Bill Hayton’s book provides historical and contemporary reasons for embracing these very qualities and conceptualizing them as part of a longer history in a vital world region.
By Jeremi Suri
University of Texas, Austin
In 1949 Fernand Braudel published his monumental history of
the Mediterranean Sea, describing in great detail how the contours of this
large and deep body of water shaped the surrounding societies, their cultures,
and their conflicts. Braudel’s book reminded readers that despite the powerful
claims of monarchs, generals, and lords, geography and climate often have the
most enduring effects on social order. Human beings made history near the
Mediterranean, according to Braudel, but they made it in ways shaped and
constrained by the environment around them. The Mediterranean privileged sea
power, trade, and urban communities, according to Braudel. It facilitated
empires, but it limited their ability to establish hegemony over wealthy and
well-defended islands and coastal cities. The Mediterranean connected Europeans
in a single “civilization,” just as it set them against each other in economic
and military competition that intensified with modern industrial capabilities.[1]
Bill Hayton is no Fernand Braudel. Unlike the esteemed French
historian who actually wrote The Mediterranean while confined to a Nazi World
War II prison camp, Hayton has spent his career traveling extensively as a
reporter for various international news organizations. According to his
website, he has worked for Dow Jones TV, CNBC, European Business News, Sky TV,
and especially the BBC. His media experience has included long periods of
reporting from the Middle East, central and eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia.
He published a highly regarded book about contemporary Vietnam in 2010. His new
book, The South China Sea, blends his seasoned reportorial eye with an
ambitious Braudelian historical vision, producing something one might characterize
as a blended historical-journalistic account of Asia’s Mediterranean.[2]
Hayton begins with the “prehistory” of the vast waterway that
sits between the southeastern lands of the Asian continent and thousands of
island chains around present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Charting the many travelers who have crossed this sea in multiple directions
over time, Hayton clearly explains that “in no sense did any state or people
‘own’ the Sea” (p. 28). The vast and deep waters nurtured rich and fragmented
societies around them. The sea facilitated trade, but it limited regional
conquest beyond the vast Chinese mainland. Hayton reminds readers that even at
their most powerful moments under the Qing, the great Chinese emperors
collected tribute from smaller nearby societies, but they never ruled directly
in Vietnam or Cambodia or other regional kingdoms. The sea facilitated the
projection of the emperor’s wealth and greatness; it limited his ability to
rule and dominate, as he did across the Central Asian steppe and other inland
areas.
The South China Sea is for Hayton a Braudelian civilization,
filled with cultures and traditions that are in direct historical dialogue with
one another, yet separate and independent. Chinese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai,
Javanese, and other societies developed through constant contact, frequent blending,
and occasional conflict. They shared ideas, markets, and peoples. They
recognized cross-sea hierarchies and boundaries, but these were ever-shifting
and often quite complex. The Chinese were an acknowledged power around their
sea coast, but they did not dominate all activities. The water spaces between
present-day Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines had powerful actors with
ties on land, but their own seaborne identities challenged landed authority as
well. Sea piracy was, in fact, an alternative form of political and social
authority, challenging traditional monarchs and trading associations.
What makes the South China Sea a civilization is that its
very diverse and frequently conflicting constituent parts lived
self-consciously together with a somewhat consistent and predictable system of
relations. Hayton draws on other scholars to call this the “Mandala” system, in
contrast to the Western “Westphalian” system. From the eighteenth century
onwards, European statesmen assumed that their authority extended consistently
across all areas within their defined political boundaries, and this included
overseas empires that often formally belonged, as personal property, to the
metropolitan monarch. For the societies around the South China Sea, Hayton describes
a system where each political entity had a center, often with a monarch, but
that ruler’s power diminished with distance from that center. For many parts of
the South China Sea, this meant that areas of frequent trade and travel were
distant from all monarchs, but still within the partial authority of many of
them.
The Mandala system in the South China Sea rejected absolute
lines of authority and clear alternatives between ruling figures. Instead, many
areas had multiple overlapping rulers, with shared influence over waterways.
For the countless small islands that dot the Sea, layerings of association and
identity rejected formal sovereignty. The Spratly Islands--between present-day
China, Vietnam, and the Philippines--were within the authority of all of these
landed areas at the same time. Residents and traders found ways to appease
multiple rulers, just as they managed to remain free from complete control by
any of them.
The South China Sea as a historical and contemporary system
of international relations is a canvas with many shades of mixed color (a
mandala), not the clear lines with straight edges that Western map-makers have
assumed. The discrete territoriality of the post-Westphalian state, with
accompanying notions of exclusive sovereignty and citizenship, never shaped the
imaginings of actors in the South China Sea. The European state system came to
the region through the force of nineteenth-century imperialism, but Hayton
shows that it never took hold. The waters were too vast, traditions were too
deeply rooted, and Western powers were too limited in their capabilities and
knowledge. European influence was, in fact, much stronger on the land than
across such a complex and shifting sea.
Rather than fixed political power, the South China Sea in
Hayton’s account is a space of movement, contingency, and vagueness. No one
owns it, but everyone seems to have a piece of it. No one controls it, but many
powerful actors shape it. Most important, few live on its waters, but many are
close by and travel through it. Like Braudel’s Mediterranean, the South China
Sea defines a large and diverse region by the opportunities and limits it
simultaneously creates for powerful actors, big and small.
Hayton’s book offers its greatest value in bringing this deep
history to contemporary conflicts over the sea, its islands, and the
surrounding region. Hayton makes a compelling case that the long roster of key
actors in current controversies--China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the United States, and Australia--are plainly
wrong when they claim someone has a historical “right” or a legitimate “claim”
to control one part of the sea or another. The Chinese, in Hayton’s account,
have been most aggressive since the Second World War (both the Guomindang and
the People’s Republic) in drawing maps, naming places, and now building
artificial islands to assert “inherited” control, where no such inheritance
exists. Supplementing his book, Hayton has created a vivid and compelling
presentation on his website that details Chinese fabrications and falsehoods
about historic rights in the sea.[3]
Of course the Chinese are not alone. One of the best parts of
Hayton’s book is chapter 3, which begins with an account of the uncertainties
and disorganized efforts to re-order the South China Sea in the years after
Japan’s defeat in 1945. For a time, no one claimed the Paracel and Spratly
Islands. Very quickly, by late 1946, multiple powers claimed them all. This
involved ostensible allies, including the Guomindang in China and the new
postwar French government. In the years before the outbreak of the Korean War,
as the new communist government took power in China, various powers raced to
create situations of strength on unoccupied islands, sending small contingents
of troops to, quite literally, plant national flags.
Despite severe resource constraints, and the limited economic
utility of new island claims, the struggling Cold War states around the South
China Sea sought to expand their claims in places they never really controlled
before. The United States did not initiate any of its own land claims in the
immediate region, beyond Guam in the South Pacific, but it acted wherever
possible to prevent the expansion of communist influence. This was an early and
enduring expression of Washington’s “containment” policy, favoring local
anticommunist claims of authority.
The United States plays a curious role in Hayton’s book.
American military power and economic influence is obviously significant in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but Hayton treats the United States as a
secondary actor in many cases. American policymakers have consistently sought
to keep the waterways open and in friendly hands. The US Navy has often acted
as the protector of shipping and the separator of warring parties (especially
China and Taiwan after 1950.) Nonetheless, Hayton’s account does not treat the
United States as the primary agenda-setter. The inherited system of overlapping
regional relations still motivates and constrains relations. The local powers
have knowledge and networks of actors on the ground (and at sea) that the
United States cannot consistently mobilize. Americans think about the South
China Sea as just another region, whereas those in the region treat it as the
center of their universe, and the focus of their efforts. In this context,
Washington is a reacting and a following, not really a leading actor.
The leaders of contemporary China, in Hayton’s account, are
trying to exploit their growing size and American distraction to expand
Beijing’s control across the region. The recently released Chinese strategic
document on maritime power is additional evidence for this almost undeniable
observation.[4] Hayton’s book provides the historical context to see how aggressive
the Chinese have become, but also to see why they are destined to fail. Just as
the United States does not fully understand the complexity of the region, the
Chinese leaders are neglecting how this complexity will necessarily limit their
power, and probably inspire resistance that diminishes Chinese power overall.
Leaders in Beijing are thinking about the South China Sea as
an extension of landed authority--that is how they articulate legal claims to
“territorial waters.” The value of the sea, and the socioeconomic dynamic that
defines its historical development, is movement and trade, not state control.
Chinese efforts to assert state control will destroy the value they seek. Local
regional actors need not put aside their own differences to combat Chinese
aggression; they only need to defend their traditional positions as
participants in a complex, multipolar system. The United States is in a very
strong position because it does not seek to control the region, but protect the
various local actors and the sea-lanes they traverse.
This current strategic assessment of the South China Sea
returns us to Braudel’s Mediterranean. The French historian wrote about the
longue durée of his beloved region, in the shadow of failed German efforts to
dominate the land and sea by force. Braudel argued that the vastness,
complexity, and historical fragmentation of the Mediterranean made it very
difficult for any single ruler, Philip II or Adolf Hitler, to control it.
Instead, Braudel anticipated, the relations nurtured by the sea would sink
those who reached too far, too fast, with too much force. Geography and history
conquered human ambition, not vice versa.
Bill Hayton’s book is a useful application of these insights
to an area of increasing international conflict. Chinese land claims (and
artificial island building) are historically predictable for a growing regional
power, as are the severe constraints on Chinese capabilities. A distant power
with limited claims, the United States has the opportunity to support the
strong historical tendencies toward movement, trade, and local complexity in
the South China Sea. This strategy will continue to serve American economic
interests, and most of the non-Chinese political actors will continue to
support this endeavor. The so-called
Asian pivot in American foreign policy is really a reinforcement of historical
dynamics, so long as the United States avoids the temptation to assert its own
direct control over local events. The regional dynamics align closely with
American, not Chinese, aims.
Power is often most effective when it is multilateral,
cautious, and self-limiting.[5] Too many foreign policy “experts” criticize the
United States for showing these qualities in the South China Sea during the
last decade. Bill Hayton’s book provides historical and contemporary reasons
for embracing these very qualities and conceptualizing them as part of a longer
history in a vital world region. Just as the Mediterranean continues to
reinforce a diverse and multilayered European social order, the South China Sea
is likely to do the same for Asia. The United States can reinforce this
stabilizing dynamic if it is prepared to act with this history in mind and play
the long game. This is a case where the Chinese, not their neighbors or the Americans,
are forgetting the most important lessons from the past.
About The Author:
About The Author:
Dr. Jeremi Suri has a joint appointment in the Lyndon B.
Johnson School of Public Affairs and the University of Texas at Austin
Department of History. Suri was previously with the University of Wisconsin,
where he was the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, the Director of the
European Union Center of Excellence, and the Director of the Grand Strategy
Program.
Suri earned his B.A. in history from Stanford University in
1994 and an M.A. in history from Ohio University in 1996. He then earned his
PhD from Yale University in 2001.
Professor Suri blogs on foreign policy and contemporary
politics at Global Brief. His research interests include the formation
and spread of nation-states; the emergence of modern international relations;
the connections between foreign policy and domestic politics; the rise of
knowledge of institutions as global actors; contemporary foreign policy;
international security; protest and dissident movements, and globalization.
Notes
[1]. See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
trans. Siân Reynolds, two volumes (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995, originally published in French in 1949).
[2]. See http://www.billhayton.com (accessed May 27, 2015);
Bill Hayton, Vietnam: Rising Dragon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
[3]. Readers can download this insightful presentation at: https://www.hightail.com/download/UlRTNWNnT00zS3B4Tk1UQw (accessed May 29, 2015).
[3]. Readers can download this insightful presentation at: https://www.hightail.com/download/UlRTNWNnT00zS3B4Tk1UQw (accessed May 29, 2015).
[4]. See, among many accounts, Keith Johnson, “China’s
Military Blueprint: Bigger Navy, Bigger Global Role,” Foreign Policy (May 26,
2015):
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/26/chinas-military-blueprint-bigger-navy-bigger-global-role/
(accessed May 29, 2015).
[5]. On this point, see Robert Hutchings and Jeremi Suri,
eds., Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
_________________________________________________________________
Publication Details:
Jeremi Suri. Review of Hayton, Bill, The South
China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. June, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43189
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia
Bill Hayton
978-0300186833
Jeremi Suri
Rating:
8 out of
10
H-Net Reviews
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