddens defines as ‘the self as reflexively understood by an individual in terms of his or her own biography’.11 This understanding of ‘self’ is therefore a narrative which establishes the continuity of an individual's existence as him or herself, and is thus closely tied to ontological security. Self-identity is not simply given, but must be ‘routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual’.12
Jennifer Mitzen and others13 have explored the relevance of Giddens's concept of ontological security to the study of world politics. Mitzen in particular uses it to develop a theory of routinized relationships between states that sheds light on enduring international rivalries.14 Ontological security, in Mitzen's view, is sought not only by individuals, as in Giddens’ original articulation, but also by states.15 Ontological security is necessary for both individuals and states, ‘in order to realize a sense of agency’.16 In short, states, like individuals:
need to feel secure in who they are, as identities or selves. Some, deep forms of uncertainty threaten this identity security. The reason is that agency requires a stable cognitive environment. Where an actor has no idea what to expect, she cannot systematically relate ends to means, and it becomes unclear how to pursue her ends. Since ends are constitutive of identity, in turn, deep uncertainty renders the actor's identity insecure. Individuals are therefore motivated to create cognitive and behavioural certainty, which they do by establishing routines.17
All actors satisfy their need for ontological security by routinizing their social interactions, but they vary in their mode of attachment to these habituated behaviours: ‘Some actors rigidly repeat routines, while others participate more reflexively.’18 Actors who are attached to their routines reproduce ontological security-providing behaviours, even when these compromise their physical security. Mitzen's application of this concept, therefore, offers a new explanation for persistent conflicts between security-seeking states.19
Giddens and, to some extent, Mitzen regard variation in the degree of actors’ routinization as dependent on their level of basic trust (their trust in ‘the continuity of others and in the object-world’), which in turn depends, among other things, on the character of social relations at the formative stages of life or other experiences that generate existential anxiety.20 Actors with healthy basic trust engage in creative thought and importantly reflexively adapt their behaviour to new information. A healthy level of basic trust is therefore a prerequisite of learning.21 It allows an actor to engage in complex forms of learning, processes that entail responding flexibly to new information by modifying conduct rather than retreating into habituated behaviours.22 Actors with healthy modes of attachment to their routines are, according to Mitzen, also capable of pursuing ‘higher-order’ goals, such as ‘sociation, development and self-esteem’.23
Actors lacking healthy basic trust, on the other hand, exhibit a ‘blind commitment to established routines’.24 This compulsiveness is ‘born out of unmastered anxiety, which lacks that specific hope which creates social involvements over and above established patterns’.25 Breaking from routines, even those that are physically harmful, causes these actors great, paralyzing anxiety. An example is found in cases of physically abused women, for whom this anxiety constitutes a barrier to ending unhealthy relationships.26 ‘Because routinized social relations stabilize our identities, individuals become attached to the self-conceptions their routines support, regardless of their content.’27 A generalized state of anxiety can be replaced by specific symptoms: rigid patterns of behaviour that ‘swallow up’ the underlying anxiety.28 This condition contrasts sharply with that of basic trust, which is related to creativity, or ‘the capability to act or think innovatively in relation to pre-established modes of activity’.29 Trust type is therefore an important factor affecting behaviour.
This focus on the idiosyncratic sources of actors’ conduct carries implications for the status of ontological security theory when it is extended to state actors. Identifying trust type as elaborated earlier amounts to a judgement about the specific properties of the actor being studied.30 This situation affects whether or not Mitzen's theory should be considered primarily structural, as some have suggested, or as according importance to agent properties, as it is treated here. If Mitzen's theory is interpreted as strictly structural or, in other words, as a way of understanding patterns of state behaviour through the structuring effect of their interactions and without reference to states’ dispositions, then the focus on actor-specific kinds of trust is problematic.31 But this narrowly structural interpretation probably misses part of Mitzen's theory, since her argument that state interaction leads to state appropriation of role identities assumes that states have low basic trust in the first place. The interactive processes compelling an attachment to the competitive routines (and identities) which generate enduring rivalries could not be expected to have such an effect on states with healthy trust, since such actors should be capable of resisting this type of self-harming role appropriation. There is thus reason to believe that ‘trust type’ is an important component of Mitzen's theorizing, and that it is relevant to consider it here. More importantly, were the theory to be stripped of its focus on agent properties, it would lose much of its capacity to explain why behaviours are routinized in some cases but not in others. In other words, it could not explain why there is variation in behaviour across actors, or cross-situational consistency in a given type of actor's behaviour. Because the need for ontological security is a constant across actors, a purely structural approach cannot explain why some actors adhere rigidly to routines while others reflexively adapt their conduct.32 Interaction that is understood as having structuring effects underdetermines whether or not, and how, actors appropriate routines.
A different interpretation of Mitzen's theory is therefore adopted here. In this view, the theory is not intended to be purely structural but instead to regard explanatory factors as consisting of both structures and the properties of units. This interpretation therefore retains a focus on the explanatory potential of individual trust type as a ‘variable’. Importantly for the argument below, it also implies that the ontological security concept cannot explain behaviour without taking into consideration processes that occur at the level of state, since the sources of variation in trust type are found at the unit level.33 In more general terms, it is difficult to sustain any application of the ontological security concept to states’ social relations that does not consider variation in states’ properties (either across states or perhaps within states over time), a process that entails examining state-level processes, rather than treating states as ontologically primitive units. Accepting this second view of Mitzen's theory leads to serious consideration of the role of agent-specific factors, such as type of trust. The first step in applying the theory to concrete cases is then an examination of the variation in these factors across actors.
As argued earlier, an actor's trust type is important in the first place because it shapes the means by which actors satisfy their ontological security needs. These means often include routinization, but other ways of coping also exist. For instance, Catarina Kinnvall argues that collective identities can help individuals who feel vulnerable and experience existential insecurity to reaffirm their threatened self-identity.34 Some collective identities, she argues, are more attractive in this regard than others. Specifically, ‘Nationalism and religion supply particularly powerful stories and beliefs because of their ability to convey a picture of security, stability, and simple answers’.35 The proposition that collective identities are involved in individual efforts at mitigating ontological insecurity suggests another important problem with extrapolating the concept to corporate actors, explored below.
In sum, a state-as-actor variant of ontological security theory generates predictions of how states with different degrees of basic trust behave in their interactions. Actors with healthy basic trust show the capacity for rational deliberation and the ability to learn and adapt to changing circumstances. Actors affected by low basic trust, on the other hand, rigidly repeat routines that stabilize their relationships with others. They are unlikely to learn new behaviours and have a lesser capacity for creativity. They also fail to engage in reflexive self-monitoring and updating of their biographical narratives.
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China's Ontological Security, Basic Trust and International Behaviour |
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To avoid tautology, an actor's degree of basic trust must be established without reference to their behaviour. In other words, it must be possible to specify a priori an actor's ‘type’ as one of either rigid or unhealthy basic trust. What, then, are the determinants of basic trust? Basic trust in people, writes Giddens, is shaped by formative experiences during infancy. For instance, the infant's routinized interactions with a primary carer help develop basic trust, of which the positive consequences span the individual's entire life, whereas traumatic experiences, at the crucial early stage or later on, have the opposite effect.36 By analogy, in the cases of states-as-persons, traumatic social encounters and other experiences such as major wars or other disruptive events, especially those related to the founding or constitution of these states, should undermine their basic trust and place them in a state of ontological security-seeking. This condition, in turn, translates into a strong attachment to routinized behaviours.
The history of the Chinese state-as-actor, according to this approach, suggests a relatively straightforward case of unhealthy basic trust and ontological insecurity. Historians and political scientists who study China, from SSu-yu Teng and John Lewis Fairbank onward, stress the profound civilizational rupture that China experienced in its first ‘encounter with the West’.37 The traumas associated with subsequent colonization and exploitation shattered China's self-understanding as the beneficent ‘Middle Kingdom’ and exposed as illusory its long-held belief in the pacific nature of its external environment and its place within it.38 These processes can be understood as having led to a deep existential crisis that is at once ‘acute’ and sustained over generations.39 The many upheavals that Chinese civilization experienced during the 20th century, most recently the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and China's ensuing international isolation, undoubtedly constitute major disruptions to China's sense of a continuous ‘biographical’ narrative. As Chih-yu Shih recounts, China's outwardly oriented self-representation has also ‘been intrinsically related to its domestic institutional array’:40
One witnesses the change of China's self-image from a ‘socialist China’ externally allied with the Soviet Union and internally embodied in central planning and land reform, to a ‘revolutionary China’ externally antagonistic toward both superpowers and internally plagued by the Cultural Revolutions, and then to an ‘experimental China’ externally lauding independence and internally praising decentralisation. The most recent shift is toward a ‘normal China’ externally looking for partnership and internally enforcing economic reform. All these changes have required a new theory of the world.41While these redefinitions certainly suggests the capacity for identity change, because these historical changes have required fundamental and often violent reconstitutions of the Chinese state, along with, sweeping reassessments of the international environment, they should be understood as traumatic disruptions, rather than reflexive developments of China's self-identity. The resulting sense of existential anxiety about its own self-identity and the nature of its environment should make of China an ontologically insecure actor with rigid basic trust.
The unhealthy basic trust that prevents China from quelling its existential anxiety and ontological insecurity should, according to the theory, compel China to engage in routinizing behaviours as a means to achieving a stable self-identity and a sense of ontological security. More specifically, ontological insecurity is expected to prompt its reinforcement of an existing identity through routinized relations. A state that is locked into this condition should systematically reproduce similar forms of behaviour with other actors. Constant patterns should be observed in the state's behaviour, including rigid, inflexible positions on international issues; continuing loyalty to states with which it has routinized friendly or cooperative relations; and persistent animosity and hostility towards, or rivalry with, states that it has come to regard as threatening. Empirical observations disconfirming this hypothesis would include the absence of such patterns and, in their stead, change over time, flexibility in the state's responses to different situations, adaptation and learning.42
Predictions for the behaviour of a state with rigid basic trust do not tally with the findings of a number of studies of contemporary Chinese foreign policy. Recent analyses of China's behaviour, in the context of international organizations and responses to foreign representations of China's economic and political rise, suggest that China is capable of the learning, creativity and reflexive self-monitoring expected of ontologically secure actors with healthy basic trust. China's external relations remain a hotly contested matter and general conclusions are elusive, but for the purposes of supporting this preliminary argument, a selection of specific patterns of China's international behaviour in some important areas of its foreign policy demonstrates the need to reconsider the behavioural expectations outlined earlier.
Behaviours inconsistent with those of a state affected by rigid basic trust and profound existential anxiety are manifest in China's participation in international organizations. Scholarship on these topics considers the various substantive areas of international governance in which China's participation has evolved and the ‘depth’ of China's internalization of the international norms that underpin practices within these institutions.43 Since 1989 these trends have progressed in tandem with substantial changes to China's understanding of the United State's hegemonic influence in international institutions and its involvement in North-East Asian security arrangements.44 Scholars note that, in matters of regional security, China has gone from being ‘very suspicious of, and to some extent hostile toward, the [U.S.'s paramount] role in Asia’ to recognizing that the United States has ‘vital and legitimate’ regional interests and plays a ‘positive and constructive role for peace and stability in the region’.45 China has shown profound changes in its attitudes and conduct with respect to both the United States' regional role and multilateralism in general.
Alastair Iain Johnston's recent work on China's socialization into the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum (ARF) illustrates how this evolution in China's behaviour has taken place in inter-state organizations. His findings suggest China's capacity to internalize new understandings and norms of conduct through sustained interactions with other actors.46 Johnston's study focuses on China's socialization into this institution by means of persuasion, a process he believes conducive to developing China's new ‘habits of cooperation’.47 For instance, China's increased participation in informal discussions aimed at consensus-seeking, the so-called ASEAN Way, provides evidence of a generally improved ‘comfort level’ with qualitative multilateralism.48 Johnston also finds that China has internalized the concept of ‘mutual security’, a development that signals a profound shift in its substantive understanding of the regional environment and has translated into a change of position on specific issues, such as ARF-led preventive diplomacy.49 Mindful of how it is perceived by other regional actors who wish explicitly to ‘socialize’ it, China has deliberately adapted its behaviours in order to restructure relationships with them.50 Rather than rigidly clinging to routines, as might be expected of a state with unhealthy basic trust, China's diplomacy has demonstrated adroitness and flexibility. China has espoused new norms of conduct and even pursued new goals in the region. From an agent-focused perspective, these processes amount to complex learning. Furthermore, as Johnston notes, persuasion of the type observed in the ARF context is likely to occur only when the persuaded is ‘highly cognitively motivated to analyze counter-attitudinal information’,51 a condition incompatible with rigid basic-trust. The ‘socialization of China’52 into the ARF and other international organizations studied by Johnston and others thus suggests forms of sociation, learning and development that the theory expects of states with healthy basic trust.
This inconsistency between China's putative maladapted type and its conduct towards other actors is further indicated by changes in China's self-representations, in other words, in the discourses through which China describes and explains itself and its circumstances to other actors. As we saw above, the capacity to self-monitor reflexively and engage in reconstruction, re-ordering and development of their ‘biographical’ narrative, including relationships with others is characteristic of actors in the high modern period, according to Giddens's original formulation of ontological security.53 While these means of producing and reproducing self-identity and identification are typical of individuals in the contemporary epoch, healthy basic trust is a precondition for them: actors with low basic trust are unable to engage in this type of self-identity development.54 Giddens regards this inability as a form of neurosis that leaves individuals paralyzed and entrapped within their identity-affirming routines. Extending the analogy with the individual suggests that states with rigid basic trust are not capable of reflexive identity change.
China, however, provides one of the most striking examples of a state's deliberate attempt to change its self-identity and its relationships of identification to other states. Yong Deng describes in great depth the processes through which China endeavours to counter ‘China Threat theory’ by articulating alternative representations of its identity, reputation and role in the international system.55 China threat theory refers to ‘Foreign attributions to China of a harmful, destabilizing, and even pernicious international reputation’.56 Beijing has taken stock of realist theories of international relations, which posit the tragedy of the security dilemma, specifically those emphasizing the probability of war when rising powers challenge established hegemons.57 China is therefore aware of the security dilemma it will confront ‘if its threat image abroad and material capabilities grow simultaneously’.58 Deng cities findings from the literature on the democratic peace and on security communities suggesting that social identification is one of the processes through which threat image can be altered or overcome.59 States that are able to identify with each other are less likely to perceive each other as threatening. They are therefore less susceptible to the constraining effects of the security dilemma. The opposite is true of states that share no sense of identification. Such consideration lies at the source of Beijing's hypersensitivity to China threat theory, and its consistent efforts to contest and undermine it.60
China's ‘strategy’ to reduce the influence of China threat theory includes several representational and other tactics particularly evident in China's official statements to external audiences. Probably chief among these is that of equating China threat theory with the outdated ‘mentality of Cold War-style power politics’ and advocating that great powers take a less alarmist approach that is more suited to current realities in their statements to external audiences.61
A second tack involves repeated reassurances to foreign listeners of China's peaceful intentions and its satisfaction with the status quo world order.62 The clearest example of this type of representation is Beijing's ‘peaceful rise’ discourse, a series of pronouncements on the unique phenomenon of China's growing influence on global economic and political processes that serves specifically to differentiate China from earlier rising powers that provoked wars.63 Jing Huang's survey of official ‘assessments and policy designs’ since the late 1990s finds this discourse indicative of a new understanding of the international environment. He concludes that it is supported by substantial changes in practices which exhibit a more actively engaged, ‘cooperative and patient’ China.64 Deng and Huang's accounts of Beijing's strategies find support in Chih-yu Shih's analysis of Chinese academic responses to China threat theory, in which he finds that ‘the introduction of IR theories to China one after another – first realism, then liberalism and most recently constructivism – has directly affected how Chinese represent themselves, internally as well as externally’.65 Shih argues that ‘the self-representation of China in terms of ‘peaceful rise’ suggests the influence of liberal theory and ideology as an alternative to realism’ in Chinese thought.66
A third and related discursive tactic through which China attempts to mitigate the effects of ‘China threat theory’ and a possible security dilemma involves its use of new self-representations that help cultivate its legitimacy to, acceptance by and identification with key international audiences. The most significant among these are international institutions, developing countries and major powers.67 For instance, China has renewed expressions of solidarity with the developing world68 and begun to emphasize its intention to act as a ‘responsible power’ through efforts to coordinate with other major powers.69
In responding to China threat theory in this manner, China proceeds with the awareness that ‘a state's reputation determines how other states judge its international character and gauge its intentions’.70 Having grasped the consequences of an unmitigated security dilemma, China self-consciously resists the narrative ascribed to it externally through its own redefinition of its identity, reputation and relationship with other states. This pattern of discourse implies the type of reflexive self-monitoring that should be observed in a state actor that has healthy basic trust.
China's ‘socialization’ into international institutions and its attempt to redefine its role and reputation in order to intervene in the processes that could lead to a security dilemma suggest that it has the self-awareness and critical distance from its routinized behaviours necessary for reflexive interventions. Rather than displaying a neurotic or pathological attachment to routines, China has shed historically ingrained patterns of behaviour which many foreign observers believed, only a few years earlier it was unlikely to abandon.71 These developments, again, are not consistent with the profile of China as a low-trust, ontologically insecure actor unable to shed identity-sustaining habits.
Although this discussion casts doubt on the state-as-actor approach, the concept of ontological insecurity as such remains relevant to international relations and, more specifically, to Chinese foreign relations. Despite the inconsistencies discussed earlier, the argument so far developed does not suggest that conditions of rigid basic trust do not obtain in China. Instead, I argue that a broad range of practices bear out the predictions associated with the ‘rigid basic trust’ actor-type and ontological insecurity. These behaviours, however, can only be observed and explained if the state-actorhood assumption associated with the current use of the ontological security concept in International Relations is abandoned. A more fruitful approach, here proposed, is one that regards Chinese nationalism, including the discourses and practices constituting and sustaining it, as reinforcing a sense of ontological security that attaches to individuals rather than states.72 ‘Deepening’ the notion of ontological security such that its referent once again becomes the individual person, reminds us that corporate entities, including states, arise from collective identities which are involved in individuals’ efforts to cope with ontological insecurity in the first place. The next section explores how ontological insecurity attended by low basic trust is a condition which, while experienced on a societal scale, translates into daily practices of nationalism that are often local rather than national, informal rather than official and performed by individual citizens rather than by a state ‘person’.
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Ontological Security and Chinese Nationalism |
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In this section it is argued that the concept of ontological security makes the greatest contribution to the study of international politics when it retains its relationship to globalization and institutional change, as it was orginally expressed by Giddens.73 His insight is developed in Kinnvall's work, which draws attention to the domestic level of analysis and proposes a relationship between collective identities and individual ontological insecurity.
Kinvall argues that the structural changes brought about by globalization leave individuals vulnerable to feelings of existential anxiety which they attempt to alleviate by reaffirming a threatened self-identity.74 As religion and the nation provide particularly compelling narratives of group continuity over historical time, they create a strong sense of stability to members. Religion and the nation are therefore identity constructions that are especially attractive to ontologically insecure actors.75 ‘Going back to an imagined past by using reconstructed symbols and cultural reference points’76 is one response to the destabilizing effects of changing patterns of global economic and political integration.
Giddens and Kinnvall regard as among the consequences of modern globalization the collapse of time-space distantiation and the expansion of mechanisms that disembed social relations from their traditionally specific locales, leaving individuals feeling uprooted and uncertain.
[T]he globalization of politics and economics is being felt as time and space are being compressed and as events elsewhere, real or imagined, are becoming increasingly localized. A globalized world is for many a world devoid of certainty, of knowing what tomorrow holds.77As ontological security is premised on a stable understanding of these basic aspects of existence, it is disturbed by this reorganization78 and ‘the search for constant time- and space-bound identities become[s] a way to cope with the[se] effects of modern life’.79
In addition to globalization's direct consequences for the individual's sense of existential certainty, its nature as a process driven by an ideologically economic logic also has effects on the form of the modern nation-state. One of the most important of these is the hollowing out the state's function of providing a minimum of individual economic security and stability.80 The weakening of public welfare programmes is one example of this trend. Kinnvall argues that these changes to the nature of the modern state exacerbate both individual material insecurity and individual existential uncertainty, creating an authority vacuum which nationalist movements often fill, in some cases competing with the state for the individual's loyalty.81
Although Kinnvall takes the individual rather than the reified state as the relevant actor, her argument remains centrally concerned with collectives in general and with the state in particular. In contrast to Mitzen, however, Kinnvall treats the state as a structure subject to globalization-induced changes which are themselves among the sources of individuals’ ontological insecurity. Insofar as it examines the effects of global structural changes on the state and the domestic sphere, Kinnvall's analysis shares more affinities with the ‘second-image reversed’ literature in International Relations than the state-as-actor variant of ontological security theory.82 In treating the nation-state as a modern structure undergoing the epochal changes that Giddens emphasizes, Kinnvall remains more faithful than Mitzen to Giddens's original theory about challenges to self-identity in the late-modern period. Treating the state as an actor affected by ontological insecurity strips Giddens's approach of its concern for the historical evolution and specificity of institutions—including the institution of the state—and of their impact on individuals’ self-understandings and sense of existential security. The modification Mitzen brings to ontological security in scaling it up to the state level fails to acknowledge the concept's dependence on the rest of Giddens's theory, the central focus of which is on the unique conditions of modernity and globalization.
Jef Huysmans, sharing Kinnvall's concern for the evolution of the nation-state under conditions of threat to ontological security, finds that ‘Ultimately the legitimacy of the state rests on its capacity to provide order – not a particular content of order but the function of ordering, of making life intelligible.’83 A state's security policy, for instance, is related to ontological security since it ‘orders social relations – introduces a level of certainty—objectifying the abstract fear of death through enemy construction’.84 When an actor's enemies, dangers and threats multiply to the extent that they cannot be coherently perceived or organized, the actor finds themselves in a ‘permanent state of crisis and urgency’ in which ‘trust in the capacity to keep threats at a distance crumbles’.85 As a consequence of this ontological insecurity, ‘the legitimacy of the political agencies which identified themselves as mediators between life and death, as the managers of Angst [e.g. states] could face a "fundamental" political crisis’.86 Huysmans depicts the modern state as a provider of ontological security to its citizens: where it fails in this role, its purpose is undermined. This view is consistent with Jim Marlow's argument that one of the major aspects of modern governmentality is the implicit provision by governments of ‘a significant background element of the "intertext" (an intersecting web of discursive semblances) of present day "ontological security" ’.87 A similar position is found in Eli Zaretsky's comment on the ‘historicity’ in Giddens's thought about modernity, an insight which he develops through his analysis of 9/11 as a traumatic event which he claims de-reified the modern institution of the state.88 The common threads that link these propositions have to do with the ontological function of the modern state (in the most direct sense, as a provider of ontological security to individuals) and the structural challenges to this role that have emerged during the late modern period.
What, then, are the implications of this discussion for the above analysis of China's international behaviour? According to the state-as-actor approach, China presents a likely case of rigid basic trust—a condition which would attach it strongly to a static, historically oriented self-identity, manifested in and reinforced by a routinized and inflexible foreign policy. Instead it has been established that China-the-actor shows a significant degree of flexibility, learning and reflexivity in its social relations in the post-Cold War period. The China case thus disconfirms the expectations of this approach about the behaviour of a state with rigid basic trust.
However, the China case also suggests that, rather than abandoning the idea of ontological insecurity on account of these weaknesses, International Relations should retain a re-conceptualized version of it. The alternative approach to ontological security introduced in the next section, which remains more attuned to Giddens's original conception, and draws on the insights of Kinnvall, Huysmans and Marlow, highlights a different set of concerns that are closer to the experiences of the contemporary Chinese individual. If, as Kinnvall suggests, the nation offers an attractive collective with which to identify by virtue of its capacity to provide a simple, reassuring sense of continuity and stability in one's self-identity, then individuals should attempt to satisfy their need for ontological security by engaging in routinized practices that reaffirm this particular aspect of their identity. The Chinese state, moreover, should aid and abet these behaviours in an effort to enact the role of provider of ontological security to its citizens. This section considers empirical evidence of the plausibility of such an approach.
Just as it can be argued that the condition of rigid basic trust obtains at the level of the unitary state-as-actor, it can also be said to pervade the societal level.89 China's far-reaching and deep economic reforms and it's subsequent integration into the world economy brought about a ‘crisis of communism’ eventually exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although this ideological crisis did not in China, as elsewhere, lead to the disintegration of the state, it was nevertheless profoundly disruptive, with the result that ‘understandings and self-understandings of the People's Republic of China have shifted from communism to nationalism’.90 William Callahan and Peter Gries note that although international observers often emphasize the narrow, top-down aspect of this ideology, closely equating it with statism and elite manipulation, China's nationalism is primarily a grassroots or mass-level development.91 The abundance of scholarly research on the content and tone of Chinese nationalism stresses the popular espousal and promotion of nationalist views.92 The examples raised below illustrate a broader range nationalist habits and customs that arguably provide the Chinese masses with a reinforced sense of self-identity and ontological security.
Suisheng Zhao's survey of various nationalist discourses and practices distinguishes between those at the state, elite-intellectual and societal levels. The ‘bottom-up populist sentiment against foreign pressures’ at the societal level is expressed in a wide range of practices that affect the lives of ordinary people. They include the consumption of popular films, television shows, posters, cartoons and, especially, books and magazines denouncing affronts to Chinese interests and dignity by, over and above all others, the United States and Japan.93 Frequently noted examples of such consumption practices include the best-selling ‘Say No’ books of the mid-1990s (e.g. China Can Say No; China Can Still Say No; How China Can Say No and Behind the Scene of Demonizing China).94 Nationalist practices also comprise regular expression and discussion of nationalistic and variously ‘patriotic’ positions in forums such as (government-sanctioned) web bulletin boards and letters to editors of online newspapers and other publications.95 Among these are statements of support for China's military exercises in the Taiwan Strait during the 1995–96 crisis and commentary on reunification with the island, as well as of hard-line positions on relations with Japan and the United States.96 Other popular cultural trends associated with Chinese nationalism include the 1990s wave of ‘Mao Fever’, during which it became fashionable among Chinese youth to collect memorabilia and other representations of Chairman Mao Zedong and historical events associated with the founder of the People's Republic.97
The popular commemoration of China's past humiliations through the routine, institutionalized observance of various ‘National Humiliation Days’ is a particularly striking element of contemporary Chinese nationalism. Observance of these dates usually entails not going to work and visiting historical sites that commemorate China's troubled history.98 These practices, as Callahan stresses in his study of the phenomenon, are primarily cultural and form an integral part of the lives of ordinary people.99
Practices of humiliation remembrance underscore that national insecurity is central to Chinese nationalism.100 Discourse on popular national humiliation centres on China's historical experiences of suffering, usually emphasizing the ‘century of humiliation’ (1839–1949) that began with the first Opium war. ‘The discourse recounts how at the hands of foreign invaders and corrupt Chinese regimes, sovereignty was lost, territory was dismembered, and the Chinese people were thus humiliated.’101 This mode of nationalist thought also encompasses a ‘very active notion of history and recovery’ that stresses the moment, upon the founding of the People's Republic, that China overcame these historical weaknesses. It reminds citizens of the need to engage in corrective behaviours to ensure such debasements will not be experienced again.102 In this sense, ‘The narrative of national salvation depends upon national humiliation; the narrative of national security depends upon national insecurity.’103 The commemoration of painful events in national history reaffirms national identity, and becomes a part of the individual's self-narrative. ‘Humiliation is thus one of the modes used to draw ethical boundaries between self and other, between domestic and foreign.’104 These distinctions, however, are not clear-cut: ‘With humiliation it is often the (former) self that is "othered".’105 The humiliation discourse, as used both by the state and ordinary people, cements the individual's sense of belonging to a group whose boundaries are defined by an historical account and which carries specific requirements for their conduct. Although national humiliation discourses and commemorations by all accounts instrumentally serve the state-building goals of current political elites, they are a routinized mode of behaving and thinking that consolidates personal self-identity and helps individuals to cope with ontological insecurity. The fixation on historical humiliation can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to impose a degree of structure on an otherwise overwhelming cognitive environment.106 Rigid adherence to the specific self-identity associated with membership in a nation and the failure to reflexively redefine narratives about self are consistent with expectations about actors coping with ontological insecurity.
Taking a comparative perspective on national humiliation remembrance across different countries, Callahan finds that the national humiliation discourse is part of a specific ‘mode of nationalism’ closely associated with modern state-building projects. The routinized re-living of historical humiliations helps to establish China's transition from empire to the constructed modern nation-state that it is today.107 As with cultural consumption practices, the sense of civilizational—hence, existential—continuity and order created in this manner provides a sense of ontological security by means of individuals’ identification with the national narrative. A related process seems to be at work in state discourse on the larger cultural area known as ‘Greater China’ which, Callahan finds, has also been ‘deployed to address a "crisis"—whether the crisis is of geopolitics, global capitalism, or identity’.108 The Chinese state's vacillating role in encouraging national-humiliation discourse and other nationalist practices (while at the same time managing them such that they remain within politically unthreatening limits)109 thus recalls Marlow's and Huysmans's suggestions that the provision of ontological security—i.e. an ‘ontological function’—inheres in the raison d’être of the modern nation-state. Such a take is consistent with Marlow's suggestion that this ontological function is part of ‘governmentality’ under the conditions of high-modern globalization. Re-enacting elements of the narrative of humiliation in actual practices provides an identification with the national group that keeps profound self-doubt and ‘chaos’ at bay.
As regards international relations theory these aspects of Chinese nationalism suggest at least three specific problems that arise when the state is treated as a person-like actor. First, various studies show that the routinized discourses and practices making up Chinese nationalism are not uniform across domestic groups. For instance, those associated with political elites and intellectuals differ from those used and performed by students and other less privileged members of society. This differentiation suggests that the individual's experience of ontological security and their resort to specific coping mechanisms are conditioned by their degree of conventional, social and economic security, as well as other ideological and cultural factors. These circumstances, in turn, are shaped by the changing nature of the contemporary Chinese state and the complex, uneven impact of these changes on Chinese society. Nationalism and ontological insecurity carry distinct observable consequences for China's relations with other states, at all levels of Chinese society. These differences, however, cannot be accounted for by an approach that treats China as a unitary actor with a single, coherent role identity; they require a focus on sub-state actors and on their relationship to the state itself.
Moreover, an approach that characterizes states as subjects of ontological insecurity cannot account for the sources of this condition, or for their historical specificity. Ontological insecurity is for Giddens a condition produced by the structural changes associated with late-modern globalization, including transformations to the nation-state itself. In the case of China-the-actor, it is not merely its ‘biography’ as a traumatized actor with low basic trust that provides clues to its contemporary conduct. If this were the case, then it would explain China's behaviour as a consequence of its history of traumatic conventional security relations, without reference to its ontological security. The condition of ontological insecurity is best understood as a product of contemporary systemic conditions; it is not reducible to specific experiences of interaction between a dyad of state actors or to events in the life history of a single state actor. Systemic conditions impact the actor in question not only experientially (as in by specific marking events), but, more profoundly, also change its nature, constituting and reconstituting it into new forms of actor. These destabilizing changes to the ‘substance’ of selfhood or agency provide the necessary basis for a claim about ontological insecurity, as opposed to one about insecurity that is born of particular experiences in the actor's life (what might be thought of as a ‘psychological’ or dispositional insecurity) or about insecurity stemming from conventional sources, such as a well specified external threat. While these other understandings of security are important, they are distinct from ontological security, a concept that loses meaning and analytical value-added when it is used to refer to them. In an approach that distinguishes between these different aspects of security, the conduct of the Chinese state is best understood as that of a complex institution with multiple forms of internal and external relations whose functions are adapting to a rapidly changing world that places increasing strain on individual citizens’ sense of existential security. This condition is illuminated by Giddens's concept and helps explain some of the phenomena observed in contemporary Chinese foreign relations. Though I have argued here against an approach that treats states as units, this point is also relevant for theorizing states as corporate actors. It implies that, if one were to develop a theory in which states have ontological security needs, it would have to be a theory that examines the changing nature of statehood and state agency rather than one that treats states as pre-theoretically given units.
Another problematic aspect of the current state-as-actor approach lies in the assumption that states can ‘routinize’ any type of behaviour, no matter how risky or extreme. In Giddens's original formulation, processes through which self-identity and ontological security are maintained include daily practices, such as habits of bodily control and other simple, routinized social interactions, many of which are so ingrained that they are taken for granted.110 These processes are not merely close to the daily experiences of ordinary people, they are part and parcel of them because they create the conditions which underpin more deliberated forms of action. It is the omnipresence of such routines in daily life that endows them with this constitutive function for individual agency. It follows that the social relations and forms of self-identifying to which similar ontological security-providing roles are imputed should also be found in actors’ daily lives. They should be ‘routines’ in the ordinary sense of the word. But Mitzen's state-as-actor approach, however, uses ontological security-seeking to explain security dilemmas, which are dynamics that unfold as escalating spirals, often characterized by crises and violence.111 These interactions are far removed from the ‘mundane’ forms of social behaviour that Giddens regards as producing ontological security. Mitzen claims that over extended interactions, states "appropriate" the identities embodied in their competitive routines, such that these came to be taken for granted in a sense similar to the one advanced by Giddens.112 The argument proposed here remains more closely attuned to Giddens's focus on the quotidian and the taken-for-granted by stressing the role of cultural practices and other behaviours that are often a part of the daily lives of individuals. This makes more plausible the proposition that the practices under discussion come to be naturalized in a way that contributes to individual ontological security.
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The scalings inter-personal theories up to the level of the inter-state system is a method frequently used to theorize international relations. Although this extrapolation is often useful, there are reasons to question it and specify the conditions under which it is unhelpful. One of the circumstances which can make problematic the anthropomorphic treatment of the state is when the logic of the original theory, as applied to the individual, relies heavily on features of the domestic environment, that are very different from those of the international system. This problem affects the extrapolation from individual-level theories that explain actors’ behaviours as driven by the need for ontological security, since the institution of the state, including its specific features and transformations, plays a role in shaping how individual persons meet their ontological security needs. This helps explain why theories that impute ontological security-seeking to state actors encounter problems when discussed with reference to specific cases.
This essay has used the case of China to examine the condition of ontological security, first as it pertains to China, the unitary state-as-actor, and, second, as it applies to individuals within the Chinese state. These applications of the concepts of ontological security suggest that China-the-actor copes with this need and retains a reflexive distance from its routinized behaviours. Despite having the makings of an actor with rigid basic trust, China-the-actor shows no strong attachment to routinized behaviours, but rather demonstrates the capacity to engage in the redefinitions of its self-identity, learning and sociation expected of actors with healthy basic trust.
Following the discussion of China-the-actor, which indicated potential weaknesses in the state-as-actor approach to ontological security, the second section considered the condition of ontological insecurity and rigid basic trust with reference to individuals. The expectations of theorists of ontological security who stress the appeal of nationalism for actors confronting existential anxiety found support in the observed cultural practices and discourses adopted by Chinese citizens, including consumers of nationalist popular media and observers of national humiliation commemorations. This suggests that the phenomenon of Chinese nationalism as integral to daily life can be partly understood as a response to ontological insecurity and unhealthy basic trust at the individual level. It also suggests that the ambiguous attitude of the Chinese state toward nationalism should be considered in light of the contemporary nation-state's role as a provider of ontological security to individuals.
This discussion acknowledges that Mitzen's ontological security approach has made a very important theoretical contribution to the study of international relations—it provides the rationale for applying the theory to the China case in the first place. Hence I do not advocate an outright rejection of attempts to theorize ontological security at a collective or group level. It could potentially be argued that corporate actors have a need for ontological security and the social relations that satisfy it analogous to those of the individual. Such a theory, however, should explicitly consider that corporate actors such as states also fulfil evolving functions of ontological-security provision to individuals and specify the relationship of ontological security at the corporate level to its ‘counterpart’ at the individual level.
Although it is argued here and elsewhere that domestic expressions of nationalism in China do not deeply compromise its conduct of a ‘pragmatic’ or ‘adaptive’ foreign policy,113 nationalism remains significant within the study of Chinese foreign relations. China's societal nationalism does provoke foreign policy consequences, especially when it leads to protests against or other expressions of negative sentiment toward foreigners living in China or other countries. Explanations of such occurrences typically represent the Chinese ‘state’ as manipulating popular nationalism in order to shore up regime legitimacy. But these accounts miss the grassroots character of nationalism and obscure how some forms of nationalist cultural practice serve ordinary individuals’ need for a sense of existential security and a stable, anchored identity. They also overlook complexity in the relationship between the modern Chinese state and nationalist practice. Rather than being merely a duping ideology deployed in the service of political elites’ narrow objectives certain forms of nationalism supported by the Chinese state might respond to the genuinely felt ontological security needs of a population undergoing destabilizing domestic change and integration with the rest of the world. The Chinese state might thus perform an ontological function arguably characteristic of the high modern nation-state. Although this does not exonerate the Chinese state from supporting pernicious forms of nationalism, it implies that certain types of nationalist practice might serve benign social needs.
The individual-level phenomena ignored by a state-actor approach are equally important and studying them more closely sheds light on the relationship between personal ontological security needs and the identity-reinforcing function of nationalist practices. An approach that treats nationalism as a disposition of unitary state actors is insensitive to a wide range of sub-state behaviours which, though not initially manifest in a state's foreign policy, can generate or perpetuate a very strong societal attachment to a specific national identity and external posture. In states where an authoritarian government cannot effectively manage nationalism, such a situation could carry significant international consequences. Even in the case of China, there is evidence that events are taking a turn in this direction.114
Beyond the direct and indirect consequences of nationalism for Chinese foreign relations, students of world politics should also be concerned with the issues raised by this case because it represents one instance of a broader set of transformations to the nature of states, as both domestic and international actors. To attach the concept of ontological security to a reified state is to ignore the broader connections between globalization, institutional change and ontological security needs in Giddens's thought. To take the state as given is to miss the incidence of globalizing forces upon this institution and its changing form and functions, including the provision of ontological security. The state should be understood not as subject to ontological security but as one of the structures involved in individuals' efforts at managing this condition. State-supported nationalism is an important manifestation of the relationship between the ontological security-seeking individual and the state that this approach can help us understand.
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* The author is grateful to Emanuel Adler, Sarah Eaton, Victor Falkenheim, Lilach Gilady, Randall Newman, Mark Raymond. Joe Wong, Sun Xuefeng and three anonymous reviewers for their comments. Seth Jaffe is especially thanked for his careful reading of the two different drafts. Alanna Krolikowski is a doctoral student in International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
1 Other, differently defined corporate actors include, for instance, diaspora groups.
2 Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 14–15.
3 See Shapiro and Green's discussion of assumptions about actor rationality in the development of rational choice theory. Ian Shapiro and Donald Green, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 30–2.
4 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol.12, No. 3 (2006), pp. 341–70.
5 While it is not feasible to relate here the different perspectives and points of contention in the debates about state personhood, it should be emphasized that these are ongoing and remain important. Exchanges and different positions on this topic are related in, e.g. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, ‘Forum Introduction: Is the State a Person? Why Should We Care?’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 255–58; Alexander Wendt, ‘The State as Person in International Theory’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 289–316.
6 Example Peter Lomas, ‘Anthropomorphism, Personification and Ethics: A Reply to Alexander Wendt’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2005), pp. 349–55.
7 The method used here is similar to a theory-infirming type of case study, but one which is incorporated into a larger abductive design intended to create opportunities for theory development, e.g. Arend Lijphart, ‘Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (1971), pp. 682–93. Although it might be possible to generate and test competing explanations for the observation that Chinese nationalism coexists with pragmatic foreign policy conduct, the purpose here is to examine the implications of the China case for ontological security theory as it is currently used and as it could be developed. The problem driving this discussion is therefore primarily theoretical; empirical evidence of Chinese nationalism is introduced to illustrate some of the theoretical issues and to support the plausibility of the alternative approach suggested. The heavier resort to empirics in this critique departs from the discussion of state personhood that has taken place so far, and from case-based approaches which attempt to lend support to one or another explanation of phenomena associated with Chinese nationalism.
8 The first part of this paper is concerned with how well the existing form of ontological security theory applies to the Chinese context. The second part proposes a different use of the theory to study Chinese nationalism, focusing on a different actor. There is no dependent variable common to these two theories; one explains inter-state phenomena while the other explains the behaviour of individuals.
9 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 243.
10 Ibid., p. 47. Giddens draws a distinction between practical and discursive consciousness in which the former constitutes a necessary precondition to the latter and remains normally ‘bracketed’ from it, and in which the latter refers to a consciousness, the content of which can be articulated by subjects.
12 Ibid., p. 52; Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, pp. 341–70. For Mitzen, ‘Role Identities’, enacted in the context of interaction and relationships, sustain self-identity. Referring to security dilemmas and enduring rivalries, she writes: ‘There is an appropriative moment, where both states take on the identity that is embodied in the competitive routines and therefore become attached to the competition as an end in itself.’ The co-constitution of the two states’ role identities in interaction is the process to which her ontological security approach draws attention, e.g. p. 360. Although the process is mainly interactive, the condition of needing ontological security is one which attaches to individual actors and affects their behaviour unevenly. In this essay it is treated as a condition that has some structural roots but which is affected by individual actors’ particular properties (e.g. dispositions and experiences). These issues are discussed on the next page.
13 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’; Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Anchoring Europe's Civilizing Identity: Habits, Capabilities and Ontological Security’, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2006), pp. 270–85; Jef Huysmans, ‘Security! What Do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1998), pp. 226–55; Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security’, Political Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 5 (2004), pp. 741–67; Eli Zaretsky, ‘Trauma and Dereification: September 11 and the Problem of Ontological Security’, Constellations, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2002), pp. 98–105; Brent Steele, ‘Ontological Security and the Power of Self-identity: British Neutrality and the American Civil War’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (2005), pp. 519–40.
14 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, p. 342.
20 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 242. Following Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, p. 350, I take a dichotomous view of the ‘basic trust’ variable. Although this part of the discussion treats basic trust as a disposition of actors, ‘trust’ more broadly understood might also be affected by situational factors or circumstances (rather than just the ‘dispositional’ ones identified here). For the purposes of this discussion of ontological security, however, the focus is primarily on the basic trust type that is a more lasting and profound characteristic of agents which affects their conduct across different situations.
21 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, p. 350.
24 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 40.
26 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, p. 347.
28 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 43.
30 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, pp. 350–51.
31 I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point. There seems to be ambiguity in how to understand the theory, which is ‘interaction-based’ but also considers agent-specific ‘mode of attachment’ to be an important factor, e.g. Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, p. 343. Ultimately, it remains unclear to me if the coherence of a unitary state-as-actor approach can be sustained, unless trust is made to be the result of only interaction.
33 Moreover, variation in trust type over time may be found in system-wide changes to the nature of units, which would still require an analysis of units themselves and thus preclude the viability of an approach that reifies the state. This is discussed subsequently.
34 Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism’, p. 742.
37 Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey 1839–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Peter Gries, China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Peter Gries, ‘Social Psychology and the Identity-Conflict Debate: Is a "China Threat" Inevitable?’ European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2005), pp. 235–65; Peter Gries, ‘China's "New Thinking" on Japan’, The China Quarterly, Vol. 184 (December 2005), pp. 831–50; discussions of nationalism under Deng and earlier include Michel Oksenberg, ‘China's Confident Nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 3 (1986/7), pp. 501–23; John K. Fairbank, ‘China's Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1969), pp. 449–63; John Cranmer-Byng, ‘The Chinese View of Their Place in the World: A Historical Perspective’, The China Quarterly, Vol. 53 (January-March 1973), pp. 67–79.
39 Peter Gries, China's New Nationalism; Gilbert Rozman, ‘China's Quest for Great Power Identity’, Orbis, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1999), pp. 383–402.
40 Chih-yu Shih, ‘Breeding a Reluctant Dragon: Can China Rise into Partnership and away from Antagonism?’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2005), p. 757.
42 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Learning versus Adaptation: Explaining Change in Chinese Arms Control Policy in the 1980s and 1990s’, The China Journal, No. 35 (January 1996), pp. 27–61.
43 Marc Lanteigne, China and International Institutions: Alternate Paths to Global Power (New York: Routledge, 2005); Allen Carlson, ‘Helping to Keep the Peace (Albeit Reluctantly): China's Recent Stance on Sovereignty and Multilateral Intervention’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 1 (2004), pp. 9–27; Wang Hongying, ‘Multilateralism in Chinese Foreign Policy: The Limits of Socialization’, Asian Survey, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2000), pp. 475–91.
44 This change in understanding, most notable since 1998, is discussed at length in Jing Huang, ‘China and America's Northeast Asian Alliances: Approaches, Politics, and Dilemmas’, in Michael Armacost, ed., The Future of America's Alliances in North-East Asia (Stanford: Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2004), pp. 237–49.
45 Jing Huang, ‘China and America's Northeast Asian Alliances’, pp. 240–42; Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions: The ASEAN Way and International Relations Theory’, in G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno, eds., International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 107–62; also David Shambaugh, ‘China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order’, International Security, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2004/5), pp. 64–99.
46 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions’, pp. 124–41; David Shambaugh, ‘China Engages Asia’, pp. 64–99.
47 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions’, pp. 124–26. Johnston is specifically concerned with showing how behaviour has changed through socialization, as distinct from two mainstream IR explanations: (1) through material rewards and punishments which exogenously change an actors preferences; and (2) changes to domestic distributions of power which result in new state preferences, discussed on pp. 107–25
48 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions’, pp. 131–37; Amitav Acharya, ‘Ideas, Identity and Institution-Building: From the "ASEAN Way" to the "Asia-Pacific Way"?’ The Pacific Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1997), pp. 319–46.
49 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions’, pp. 133–37.
50 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions’, p. 126; ASEAN's perceptions of China are discussed in Allen Whiting, ‘ASEAN Eyes China’, Asian Survey, Vol. 37, No. 4 (1997), pp. 299–322.
51 Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Socialization in International Institutions’, p. 117.
52 Marc Lanteigne, China and International Institutions; Alastair Iain Johnston, ‘Treating International Institutions as Social Environments’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2001), pp. 487–515; a contrasting take is found in Wang Hongying, ‘Multilateralism in Chinese Foreign Policy’.
53 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 40–5.
55 Yong Deng, ‘Reputation and Security Dilemma: China Reacts to the China Threat Theory’ in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert Ross, eds, New Approaches to the Study of China's Foreign Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 186–214; also discussed at length in Zha Daojiong, ‘Comment: Can China Rise?’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2005), pp. 775–85; and William A. Callahan, ‘Forum: The Rise of China: How to Understand China: the Dangers and Opportunities of Being a Rising Power,’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2005), pp. 701–14; Wang Hongying, ‘National Image Building and Chinese Foreign Policy’, in Yong Deng and Fei-Ling Wang, eds, China Rising: Power and Motivation in Chinese Foreign Policy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 73–102.
56 Yong Deng, ‘Reputation and the Security Dilemma’, p. 186, also William Callahan, ‘Forum’, pp. 270–71, and William A. Callahan, ‘National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism’, Alterna