Political Periphery Research Articles

Global Politics, According to Pope Francis

Pope Francis conceptualizes the papacy’s and the Church’s theological, social, and political aspirations from a global perspective as seen from the periphery of society and politics, not from the centrist perspective of the international realm of a world of states. Mapping Francis’ conception of global politics has various benefits for international studies: First, it fills a part of the lacunae in the literature which has been tagged with a missing mapping of “ideological visions of global politics”. Second, it helps to better understand the Church’s international political engagement and the Holy See’s further course of foreign policy under this pontificate. Third, at the example of Francis’s conception of the global realm and the place of the Church therein, the paper contributes to a burgeoning literature that moves beyond topically recognizing religion in international politics by outlining the relational dimensions of religion and global politics. If international and global studies want to make bold claims about the Holy See and take it serious as the largest transnational religious actor, then it needs to take serious its principal’s conceptualization of global politics.

Mubarak’s Use of Religion in his Political Discourse

Egyptian politicians use religion to avoid criticism or escape some danger. For example, the late Egyptian president Nasser (1918-1970) used religious terms before and after the defeat of the 1967 war with Israel. During the era of President Sadat (1918 – 1981), the state used religion to achieve some political goals or gain political interests. In the 1970s, during Sadat’s era, the aim was to counter the left, i.e. the communist ideas. The case was a little different during President Mubarak’s era in the 1980s as there was an attempt to adopt Islamist political groups within the fringes of formal politics, but in the 1990s there was an attempt to contain the Islamist challenge. This paper relies on an analysis of some of Mubarak’s speeches before the joint session of the Peoples’ Assembly and Al-Shura Council, because this occasion is one where the President will tackle almost every aspect of Egyptian policy: domestic and foreign. The current paper concentrates on the question of using religious lexical forms in the ex-Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, political speeches

Securitizing “spiritual-moral values” in Russia

This article examines how “spiritual-moral values” (SMV) became securitized, or defined as a matter of national security in Russia. I analyze speech acts to show how moves to securitize SMV spread from the political fringe to the center of power, and from individual sectors to the strategic level. This “moral turn” in Russian politics is not merely a superficial attempt of the elite to distract the masses and rally the conservative electorate. The securitization of SMV has wider implications: It is, in the most direct way, the regime’s way of preventing a “color revolution.” By introducing a “state of siege” to the sphere of fundamental moral values, this securitization aids the construction of a national identity that is incompatible with basic human rights. An existential threat is constructed in order to justify extraordinary measures and establish a new social contract in which modernization is sacrificed at the altar of security.

The Rainbow Is Burning: Analysing Public Contemporary Art as Site of the Polish Symbolic Conflict Over LGBT Rights, the Nation and Europe

AbstractThis paper examines the meanings and the social function of the Rainbow artwork mounted on one of Warsaw's central squares. It analyses how its public presence became site of the Polish symbolic conflict over LGBT rights, nationhood, and Europe. On the one hand, the Rainbow illuminates existing social cleavages – the way in which Polish national subjectivity is currently reconstructed in relation to undergoing social and civilisational changes after EU accession. On the other hand, the Rainbow not only represents existing differences in society, but itself catalyses polarisation of public attitudes. It does so mainly because of its perceived LGBT symbolism. It is shown that while the symbolic conflict may be intensifying and political fringe polarisation is indeed occurring, popular sentiments are actually liberalising, public visibility of the LGBT minority is historically unparalleled, and a European civilisational aspiration is overwhelmingly embraced in Polish society. This paper shows that though homophobic right‐wing radicalisation does occur, it is mainly a result of political ideology supply, and that overwhelming popular support for the artwork and its ‘gay’ meaning reflects actual social liberalisation and a pluralisation of the public sphere in contemporary Poland.

Antinuclear Radicals: Scientific Experts and Antinuclear Activism in Japan

This article examines the role of scientific experts in the post-war Japanese antinuclear power movement. It argues that experts and their movements have influenced the development of nuclear power in Japan, albeit in an indirect, constrained and sporadic way. Experts like the nuclear chemist Takagi Jinzaburō stimulated an upsurge of antinuclear protest and public opinion, especially after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, which made power plant siting more difficult, contributed to longer construction lead times, and forced state and nuclear industry officials to devote considerable resources to atomic energy public relations (PR) campaigns and compensation for nuclearised communities. The antinuclear advocacy and activism of scientific experts arguably helped to slow down nuclear power development, resulting in a less nuclearised Japan than imagined by its advocates. Antinuclear experts and their movements, however, never became players in mainstream nuclear policymaking and had to be content with pressure tactics from the political peripheries. After the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster of March 2011 some observers pointed to this lack of direct political influence as evidence of the failure of the antinuclear movement. Rather than outright failure, however, this article presents a more ambivalent history marked by both achievements and shortcomings.

From Political Fringe to Political Mainstream: The Front National and the 2014 Municipal Elections in France

From Political Fringe to Political Mainstream: The Front National and the 2014 Municipal Elections in France

Decolonizing Vision on Borderlands: The Mexican Southern Borderlands in Critical Review

This article critically examines the Mexican southern borderlands, understood both as a concrete borderline region and as a concept constructed by scholars. Building on recent borderlands debates, the article constructs a decolonizing vision, which provokes us to ask: To what extent is the borderlands perspective colonialist? By dividing the world into centers and peripheries, do we automatically repeat the centrist interpretations? Are the habitants of the borderlands thinking they are living in a periphery? By exploring academic literature on Mexican southern borderlands and decolonizing criticisms set forward by the Zapatista movement, the article brings forth epistemological challenges related to colonialist imagery and vocabulary on borderlands, suggesting a decolonizing vision from which to shed a new light to the world political centers and peripheries. This way, the article attempts at bridging critical borderlands studies with the field of international relations.

Imagining Geographies, Mapping Identities

The ambition of this issue of Portal is to reach across the methodological boundaries of history, politics, literature and geography to apply their complementary perspectives to the study of identity and its relation to space and place, an aim that involves attempting to identify the many different ways the notoriously slippery concepts of identity and geography may intersect.For this issue we have selected articles that cast a fresh perspective on two areas where identity and geography intersect: the construction of identity through the imaginative recreation of place in literature: Mapping Literary Spaces; and the study of the shifting relationships of centre and periphery, exclusion and inclusion in urban settings and geopolitical confrontations: Social and Political Peripheries.Gerard Toal has written that geography is not a noun but a verb: it does not describe what space is but studies what we do with space, imaginatively and politically. The articles in this issue illustrate the exercise of the literary and political imagination and the role of materiality and memory in the creation of geographic representation. They show too a new awareness of the centrality of space in the constitution of identities, and the need for a new geocritical reading of its discourse, as the interrelations of place and community are played out on the many scales of social and political life, from the local to the global. The special issue is organised thus:IntroductionMatthew Graves (Aix-Marseille University) & Liz Rechniewski (Sydney University): “Imagining Geographies, Mapping Identities.”I. Mapping Literary Spaces- Isabelle Avila (University of Paris XIII), "Les Cartes de l'Afrique au XIXe siècle et Joseph Conrad : Perceptions d'une Révolution Cartographique."- Daniela Rogobete (University of Craiova), "Global vs Glocal: Dimensions of the post-1981 Indian English Novel."II. Social and Political Peripheries- Elizabeth Rechniewski (Sydney University), “The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australian views of New Caledonia in the 19th Century."- Annie Ousset-Krief (Paris III), "Le Yiddishland newyorkais."- Carolyn Stott (Sydney University), "Belleville: Space, Place and Identity."- Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield), "Silencing Deafness: Marginalising Disability in the 19th century."

From Political Fringe to Political Mainstream: The Front National and the 2014 Municipal and European Elections in France

The succession of Jean-Marie Le Pen by his daughter Marine Le Pen as president of the Front National (FN) in January 2011 heralded a significant strategic shift in the party’s development. In terms of its overarching political objective, the FN has moved from playing its historical spoiler role as an anti-system protest party to recasting itself as a mainstream political formation interested in exercising political power. In order to secure this objective, the FN under Marine Le Pen has adopted a two-pronged discursive and organizational approach. At a discursive level, the FN has toned down the racialized anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric that characterized it in the past and instead chosen to couch its rejection of immigration in a broader, more conceptually neutral opposition to neoliberal globalization. The central element underpinning this discursive aggiornamento has been the rejection of the European Union, which is presented as an institutional stalking horse for the latter, conjoined with an avowedly Gaullist reaffirmation of France’s economic and political sovereignty. While the ‘UMPS’ (an acronym combining the initials of the principal center-right and -left parties in France) is busy facilitating Europe’s neo-liberal economic integration, so this new line goes, the FN erects itself as the sole authentic partisan opponent of this project and defender of its sectoral victims. At an organizational level, the FN has attempted to balance its top-heavy party structure built around a charismatic leader in favor of establishing a grassroots structure geared to responding to local concerns. Specifically, it is attempting to develop — much like the French Communist Party in the 1950’s and 1960’s — a clientelistic network to anchor its municipal electoral implantation. In turn, this Frontisme municipal is designed to strengthen the FN’s parliamentary representation at the mainstream parties’ expense. Thus, through both its discursive aggiornamento and new emphasis on local organizing, the party hopes to translate its status as the third political force in the country following the 2012 presidential elections into concrete electoral gains. This would allow it to more directly shape national policy and ultimately aspire to exercising power in its own right. The municipal and European parliamentary elections respectively scheduled for March and May 2014 stand to provide a sterling empirical test of the electoral effectiveness of the FN’s strategic reorientation under Marine Le Pen. The former will gauge the FN’s organizational gambit to wrest local political control from the mainstream parties, while the latter will measure the electoral resonance of its anti-European discourse. On a backdrop of generalized socioeconomic crisis, this paper shall analyze the FN’s performance in the 2014 municipal and European parliamentary elections from the standpoint of discourse and organization as essential factors of political supply. First, it will assess what the electoral results bode for the FN’s positioning and status within the French party system, chiefly whether they signal the party’s ‘breakout’ from the political fringe to the political mainstream. In turn, it will consider the broader lessons and implications this case holds for other radical right-wing parties in Europe.

The Eastern Partnership and the disintegration of Eastern Europe: The end of the region-building project?

The article analyses the regional approach in the Eastern Partnership (EaP). It is argued that the EaP is a political region-building project, which has entailed the construction of the EaP region as a political and economic periphery based on a process of assimilating the EaP countries to EU norms and standards. The assimilation project has, however, failed to yield significant success. The article explores the potential (and perhaps by now the missed opportunity) to adopt a more emancipatory approach to the region, including the strengthening of political and economic cooperation and infrastructure links between the EaP countries to reduce their dependence on Russia. But the outlook is bleak: after a decade of the EU's and Russia's region-building projects competing (with neither power being particularly successful in the attempt to assimilate ‘its region’), the region and its states are likely to be fragmented into a multiplicity of territories which are set to develop into de facto dependencies of either Russia or the EU/ the West.

Polish Interstate Relations with Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania After 1990 in the Context of the Situation of National Minorities

When we compare the contemporary ethnic structure and national policy of Poland and its eastern neighbours, we can see clear asymmetry in both quantitative and legal-institutional aspects. There is currently a markedly smaller population of Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians living in Poland than the Polish population in the territories of our eastern neighbours. At the same time, the national minorities in Poland enjoy wider rights and better conditions to operate than Poles living in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.
 Additional complicating factor in bilateral relations between national minority and the home state is different political status of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine and different processes of transformation the consequence of which is differentiated state of political relations of Poland with its eastern neighbours. Lithuania, like Poland, is a member of EU, Ukraine, outside the structures of European integration, pursued a variable foreign policy, depending on the ruling options and the economic situation, and Belarus, because of internal policy which is unacceptable in the EU countries, is located on the political periphery of Europe.

Socialist Intercessions: The Earliest Demands for a Separate Montenegrin Language (1967–1972)

The question of a separate Montenegrin language has been extensively debated in the last decades. Its roots, however, lie deeper, with the first demands for it appearing in the late 1960s. By analysing the contemporary sources, this paper seeks to establish how and by whom these demands were voiced, the argumentation of both sides of the debate and how were they received by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The debate was started by a group of Montenegrin intellectuals in a climate favourable to the “political periphery” of socialist Yugoslavia and the smaller nationalisms. The group, supported by some of the high executives of the Communist Party, claimed that the rights of the Montenegrin nation were being negated by the government's refusal to allow the local language to be codified to a literary standard. The discussion sheds light on the process of nation-building in socialist-era Montenegro, revealing its actors and dynamics.

Beyond National Socialism?

Beyond National Socialism? S. Jonathan Wiesen and Geoff Eley When Sabine Hake suggested that someone address the theme “Beyond National Socialism,” we volunteered with alacrity. We did so, however, not to defend its underlying assumption—that the Third Reich should now surrender its central place in German history—but to scrutinize it. As historians who have explored how Germans arrived at, experienced, and extracted themselves from this terrifying twelve-year period, we saw “Beyond Nazism” as a welcome provocation. Historians should always be testing the boundaries of their field; almost seventy years after the end of National Socialism, fresh perspectives might indeed complicate Nazi-centered narratives. And yet, the following essay takes a less revisionist tack. Is it even feasible in the first place to decenter National Socialism? If possible, would it be desirable? Putting a question mark at the end of our title implies no aversion to challenging scholarly norms. But what might we lose by pushing Nazism and the Holocaust prematurely toward the margins? Most commonly, “moving beyond” National Socialism bespeaks a cris de coeur, a wish among some Germans to rid themselves of the moral, political, and financial obligations attending historical memory. While some academics might share in this desire, worrying about Nazism, its place in German history, and the state of the field clearly has a scholarly purpose. In a 2011 German History forum, six noted scholars offered measured and thoughtful suggestions about how we can decenter Nazism and the Holocaust.1 By embedding the Third Reich within broader developments in the history of politics and culture and placing it in a global context, they assert, we can move the field into new directions no longer beholden to Nazism as their structuring theme. So far, so good. Yet the GH forum betrays a disquieting cynicism. By focusing our pedagogy and scholarship on the Third Reich, Germanists have been “indulging the public’s obsession,” “pandering” to students, and “fixating” on Nazism. Most provocatively, we continue to “genuflect” before the enormity of National Socialism “to keep our union cards.” On that basis, German historians would seem to be opportunists (we study the Third Reich because it sells) or cowards (we’re afraid not to study the period for fear of professional ostracism). While decidedly a caricature, [End Page 475] such hyperbole bespeaks real concerns. Why pay obeisance to increasingly barren scholarly conventions? “Are there empirical and ethical reasons,” asks Glenn Penny, “for moving on to new perspectives?”2 What would we lose morally, psychologically, and politically by such a shift? As most GSR readers would agree, the memory of Nazism has been crucial to the Federal Republic’s health over the last six decades; it binds the country to a parliamentary democracy that pays wrenching deference to the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s and to the goal of avoiding them in the future. If the Nazi past works as a “moral cudgel,” to use Martin Walser’s controversial phrase, it does so to the good of Germany and Europe more broadly. By holding Germany’s feet to the fire, as it were, historians continue to make vital contributions to sustaining democracy. The Third Reich is both a reminder of the potential for barbarism and an incitement to countervisions—of political and social pluralism and peaceful international relations. Even after the post-Holocaust genocides, Nazi crimes still form the main ground of this pedagogy; facing them sustains an optimism about learning from the knowledge that we gain. Pushing ourselves beyond National Socialism in those terms would mean ceding a perspective on the past that remains rife with meaning: about individual morality, political passion, hatred, cowardice, and courage. The philosophical, moral, and political legacies of National Socialism continue to haunt us. They will not easily be dismissed. And yet the critics have a point. As scholars we are obliged to seek new perspectives. Historians, of course, have been doing this for some time. Recently, German history has been considered “from the margins”—from the vantage point of those previously consigned to the social, cultural, and political peripheries: Jews, backwoods localities, German diasporas, particularists, women, immigrants, and Afro-Germans, to cite the inventory of one insightful collection.3 That perspective...

Could climate change precipitate peace?

Growing interest in the social consequences of climate change has fueled speculation that global warming could lead to an increase in various forms of political violence. This article examines the effects of climate change on international conflict subsequent to the onset of European industrialization. Surprisingly, analysis at the system level suggests that global warming is associated with a reduction in interstate conflict. This naive relationship is suspect, however, as the increased consumption of carbon-based fuels is itself associated with changing patterns of politics and prosperity. In particular, economic development has been viewed as a cause of both climate change and interstate peace. Incorporating measures of development, democracy, cross-border trade, and international institutions reveals that systemic trends toward peace are actually best accounted for by the increase in average international income. The results imply that climate change, which poses a number of critical challenges for citizens and policymakers, need not be characterized as fundamentally a security issue, though climate change may have important security implications on the periphery of world politics. The analysis here also suggests that efforts to curb climate change should pay particular attention to encouraging clean development among middle-income states, as these countries are the most conflict prone. Ironically, stagnating economic development in middle-income states caused by efforts to combat climate change could actually realize fears of climate-induced warfare.

Rosamond Jacob: An “Ordinary” Woman in the Early Free State

Rosamond Jacob: An “Ordinary” Woman in the Early Free State Leeann Lane That Rosamond Jacob (1888–1960) is the first female author to feature in “A Backward Glance” would be a source of great satisfaction to her. Jacob spent much of her life, particularly in her later years, haunted by feelings of inadequacy and lack of fulfilment.1 Unmarried, she longed for—in the words of her character Constance Moore in the unpublished novel she titled “Third Person Singular”—a “happy love affair.” Well read, home-schooled, and intellectually curious, Jacob was born a generation too early to imagine or train for a career. She came of age between the cohort who adhered to the Victorian ideology of separate spheres and a later generation of single women who benefitted from first wave feminism. While she wrote steadily, Jacob’s diary entries are replete with mentions of publishers declining to publish her fiction. She failed to get The Troubled House published until 1938, more than a decade-and-a-half after she had begun to write it and nearly two decades after the publication of her first novel, Callaghan (1920).2 Yet, she clung to the notion of herself as a writer, needing to establish an autonomous identity in an Irish society structured, legally and socially, on an essentialist view of the domestic, married, childbearing, and childrearing woman. From the late 1920s on, Jacob lived increasingly on the fringes of Irish society; according to the evidence in her diary, the dominant expectation of Irish women to be wife and mother worked to infantilize and elide the single adult woman. Jacob’s later life was marked by alienation from the state and publishing marketplace, yet her writing of The Troubled House was marked by optimism. Jacob wrote the novel at a seminal moment in the history of the new postcolonial Irish state. She began drafting the novel in 1923: this date is important. While the disillusionment of the Treaty was real for those who saw it as a betrayal of the ideals of 1916, many anti-Treaty supporters held out hope, in the spring of 1923, for a political reversal. For Jacob, the civil war era represented a period of political excitement and intrigue, as had the earlier periods of the revolutionary struggle.3 Moreover, few female activists in 1923 foresaw the repressive [End Page 64] gendered legislation to come with the new Irish Free State. Jacob hoped that the new state afforded plenty of room for women artists like the fictional Nix, who embraced the alienation that was a prerequisite of the woman artist.4 However she personally identified more with the outlook of the novel’s protagonist, Maggie Cullen. Several methodological choices emerged in my biographical study of Jacob. The literary merit of the novel has been noted by Steele and Meaney, but The Troubled House is equally significant for how it investigates the political and cultural schisms of the revolutionary years from the perspective of a foot soldier, rather than a leader. Jacob’s lack of putative exceptionality for biographical study thus intersects with the historical importance of the novel. The standard biographical subject is the outstanding writer, the political leader, or the pioneer in social movements: Jacob’s “ordinariness” requires an alternative lens. Much as the last two volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (2001) “set out to challenge existing canons of Irish writing” by emphasizing breadth and range, rather than strict literary excellence, my interest in The Troubled House centers on how it offers a broader perspective on the Irish revolutionary and suffrage period. When I set out to write the first book-length biography of Jacob, I inevitably needed to explain to readers the merit in studying a female activist and writer on the fringes of feminist activism and nationalist politics. Jacob never assumed a leadership role in any of the political campaigns with which she was associated, but her experiences teach us a great deal about these significant years. In fact, the history of the revolutionary period—and of the campaign for female equality—is as much the history of followers as of leaders. More work needs to be done on how...

Indonesian politics in 2011: democratic regression and Yudhoyono's regal incumbency

In 2011, a number of trends in Indonesian politics became clearer. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) has not become a more reformist and risk-taking president in his second term, contrary to the hopes of many, but has rather become more cautious, aloof and regal in style. He is irked by criticism and dislikes any disturbance to the authority of his rule. The political elite, often in concert with the SBY government, pushed through a range of democratically regressive measures, including allowing politicians to be appointed to the Elections Commission. The malaise within the party system deepened, with less than a quarter of the electorate professing any party affiliation. Most Islamic parties slid closer to the political periphery, and the largest one, PKS, was beset by controversy. Government and community responses to a brutal attack on the Ahmadiyah sect in early 2011 showed the limits of Indonesia's much lauded religious tolerance.

Literary Culture on the Burma–Manipur Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Intellectual exchange between South Asian and Southeast Asian societies before and outside of colonialism is still poorly understood, both because of the lingering cultural essentialism promoted by colonial scholarship and the national and regional politics that have dominated historical perspectives since. Certainly, the role of local literati in the Chindwin river area on the Burma–Manipur frontier as mediators in the movement of ideas and literature between the Indian subcontinent and Burma in the 18th and 19th centuries has been obscured by conventional political and intellectual history. This historiography has both partitioned and incor-porated the local, the transregional and the culturally diverse into national, regional and mono-cultural frameworks. The call by scholars of border-lands to reverse the way we examine border areas, taking a view from the periphery rather than the perspective of the centre, also invites the explora-tion of cultures that can complicate the state-centred narrative of literary history. The present article examines one precolonial scholarly network and the nature of its activities on what is conventionally viewed as the cultural and political periphery to raise questions about the central role attributed to the royal court in literary production, the neglect of the role of important women as patrons of local cultural activity, and the origins of Burma’s national literary heritage.

Does the Internet Encourage Small Parties? A Case Study of the Minutiae of BC Politics, 1996–2009

Researchers remain divided on what Small describes as ‘a key debate in the cyber-campaigning literature’ – whether or not the emergence of the Internet enhanced the prospects of small parties on the periphery of mainstream politics that speak for those whose voices might otherwise go unheard. Often researchers have approached this question by seeking to establish if small parties are indeed able to maintain an on-line presence that matches that of larger, better resourced parties. The ultimate test of this ‘equalisation thesis’, however, is whether the Internet ushered in a period in which small parties could flourish. With its propensity to produce small parties and its rapid take-up of Internet technology from the mid-1990s onward, the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) is an ideal case study. The number of small BC parties increased in the decade beginning 1995, but a close scrutiny of the minutiae of BC politics in this period finds no evidence to support a claim that the Internet favoured small parties and enlarged the opportunity for marginalised citizens to participate in politics. ‘Cyber-optimists’ will have to look to unconventional forms of political activity for evidence that the Internet can draw new constituencies into politics.

Center and Periphery at the Austrian-Russian Border: The Galician Border Town of Brody in the Long Nineteenth Century

Center and periphery are popular concepts to describe geographical, political, or economic power relations. Both are mostly perceived as strict and mutually exclusive categories. This article examines a Galician border town whose history illustrates the complexities of conceptualizing center and periphery relations. At first glance, nineteenth-century Brody (in today's Ukraine) would seem to qualify as a peripheral town located on the Galician border between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. An analysis of this city under Habsburg rule (1772–1918), however, shows us that during that period it constituted both an important centeranda declining periphery, not only consecutively, but also simultaneously. Its situation on the country's physical and political periphery did not harm Brody's central role in Europe's East-West trade until the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. Only in later decades did the city lose its place within a modernizing commercial system, and eventually it declined in importance. If we leave aside the economic aspect and take a closer look at Brody's mostly Jewish inhabitants, we see that for centuries this city functioned as an important center for Eastern and Central European Jewry. Even though the town's centrality for Jewish history also changed over time, Brody nevertheless kept its place on Jewish mental maps, whether as a center of religious learning, as a pioneering site of political emancipation, or as a safe haven for Jewish refugees.

The West that is not in the West: identifying the self in Oriental modernity

This paper discusses the meaning of ‘the West’ in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, ‘the Chinese’ is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as ‘Other’ in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of ‘the Chinese’ in world politics. ‘The Chinese’ is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West, but at the centre of Japanese selfhood. Self-knowledge produced through Othering and that through self-rectification are so different that the universal West could not make sense of the all-under-heaven way of conceptualizing the West.