Principal speaker
Christian Wirth
Even more than regional integration, the rise of China or ‘power shift’ has come to dominate the agenda of international politics in the Asia-Pacific. The maritime sphere is the centre stage on which this shift unfolds.
Although neither regionalism nor the rise of China would be possible without the connecting element of the ocean, the East Asian Seas have become dangerous and divisive, rather than connecting, in the minds of politicians, bureaucrats and students of international politics. The paper argues that this is a result of efforts to secure or ‘stabilize’ the current socio-political order in three dimensions. First, the maritime is a borderland between civilized, modern society and uncivilized nature. Developing the ocean, therefore, means to continue along the linear path toward progress and modernity. Second, the maritime coincides with the political boundaries among the modern nation states of China, Japan and South Korea and its safeguarding is imperative for the preservation of the legitimacy of postwar-era state institutions. Moreover, often neglected, a third delineation that cuts across the ocean is in most general terms the one between ‘East’ and ‘West’. This makes Northeast Asian seas also borderlands in the global civilizational order. Analyzing international politics through the prism of ocean politics, therefore, enables the paper to capture both, the social and economic bases of states and the structural determinants that constitute the international system of states.
Dr. Christian Wirth is a Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Brisbane. He obtained his PhD from Waseda University in Tokyo and previously worked for the Federal Government of Switzerland. He is published in International Relations of the Asia-Pacific and The Pacific Review, amongst others.
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