The Ritual/Performance Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis: European Diplomats at the Chinese Court

Erik Ringmar

“But where does culture go?” Walter Carlsnaes leaned across the table and looked

me straight in the eyes. “You're saying there is something missing from my boxes?

You want me to include 'culture'? But where, Erik, does it go?” I must admit I was

flustered. Our meeting had been going well up to this point. I had just read

Walter's “agency and structure” paper, fresh in print with ISQ, and I believed I had

found a problem with it.1 Finding problems with your supervisor's arguments,

especially the ones published in prestigious journals, is exhilarating. It allows you

to try out a new voice, the voice of a fellow colleague. Leaving my student identity

behind for a moment, I was going to assert my independence. If only I had a good

answer. “Well,” I cleared my throat, “it should probably go somewhere here.” I

pointed to one of the blank corners on the graph before us, but as I pointed I could

feel my self-confidence dissipating. There was no place for culture in that graph

and I knew it. Walter looked at me straight again. “Perhaps you'd better think this

over until our next meeting,” he said with a faintly ironic smile. “Yes,” I said,

“perhaps I'd better.”

That next meeting never took place. I saw Walter on a number of occasions,

but never again formally, as a supervisor. I got my PhD from the United States in

the end and Walter was on the committee, but we never had a chance to return to

our topic. I never explained to him where culture goes. I've thought about this

1 Walter Carlsnaes, “The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis”, International Studies Quarterly 36, no 3 (September 1992): 245―270.

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problem for about twenty years now, and I think I finally know the answer.

* * *

The agency-structure problem, as other contributions to this book explain, is the

question of how to theorize the relationship between human actions and the

environment in which they occur. This is the hen-and-egg problem of whether

structures determine agents or agents structures. The obvious solution is to say

that structures and agents determine each other, yet sensible as this solution

sounds, it provides surprisingly little help when it comes to research design. We

already know that “everything depends on everything else,” but what we do not

know is which factors that are the most important. After all, it is only by keeping

some things fixed that we can study how other things vary. The suggestion that we

first should look at the structure, then at the agent, then at the structure again and

so on, is not very helpful as long as we lack a more general framework which can

integrate the two and explain the logic of their relationship. By refusing to opt for

one side or the other of the agent-structure divide, we are back where we started

― with the trite statement that eggs produce hens and hens eggs.

Although the agency-structure problem has been extensively discussed by

theorists of all stripes, what has received less attention is the fact that members of

society too face the same problem. They too ask themselves what they can do

given structural constraints and how those constraints could be reimagined or

altered. Reflections on the structure/agency problem is a persistent theme of social

life, including its treatment in novels, movies, arts and drama. In fact, the social

scientists' reflections on the problem are best understood not as the concern of

scientists observing life in a test tube, but as part and parcel of this modern, more

general, preoccupation. Social scientists pondering the agency/structure problem

are only doing what everyone else, in some form or another, does. Since this is the

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case, the problem can be investigated not only as a matter of theoretical reflection

but also empirically ― by studying the publicly available reflections on how it can be

addressed.

This is true for a study of international relations too. The international system

of states which emerged in Europe in the late Renaissance is often described as

“anarchic,” and as such it constitutes a structural constraint on action.2 What

anarchy means, however, is not self-evident but instead to be determined through

the actions of states and other international actors, and the interpretations they

provide.3 The topic to be investigated below concerns how such interpretations

happen. Anarchy may be what states make of it, but to say as much still begs the

question of how that which states make of it was made. There is a pragmatics to

the interpretation which needs to be further elucidated. Specifying how meanings

are made, we will argue, “culture” can be reintroduced into our analyses. Indeed, a

study of culture provides a way to investigate the interrelationship between agents

and structures which explains the logic of their relationship. Eggs will still produce

hens and hens eggs but we will have a better means of studying this process of

production.

European diplomats at the Chinese court

In order to better understand how anarchy was made in Europe, lets consider how

anarchy was made in East Asia. In the latter part of the world, before the middle of

the nineteenth-century, international relations were organized in a radically

different fashion.4 The system was hierarchical and ordered and the units were

2 David Dessler, “What’s at Stake in the Agent―Structure Debate?”, International Organization 43, no 3 (1989): 441―473; Alexander E. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory”, International Organization 41, no 3 (Summer 1987): 335―370; Carlsnaes, “The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis”.

3 Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics”, International Organization 46, no 2 (March 1992): 391―425; ibid.

4 John K. Fairbank, ed, The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973); Feng Zhang, “Rethinking the ‘Tribute System’: Broadening the Conceptual Horizon of Historical East Asian Politics”, Chinese

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explicitly unequal. The metaphor of a solar-system is often used, with China as the

sun around which other political entities of varying sizes circled in increasingly

distant orbits. An important institution were the tributary missions through which

the subordinate states brought gifts ― usually some form of “native produce” ― to

the imperial court. In Beijing the visitors were wined and dined and received in an

audience with the emperor who treated them kindly, if condescendingly, affirming

the social bonds that tied the system together. In this way order and peace was

maintained, the Chinese confirmed in their world-view, and the visitors recognized

by the emperor of China as legitimate rulers. In addition the visitors took the

opportunity to trade with the Chinese.

Although the Europeans were outsiders to this system, trade and colonialism

brought them into it, and as a result they too had to present themselves at the

imperial court. From the beginning of the Qing dynasty until the system was

abandoned in the wake of the Opium Wars, some 27 separate diplomatic missions

showed up in Beijing: 4 Portuguese, 4 Dutch, 12 Russian, 3 delegations from Rome,

3 British and one American. At the imperial court the Europeans, much like visitors

from East Asia, were required to follow a specific ritual which notoriously included

the koutou, the full-length prostration before the imperial throne.5 The koutou

confirmed the paternalistic relationship which connected the tribute-bearers to the

Qing emperor. By koutou-ing the visitors accepted their subordinate positions while

the emperor agreed to take them into his benevolent care. There were solid

utilitarian reasons why the Europeans should go through with this ritual ― the

merchants wanted access to Chinese consumers and the missionaries wanted

access to Chinese souls ― and yet they regarded it as profoundly humiliating.

Journal of International Politics 2 (2009): 597―626; Erik Ringmar, “Performing International Systems: Two East Asian Alternatives to the Westphalian Order”, International Organization 66, no 2 (2012).

5 The most detailed description in English is Allen J. Chun, “The Ching Tribute System as Guest Ritual: A Preliminary Description”, in Proceedings on the Second International Conference on Sinology (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1989), 169―208; On the koutou in Sino-European relations, see William W. Rockhill, Diplomatic Audiences at the Court of China (London: Luzac & Co., 1905).

4

From a European point of view, a full-length prostration was what slaves performed

before a master, or a worshiper before a god, but before a political ruler ―

including their own kings ― a European would at most go down on one knee. Only

East Asian rulers, the Europeans decided, were despotic enough to insist on this

ritual, and only East Asian subjects were submissive enough to go along with it.

visits koutou refused to koutou, no audience

refused to koutou, audience

koutou/visits

Russia 1656, 1670, 1676, 1693-94, 1716-17, 1720-21, 1721-22, 1725-27, 1757, 1763, 1767-68, 1806

9 2 1 75%

Portugal 1670, 1678, 1727, 1753 4 0 0 100%

Papacy 1705-06, 1720-21, 1725 2 0 1 67%

Holland 1656, 1667, 1685-86, 1795

4 0 0 100%

United States

1859 0 1 0 0%

Great Britain

1793, 1816, 1860 0 2 1 0%

The question is how this pattern best should be explained. Why did some European

visitors always koutou, some never koutou-ed, and some koutou-ed only some of

the time? The question is puzzling since they all faced the same opportunities and

the same constraints: they all wanted concessions from the Chinese. Moreover,

once the embassy arrived in Beijing they had already invested a lot in its success

and it would seem foolish to jeopardize the outcome by not following the required

protocol. Yet some countries always did, some never did, and some did it only

some of the time. Lets consider this as a problem of foreign policy: there were

actions, there were structures, but there also seems to be “something cultural”

going on.

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action and the pragmatics of discourse

One particularly striking feature of the diplomatic interaction between China and the

rest of the world during the Qing dynasty is its theatrical quality. The Europeans

presenting themselves at the imperial court found themselves the actors in an

elaborate state ritual, and it was the terms on which they appeared in this ritual

that the conflict concerned. For scholars used to analyze action in terms of rational

choices, this is bound to be puzzling. To them, rituals are “mere rituals,” and as

such at best examples of “expressive behavior.”6 Yet as the ritualism of the

Chinese court reminds us, rational actions are only one of several kinds of behavior

in which states, and their representatives, engage. Ritualistic and theatrical

behavior are not simply actions that are insufficiently rational, but behavior of an

entirely different kind. As a result we need a different way to explain them.

An action, lets remind ourselves, is the result of an actor interpreting a

situation in a certain fashion, identifying the options available and considering

which option that is most likely to bring most benefit. The process of rational

deliberation thus understood, when brought before one's mind at the appropriate

moment, results in a rational action. Actions, that is, serve the desires of the

persons carrying them out. Yet, since our desires typically are thought of as

unlimited, the environment in which we act will never properly satisfy us. We

always want more and the fact that everyone else wants more too means that we

have to behave strategically in our interactions with others ― to make sure that we

get what we want before someone else gets it. Conditions of scarcity and

competition mean that both the physical and the social environment ― both

“structures” ― are understood as constraints.

Consider the place of culture in this process of rational deliberation. Rational

actions, we said, rely on interpretations. Before we act, we need to define our

6 See, for example, Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings, “Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications”, British Journal of Political Science 41, no 03 (February 11, 2011): 645―670.

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interests, define the options available to us, define the situation we are in ― and

these definitions all presuppose a world which is meaningful. Sense is never made

by individuals alone but instead always together with other members of our society

and by the people who preceded us. Obviously, all societies have several

competing ways of making sense of things, and this gives us the option of choosing

between them.7 Equally obviously, we do not have to agree with the established

interpretations. Even when we disagree, however, we have to disagree in a

meaningful way. All in all, we take things to be the kinds of things that people in

our society take things to be; we want the kinds of things that others want; we are

the kinds of people that others are. As a result we come to incorporate a social

element into even the most selfish of our desires.

These ready-made meanings make up an important part of the culture of our

societies.8 Meanings form a vast system of interrelated, although disparate and not

necessarily coherent, terms which together constitute what we could call a

“discourse.” A discourse can be understood as a vast imaginary dictionary, specific

to our society, where various terms are defined in some particular, if not

necessarily coherent, fashion. Actions are thus simultaneously real ― meaning

physiological and material ― and discursive, meaning meaningful.

We rely on a discourse in putting together the narratives through which we

make sense of our lives.9 Narratives put meanings into action, as it were: a story

identifies a protagonist who is located in a certain situation which includes other

people but also the material, economic and social circumstances of their lives. The

situation has some basic problem or tension which is worked out, scene by scene,

7 See, for example, Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

8 This definition follows Lisa Wedeen, “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science”, American Political Science Review 96, no 4 (December 2002): 713―728; and is obviously indebted to Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

9 See, for example, Barbara Johnstone, “Discourse Analysis and Narrative”, in Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Melden: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 635―649; Swidler, Talk of Love.

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through the actions in which the protagonists engage. In its telling, the story

comes to provide an account of the relationship between agency and structure.

Moreover, this relationship is no longer an endless succession of hens and eggs, but

it is emplotted in a certain fashion. The story has a beginning, a middle and an

end, and agency is related to structure, and structure to agency, by means of a

plot. When the story comes to an end, the tension between agency and structure is

resolved.

In addition to the problem of what something means, we said, there is the

problem of how something means. Discourse has no social life; it is mute, like a

book on a shelf before somebody reads it. Although this may be good enough for

literary theorists who study texts, social scientists are in addition interested in how

something came to be interpreted a certain fashion; how, that is, the book was

read and received. There must be some process, in other words, through which

discourse came to be activated and made available for public as well as individual

deliberation.10 We could refer to this process as the “pragmatics” of discourse.

Such a pragmatics can take many forms, but two are particularly important for our

purposes: rituals and what we will refer to as “social performances.”

Rituals are associated with particular times and places in the life of a person or

a society.11 Rituals are established responses to an environment which is uncertain,

risky, or in a state of change; rituals are associated with comings and goings,

passages and turning-points, transitions and transformations. Rituals take place in

their own space, a location and an occasion removed from the ordinary stream of

life, which you enter and leave ― often by means of a ritual. Engaging with the

ritual, we subject ourselves to the requirements of a script which specifies the use

of particular movements, words and assorted paraphernalia; that is, we subject

10 Compare Julia A. Walker, “The Text/Performance Split Across the Analytic/Continental Divide”, in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 19―40.

11 Compare Turner’s discussion of “liminal moments.” Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

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ourselves to a tradition of which our society is the custodian and perpetuator.

Rituals, as a result, are social occasions, they are usually carried out together with

others, and even when we carry them out alone, rituals necessarily makes a

reference to a larger community ― of believers, for example, co-nationals or fellow

party-members. Yet rituals require no particular skill and they are not performed in

the sense that they require a personal interpretation or expression; rituals can

often be carried out without your hearts or minds being engaged.

But not all performances are ritualistic. In addition to rituals there are plays,

that is, theatrical performances.12 Plays are staged in much the same fashion as

rituals; they unfold in a confined space, dedicated to the purpose, which is set off

from the continuity and flow of ordinary life. Yet theatrical performances, in

contrast to rituals, have pretensions to verisimilitude; they are at the same time a

presentation and a re-presentation. The actions presented on the stage are

representing life outside the stage ― above all the lives of individuals and the social

and material conditions in which they find themselves. The play has a narrative

structure and a plot which turns on the actions carried out by the actors.13 Plays, in

contrast to rituals, have an audience. The purpose of the performance is to show

the audience something, to demonstrate or teach something, to convey emotions

and experiences.14

Thus understood, performances are not only taking place in theaters but

elsewhere in society too. A “social performance” is a staged and narrated event,

performed by actors in front of an audience, which takes a social, political or

economic issue as its topic.15 Social performances have plots too which unfold

12 Compare Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy”, in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29―90.

13 As already emphasized by Aristotle, The Poetics, trans Samuel Henry Butcher (London: Macmilllan, 1898).

14 “Theory” and “theater” share etymological roots in the Greek, theo, meaning “seeing.”

15 Compare Turner’s “social drama,” which however has a more restricted definition. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors; See also Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics”.

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through the actions of actors, and the aim, just as in a theatrical performance, is to

show or teach something, to convey emotions and experiences. Examples of social

performances include extravagant displays of royal opulence, staged debates

between presidential candidates, the destruction of a palace during a war, mass

demonstrations, victory parades, state funerals, a revolutionary fête, the “cult” of a

political leader, and acts of terrorism.

This is how societies conceptualize the agency/structure problem. In rituals

and social performances the external world is internalized. The external

environment is transformed into a known and far more easily graspable

environment which belongs to the performance itself.16 Rituals, we said, are

particularly common during times of transitions and transformations, that is, at

moments when agency is badly defined, social structures uncertain, and the

relationship between agency and structure unclear. The ritual replaces this external

uncertainty with an internal certainty and helps ease the move from the one state

to the other. The ritual reinserts the individual both into the unfolding context of

her own life and into society as a whole. In this way the ritual provides a means of

coping with a situation with which we could not have coped, or not coped as well,

on our own.

Social performances add verisimilitude and audience participation to these

ritualistic representations. On the stage a world is created which has its own

agents, structures, and relationship between them. The constraints set by this

internal environment, and the actions in which individuals engage on stage, are

determined by what we regard as meaningful, not by economic, social or political

factors. As audience members, we watch the performance and as a result the

structural constraints and the actions available to us in our own lives come to be

elucidated, criticized or reaffirmed. A performance, that is, is a way for society to

think. As members of the audience, we are no longer telling only our own story,

16 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); On the “pragmatics of discourse,” see Wedeen, “Conceptualizing Culture”.

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but forced to consider other people's stories and the stories of our society as a

whole.17 This is the story-telling to which social scientists too, in a modest fashion,

make a contribution.

to koutou or not to koutou?

To say that an international system is “anarchic” is not to say very much. Anarchy

refers to the positioning of political subjects in relation to each other, but such a

positional map tells us nothing regarding how their relationships are interpreted. In

order to understand the logic of a certain international system, we need not a

theoretical analysis but a historical account. Only a historical exposition can tell us

how a certain definition of anarchy came to be established and how it came to

matter to states and to the individuals acting in their name.

The rituals performed at the imperial court in Beijing answer these questions

as far as the Sino-centric international system is concerned.18 The fact that the

system was centered on the Chinese capital, and that envoys from the rest of East

Asia paid their respect before the imperial throne, reveal the basic logic of the

system. The emperor stayed put, that is, and the envoys appeared before him

carrying their respective tributes. Through the rituals, including the koutou, they

affirmed their submission, much as a Chinese child might do before a father. The

emperor responded in kind, affirming that the envoys and their masters now were

under his care. The rituals, in short, stressed hierarchy, inequality, but also mutual

obligations. This was how the Sino-centric international system was interpreted

and it was through these rituals that it became visible, that is, real. Through the

ritual the relationship between agency and structure became obvious to all

participants.

Contrast and compare the international system which emerged in Europe in

17 Walker, “The Text/Performance Split”, 24―25; See also Tobin Nellhaus, “Social Ontology and (Meta)theatricality: Reflections on Performance and Communication in History”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 14, no 2 (2000): 12―20.

18 Ringmar, “Performing International Systems”.

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the late Renaissance.19 This Westphalian system was not ritualistic but theatrical.

The world, in the popular metaphor, was regarded as “a stage” on which states

acted and interacted with each other. This metaphor took on concrete

manifestations in various locations across Europe ― in theaters of war but also in

the chambers of peace congresses or, more recently, in the assembly halls of

international organization like the United Nations. Here there were plenty of rituals

too, but there was no set script and no one director. Instead the states and their

representatives were free to write their own lines, subject only to the requirements

imposed by the common performance. There was an audience too: a “world

opinion” expressed through the printing press which regularly passed its judgment

on what states did and what they should do. In contrast to the rituals taking place

in Beijing, these performances stressed equality, sovereignty and self-

determination. States were guided by their “interests” and constrained only by

other states who were guided in the same fashion. It was through these

performances that the Euro-centric international system came to be visualized and

made real. It was in this way that agency was related to structure.

Given that anarchy was so differently conceptualized in the two systems,

there were bound to be misinterpretations and conflicts between them, symbolized,

as we have seen, by the question of the koutou. To the legates dispatched by

Rome, however ― including the Jesuits fathers who were permanently stationed in

Beijing ― the issue was never presented in these terms.20 The Church, much as

the emperor, had a ritualistic view of the world and a firm conviction regarding its

own centrality ― and it did not recognize the newfangled notion of state

sovereignty. Given their incompatible universalisms, however, one would have

expected Rome and Beijing to clash and the legates to have had serious problems

with the koutou. Such confrontations, however, were avoided by the dexterity of

19 Ibid.

20 How this was a fortiori the case for the Jesuits working at the imperial court. See David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989).

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Jesuits missionaries such as Matteo Ricci who argued that these were rituals of no

particular significance. To Ricci what mattered was access to the imperial court

which he regarded as key to a successful conversion of the Chinese. It was only

once the power of the Jesuits in Rome had been eclipsed by that of the Dominicans

that this interpretation came to be questioned. It was also only now that Rome's

legates made trouble about the koutou.

The Portuguese and the Dutch koutou-ed too, but in order to win commercial

favors. To both countries trade was paramount and they were not going to make a

fuss about the trifles of court protocol. In fact, the Portuguese took great pride in

their respect for local customs ― they did not, for example, like other Europeans,

impose their own place-names on the foreign lands they encountered ― and the

Dutch were not even represented by the country's diplomats but instead by officials

of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company.21 Moreover, both countries had a direct

stake in the Sino-centric system. Ever since 1550, the Portuguese had had a

foothold in Macau and this made them, if not Chinese subjects, at least highly

dependent on the emperor's benevolence. And Holland first settled in Batavia, on

the island of Java, in the early seventeenth-century, and at this trading-post they

too were an integral part of the Sino-centric system.22

As for Russia's relations with China they were established on an entirely

different footing.23 Since the Russians approached China overland rather than from

the sea, they were treated as a Central Asian rather than as a European power.

Central Asia powers, the Chinese emperors knew only too well, were dangerous,

and he Russians, as a result, were treated with far more respect. For example: the

two countries concluded a series of agreements in the seventeenth-century in which

a common border was established. Meanwhile, back in Europe itself Russian

21 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

22 John E. Wills, Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1984).

23 Gaston Cahen, Some Early Russo-Chinese Relations (Shanghai: National Review Office, 1914).

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diplomatic practices were considered as hopelessly old-fashioned. The Russians

thought of themselves as an empire ― as a “Third Rome” ― and as such they shied

away from the emerging Westphalian practices. They did not, for example, station

ambassadors abroad, and European visitors to Moscow had to follow a protocol

which resembled that employed in Beijing. Yet this was why Russia and China got

along so comparatively smoothly. Russian ambassadors koutou-ed in Beijing

without complaints as long as the Chinese promised they would do the same in

Moscow. That no Chinese ambassadors ever were likely to go abroad was less

often mentioned. It was only as a result of the diplomatic reforms during Peter the

Great that difficulties between the two countries arose. Once Russia had joined the

Westphalian system, and suddenly found itself as an actor among others on its

stage, the status of the country in the eyes of the Chinese became a matter of

great concern to its diplomats. This was also when Russian visitors to Beijing

suddenly refused to koutou.

There was never a question of the one American delegation, led by John Ward

in 1859, ever koutou-ing. At the time Americans were skeptical even of European-

style diplomacy which they regarded as too secretive and too aristocratic.24 Thus

no ambassadors were ever received in Washington D.C. since this “extraordinarily

foreign privileged class” was thought to fit badly with American republican ideals.

Moreover, the State Department insisted that its own diplomats “should appear in

the simple dress of an American citizen” when representing the country abroad.25

As Ward was approaching Beijing, his fellow Americans worried that he would

embarrass the country, yet Ward, firm in his republican convictions, did not

koutou.26 His steadfastness does, however, raise the question of what the

24 Ernest Mason Satow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1917); John Watson Foster, The Practice of Diplomacy as Illustrated in the Foreign Relations of the United States (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1906).

25 Foster, Practice of Diplomacy, 22―23.

26 “Important from China: The American Minister at Peking”, New York Times, November 16, 1859.

14

Americans aimed to achieve in China. When the imperial courtiers informed them

that a koutou indeed was mandatory, the Americans left on their own accord.

Instead a partial agreement was signed, in a thoroughly unceremonious fashion, as

they were about to board their ships to go home.

British diplomats, like the Americans, never koutou-ed, and the reason,

ironically, is that they shared many of the same “republican” ideals.27 Members of

the British aristocracy took great pride in their commonsensical attitude to life and

they were often skeptical of empty ritualism and blind beliefs. While they as a class

often were dismissive of their social inferiors, they had just as much disdain for all

claims to absolute power. In their eyes, their own king was a primus inter pares

entirely bereft of sublime attributes. Not surprisingly, British writers were scathing

of the spinelessness of their fellow Europeans, and the Dutch in particular were

endlessly lampooned.28 And yet the British, much as the Dutch and the Portuguese,

wanted concessions on trade, and for that reason they needed to come to an

agreement with the imperial authorities. The American solution of a partial treaty

concluded in a provincial town was dismissed, however, as being beneath the

dignity of the representatives of the British government.

The British diplomats, in short, were confused, and the confusion was

reflected in their instructions. George Macartney, visiting Beijing in 1793, was told

not to “commit the honor of your Sovereign or lessen your own dignity,” yet neither

should he “let any trifling punctilio stand in the way of the important benefits which

may be obtained by engaging the favorable disposition of the Emperor and his

ministers.”29 Macartney, that is, had the option to koutou, yet on the day he could

not bring himself to do it. Much the same was true of the mission led by William

27 Erik Ringmar, “Liberal Barbarism and the Oriental Sublime: The European Destruction of the Emperor’s Summer Palace”, Millennium 34, no 3 (2006): 917―933.

28 See, for example, John Barrow, Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey Through the Country, from Peking to Canton (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1804), 9―13.

29 Quoted in Earl H. Pritchard, “The Kotow in the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793”, The Far Eastern Quarterly 2, no 2 (February 1943): 184.

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Amherst in 1816. On the way to Beijing extensive discussions pro et contra the

required prostration took place among Amherst's staff. What they hoped for was

some kind of face-saving measure, yet when no compromise was forthcoming,

Amherst excused himself from the audience, insisting he was ill. After being

examined by the emperor's own doctor, however, the whole embassy was promptly

sent packing. Why the British acted in this manner was impossible for the Chinese

to understand. Why travel so far, at such an expense, and then ruin everything

over such a trifle?

The British diplomats were confused since they were torn by conflicting

imperatives. They wanted concessions on trade to be sure, but in addition they

wanted the Chinese to treat them with respect. They demanded to be recognized

as an equal, that is, they wanted the Chinese to deal with them on European terms.

That such recognition was impossible for the Chinese to even consider was

impossible for the British to understand and they constantly complained about the

“stubbornness” and “stupidity” of Chinese officials.30 This, in our terms, was not

only a political conflict but also a cultural. The Euro-centric and the Sino-centric

international systems were incommensurate with each other and while imperial

authorities and other visitors found a way to work around these

incommensurabilities, the British refused to compromise. The issue was only

resolved through the Opium wars, 1839-1842 and 1856-1860, in which the entire

Sino-centric international system was blown to pieces. Once Beijing was occupied

and the emperor's palace destroyed, there was no more talk of a koutou.31

where does culture go?

Culture enters our analyses of social phenomena to the extent that the actions of

30 See, for example, Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes, Sometime Her Majesty’s Minister to China & Japan, Volume 1: Consul in China (London: Macmillan, 1894), 376.

31 Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism and the European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012).

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actors are based on interpretations ― and actions are always based on

interpretations. Before we act we must understand what we want, who we are,

what kind of a situation we are in, and who the other people in the same situation

are and what they want. Understanding all these things requires interpretations.

There are no “structures” without interpretations, no “actions,” and no acting

selves. The question, however, is not only what but also how something means.

There is a pragmatics of discourse, a way of showing and making known through

which discursive meanings are turned into shared and socially relevant meanings.

In this chapter we briefly contrasted and compared two such pragmatics ― rituals

and social performances. One of the main tasks of a pragmatics of discourse is to

present solutions to the agency/structure problem. That is, to provide social actors

with a means of understanding the world they are confronting and the options at

their disposal. Social scientists do not analyze these pragmatics as much as to add

to them.

This is why, and how, culture matters to a study of international relations.

Anarchy is not real but interpreted, or rather, the interpretations become real once

they are staged, performed, and then acted on. This is a social process, we pointed

out, and as such it is delimited by the boundaries of a certain international society.

In this chapter we briefly analyzed two such international societies and it was not

surprising to find that their respective interpretations of anarchy varied widely

together with the pragmatics through which these interpretations were expressed.

In the Sino-centric international system the units were unequal, hierarchically

ordered and connected through mutual obligations; in the Euro-centric system the

units were taken as equal, sovereign and free to pursue their separate goals. The

Sino-centric system was visualized through rituals whereas the Euro-centric system

was visualized through social performances.

If culture is the property of a certain international society, the question

becomes what happens when different international societies come into conflict with

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each other. This was the topic of our historical case-study. The koutou, as we saw,

was interpreted in entirely different ways in East Asia and in Europe. In East Asia it

was the ritual by which a foreign envoy was inducted into the international system

organized by the Chinese. As such it manifested and confirmed a set of mutual

obligations. To the Europeans it was a performance which signified complete

submission and thereby national humiliation. Whether the Europeans in Beijing

koutou-ed or not depended on how they felt about performing on these terms; that

is, it depended on how they defined their interests and their identities. This issue

was easily dealt with by legates from Rome and by Russian diplomats prior to Peter

the Great since both regarded international politics in similarly ritualistic terms as

the Chinese. The issue was easy also for the Portuguese and the Dutch who did

regard the ritual as humiliating, but who quickly decided that this was a small price

they had to pay for commercial benefits. The issue was easy for the United States

too for whom a koutou always was out of the question. It was instead only Britain

that struggled with the issue. What was at stake here was the place Britain saw

itself as occupying in international relations. Commercial benefits were important

to them too, but more important still was Britain's standing in the world. Instead of

performing on Chinese terms, they defied their hosts and eventually destroyed the

entire Sino-centric international system.

word count: 6246

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