Broadening Horizons: "Indo-Pacific" Maritime Politics beyond China

China's expanding presence in the South China Sea has prompted European governments to join the United States and its East Asian allies in their mission to secure the "liberal rules-based order" across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Yet without understanding the historical and regional contexts, efforts at strengthening the rule of international law may well produce the opposite of the desired outcome. In 2016, the Chinese government refused to participate in and accept the outcome of the Philippines-induced arbitration proceedings concerning the interpretation of "historical rights" and the designation of "islands" according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in the South China Sea. Against the background of President Xi Jinping's rolling out of the Belt and Road Initiative, this reinforced the view - especially in Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra - that China is seeking to overturn the United States-led liberal rules-based order. Yet, the narrow focus on Chinese actions distracts from the broader political context. Policymakers' preoccupation with nationally conceived "sea lanes of communication" and conflation of the freedom of navigation for warships with the economic reality of transnationally interconnected maritime transport routes has exacerbated long-standing maritime disputes. Predictions about China's coming global dominance and concomitant efforts to defend the "West" are reminiscent of the Australian, European, and United States reactions to the rise of Japan in the 1980s. This must alert policymakers to the fallacies of tunnel vision on non-Western rising powers. European decision-makers must resist the temptation to supersize China as a common threat for the purpose of fixing transatlantic relations and overcoming discord within the European Union. The further militarisation of Indo-Pacific seas can only be avoided if all militarily present actors ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and related agreements. They must also acknowledge that the Convention is the result of a grand political bargain, take others' security concerns into account, and focus on the preservation of the marine environment

How to Anchor Germany's Drifting Indo-Pacific Policy

In recent months, the implementation of Germany's Indo-Pacific policy from September 2020 has started to take shape. With maritime security concerns as principal drivers, naval deployments have taken centre stage. Yet, as the voyage of the frigate Bayern exemplifies, the German approach - similar to other European policies - suffers from contradictions which are hidden under the "rules-based order" label. Adopting terminology that originated in Australia and Japan, also the German "Policy Guidelines for the Indo-Pacific" employ a variation of the rules-based order concept for describing what they seek to preserve. Symbolically powerful naval deployments aimed at safeguarding the "freedom of navigation" through Southeast Asian waters have spearheaded the implementation of the Guidelines, while overshadowing their many other dimensions. The conflation of legitimate concerns about Chinese expansion in the South China Sea with questionable projections of China's linear path to hegemonic power and concomitant courting of "like-minded" "value partners" altered the Guidelines' characteristically European emphasis on inclusivity, de-escalation, and the rule of international law. The rules-based order has come to signify the common interest among a diverse group of powerful states in curbing Chinese influence. This complicates the question of which shared "values," "rules," and conceptions of "order" are at stake. The increasingly wider usage of "rules-based order" has also led to policymakers glossing over the fact that they have themselves been part of, and are driving, the scramble for new spheres of influence. German policymakers must admit that talking about the rules-based order raises more questions than answers. This is also a precondition for getting clear about whether they seek to help contain China. To play a stabilising role, they and other European governments must listen to what the many less-powerful actors in the Indo-Pacific have to say, and clearly articulate the specific rules, norms, and institutions they are seeking to promote to the benefit of all

Whose 'Freedom of Navigation'? Australia, China, the United States and the making of order in the 'Indo-Pacific'

The so-called freedom of navigation through the Malacca straits and the South China Sea, some of the world's busiest trade routes, has long been of concern to scholars and practitioners of international politics in the region. Increasing tensions around territorial disputes recently propelled the issue to the forefront of global foreign and security policy making. Yet, despite the frequent invocation of threats to the 'freedom of navigation' for the justification of military measures to protect the 'liberal rules-based order', the substance of this rule or norm remains ambiguous and the nature of the threatened order unclear. Located at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australian discourses represent a suitable case for clarifying both. Starting from the original provisions on navigational regimes in international law, this study analyses the meanings that officials, think tank analysts and academics have been attributing to the freedom of navigation and contextualize them in the evolving debate about order. Focusing on political rather than legal discourses, it finds that concerns with the freedom of navigation are largely unrelated to the safety of maritime transport. Instead, they serve as proxy for an increasingly static imagination of international order - written backward in time - to be secured

The Nexus between Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Cooperation in Japan -China Relations: Environmental Security and the Construction of a Northeast Asian Region

FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

The nexus between traditional and non-traditional security cooperation in Japan-China relations

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3384号 ; 学位の種類:博士(学術) ; 授与年月日:2011/6/13 ; 早大学位記番号:新570

Emotions, international hierarchy, and the problem of solipsism in Sino-US South China Sea politics

This study offers an explanation for Beijing's seemingly self-defeating approach to the South China Sea that distances China ever more from the regional and international communities which it wants to lead and join while drawing in the foreign military presence that it seeks to keep at a distance. Combining recent research on the role of emotions and on hierarchy in international politics, this article shows how the powerful narrative of national 'humiliation' and 'rejuvenation' has informed Chinese maritime politics. As the South China Sea became incorporated in the linear timeline of China's 5000 year civilizational history, the US' and its allies' push-back against Beijing's territorial claims deepened China's ideational isolation. The ensuing state of solipsism increases the risk of violent confrontations

Physical and mathematical justification of the numerical Brillouin zone integration of the Boltzmann rate equation by Gaussian smearing

Scatterings of electrons at quasiparticles or photons are very important for many topics in solid state physics, e.g., spintronics, magnonics or photonics, and therefore a correct numerical treatment of these scatterings is very important. For a quantum-mechanical description of these scatterings Fermi's golden rule is used in order to calculate the transition rate from an initial state to a final state in a first-order time-dependent perturbation theory. One can calculate the total transition rate from all initial states to all final states with Boltzmann rate equations involving Brillouin zone integrations. The numerical treatment of these integrations on a finite grid is often done via a replacement of the Dirac delta distribution by a Gaussian. The Dirac delta distribution appears in Fermi's golden rule where it describes the energy conservation among the interacting particles. Since the Dirac delta distribution is a not a function it is not clear from a mathematical point of view that this procedure is justified. We show with physical and mathematical arguments that this numerical procedure is in general correct, and we comment on critical points

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the United States: more symptom than solution to the problem of growing instability in the Indo-Pacific

According to official statements, the main purpose of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue ("Quad") is to intensify cooperation between the four partner countries - Australia, India, Japan and the United States - in tackling urgent challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. These include climate protection, health policy and maritime security. However, it is primarily the rise of China and the associated challenge to US hegemony in the region that brings together the four partners. In this context minilateral cooperation formats such as the Quad are gaining global importance. But more than 15 years after the start of formal meetings, and despite increased cooperation, the security dialogue between the four unequal partners appears more a symptom of regional instability than a remedy for it. (author's abstract