The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Ecumene (Part IV)
Aftermath
Estimates of military and civilian causalities are between 250,000 and 300,00 with 185,000 Koreans killed and another 60,000 held captives by Japan. The aftermath of the war had repercussions throughout East Asia with the Tokugawa clan reunifying Japan, the supplantation of the Ming dynasty with the Qing, and Korea taking decades to recover, a devastation that was perhaps even greater than it had suffered during the Korean War (1950-53).[i]
After the war, Korea and Japan restored diplomatic relations. For Japan it was a way for the Tokugawa claim to legitimatize its authority as the “king of Japan” whereas for the Koreans it provided a rationale for Chinese soldiers to withdraw from the peninsula and provide a peaceful southern front and concentrate on the chaos on its northern border.[ii] This was a result of the collapse of the Qing dynasty which the Imjin War had weakened such that the Manchus emerged as the victorious power, establishing the Qing dynasty.
However, the Qing enjoyed less authority than the Ming in the tributary system: it had to invade Korea twice for it to become a tributary state and Japan ignored its authority entirely, forming its own self-proclaimed miniature tributary system. Because the Manchus were considered barbarians by the Han Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and other East Asians, their rule was seen as violating the boundaries and norms of diplomatic practice. Both Korea and Japan used this perceived cultural inferiority of the Qing dynasty to their own domestic political advantage. Korea initially supported a declining Ming against the growing Machu threat because the new king needed legitimacy from the Ming to cement his rule, while Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) claimed itself the new center of East Asian politics to unify the country and enhance its own domestic legitimacy.
Thus, the spiritual and pragmatic politics of East Asia remained unchanged after the Imjin War.
Conclusion
The cosmological form of the East Asian ecumene makes it that the spiritual and the pragmatic order are analogue of each other. When there is more than one civilization that adopts the spiritual ecumene, the result is civilizational conflict, for those societies want to have their pragmatic empires correspond to their spiritual aspirations. Voegelin’s insight therefore is to recognize that conflict among civilizations therefore is not merely about power, resources, or values but a spiritual worldview that seeks to have its pragmatic counterpart manifest in the world of power politics. The Imjin War is a clear example of this.
The current rise of Asia, particularly China, has raised questions not only about the West’s place in the future of global politics but how should we understand and analyze it: Is civilizational conflict inevitable? Can the West and East have a peaceful coexistence? At what costs?[iii] Voegelin’s account of the ecumene as both a spiritual and pragmatic reality provides us a way to understand the West’s encounter with Asia. It is a civilization that traditionally understands itself in a cosmological form where its spiritual and pragmatic ecumene must coincide. This is different than the West which, accordingly to Voegelin, has adopted a soteriological and Gnostic account of self-interpretation.[iv] That is, we in the West have at times organize our societies by separating the spiritual and the pragmatic (soteriological) or collapsing them into one (Gnostic).
If it is the latter, then conflict between the West and East appears more probable, since there can only be one representative of humankind both spiritually and pragmatically. But if it is the former, cooperation is a possible avenue because the West’s aspiration for spiritual unity in humankind does not have to be mirrored in the pragmatically way people organizes themselves. The example of human rights is instructive in this regard.[v] In the West, human rights is the symbolization of the universal spiritual history of humankind but it does not require a single pragmatic organization for them to be established, for the type of government a country is (e.g., liberal democracy, one-party state) matters less than whether individual rights are respected by that government. By contrast, if a Gnostic were to claim that respect of human rights equated into a certain type of government (e.g., liberal democracy), then it would be incumbent upon that person to export democracy and make the world safe for it so the spiritual and pragmatic ecumene are one and the same.
It would seem then that to avoid civilizational war with Asia it is incumbent upon the West to see itself in soteriological rather than Gnostic terms. This is not to guarantee that conflict and war would not transpire but it would lessen the chance of it. To understand our own spiritual and pragmatic ecumene, as well as others’, is key for peaceful co-existence. To recognize this Voegelinian insight can contribute to our better understanding of Asia and international relations.
[i] Ibid., 561-86.
[ii] Ibid., 573-75
[iii] Jacques Martin, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (New York: Penguin, 2012); Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Parag Khanna, The Future is Asian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019); David Shambaugh, ed. China and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
[iv] For more about Voegelin’s Gnostic and soteriological theories, see my introduction to Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 1-10.
[v] David Walsh, The Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). For more about whether human rights is an appropriate symbolization of the spiritual ecumene, see Macon Boczek, “The Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being,” VoegelinView October 3, 2016. Available at https://voegelinview.com/politics-person-politics/; David Walsh, “In Defense of Human Rights,” VoegelinView October 5, 2016. Available at https://voegelinview.com/defense-human-rights/; Macon Boczek, “A Response to Professor Walsh,” VoegelinView October 7, 2016. Available at https://voegelinview.com/response-professor-walsh/.