Taiwan Lecture Series Working Papers Online (TLS WPO) No. 1 (July 2010) The Plausible Asian Schools of International Relations: Hypothesizing Non-interventionism By Shi Chih-yu Publisher: Institute of Chinese Studies University of Heidelberg Akademiestraße 4-8 69117 Heidelberg E-Mail:
[email protected] The Plausible Asian Schools of International Relations: Hypothesizing Non/interventionism Presented at the Conference on Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention in the International Society of East Asia – Historical Legacies and New Dynamics Modern East Asia Research Centre Leiden University Leiden University College, The Hague June 10-12, 2010 Chih-yu Shih Department of Political Science National Taiwan University 21 Hsu Chow Road, Taipei, Taiwan 100 Abstract Asian intellectuals do not celebrate the coming end of history through the triumphant establishment of a sovereign nation state in their communities. Rather, they invariably treat nation states as civilizational agents adapting to pressures and changes. The following discussion will survey samples of societal norms in the literature that are explicitly as well implicitly plausible candidates for a different IR perspective embedded in civilizational politics. The paper searches for those narrative candidates for indigenous Asian Schools of IR, including both the contentious Chinese and Japanese alternatives and the non-resistant Indian, Australian, Korean and Taiwanese alternatives to show the role of civilization in the conceptualization of plausible Asian Schools of IR and how they allude to a universal IR. Then the paper picks up the case of China to illustrate how epistemologically indigenous schools of IR in Asia are nevertheless not ―international,‖ and hypothesizes accordingly why the Chinese school of IR is arguably uninterested in intervention in view of wrongdoing.