Content area
Full text
INTRODUCTION
For at least three decades, it has been quite common in the United States to talk of the coming of the Asian century. Since the publication in 1979 of Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One,1 Americans have been fascinated with the rise of Japan and then China, and the corresponding reports of the decline of the United States. This psychology may have intensified with the 2008-09 financial crisis and the understanding that China is now playing a central role in assuring global financial, and thereby political, stability. Notwithstanding some Orientalist hyperbole, there is no doubt that Asia has been, and will continue to be, a region of rising power, responsible for an increasing share of world output, innovation, and power, even as the United States declines in relative terms.
What will the rise of Asia mean for global governance? Oddly, I believe that any "Eastphalian" world order will mean a return to Westphalia, at least as modern international lawyers understand the term. Drawing its name from the 1648 treaties ending the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War, Westphalia stands for principles of mutual noninterference, an emphasis on sovereignty, and formal equality of states. Eastphalia, should it materialize, will emphasize similar structures, putting an end to the brief interlude of European universalism and global constitutionalism that intensified after the Second World War.2
Universalism has driven the great development of the human rights movement and the establishment of an infrastructure of global institutions. Global constitutionalism has inspired increasingly numerous attempts to reach into policy realms previously considered within the domestic jurisdiction of a state and, in the European case, a shift to supermajority rather than unanimity as a basis of intergovernmental decision-making. But Asian countries have not been leaders in either of these movements. Instead, they have reacted cautiously and have emphasized the traditional concerns of sovereignty and noninterference. There is little sign that this approach will change radically, even as economic and political power continues to shift to the proverbial East.
It is often argued that the European Union is somehow the future of global governance.3 As Slaughter and Burke-White put it, "The Treaty of Westphalia has given way to the Treaty of Rome."4 European nations embody the Kantian "democratic peace," having replaced...