Description
This article seeks to contribute to the expanding investigations of the non-Western productions of the modern international order by tracing its East Asian genealogy. I argue the pre-modern East Asian spatial conception continues to constitute the modern international order in East Asia. The pre-modern East Asian polities shared a distinctive fractal spatial order in which each and every place implicated the entire shared spatial connections from its particular perspective. Thus, no place could be a part of another place, even when it could be enveloped in another place. This East Asian fractal space became one section of the composite modern international order after it had gone through two historical transformations. It first underwent partial territorialization in the early 18th century when it appropriated the linear and homogeneous space of early modern European geography. In the late 19th century, it went through another transformation under the pressure of the expanding imperial powers. Instead of being the primary spatial order in the region, it became a suppressed section of a composite order which consists of both the fractal spatial order and European territorial order. This composition generated a discordance, or hysteresis, between the territorial habitus and the logic of the fractal spatial order. The hysteresis has manifested in the form of intensifying historical disputes that have threatened the national identity and stability of East Asian states. The resolution to the compounding identity and, increasingly, security crisis can be sought only if the composite reality of the modern international order in East Asia is properly understood.
