External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation
China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893–1952

Chong argues that when foreign actors face high opportunity costs of intervention in a weak state, their behavior may foster sovereignty.

Ja Ian Chong (Author)

9781107679788, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 May 2014

304 pages, 5 b/w illus. 7 maps 11 tables
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.7 cm, 0.47 kg

"Chong evaluates interactions among local political groups, governance institutions, external actors, and pressures from international system … He considers the competition among several powers (e.g., the US, Britain, Russia, Japan, France) as they intervened these fragile states, their rivalry creating conditions favorable for political centralization, territorial exclusivity, and external autonomy, the marks of the sovereign state. The argument Chong makes also applies to fragile states today, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Kosovo."
G. A. McBeath, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Choice

This book explores ways foreign intervention and external rivalries can affect the institutionalization of governance in weak states. When sufficiently competitive, foreign rivalries in a weak state can actually foster the political centralization, territoriality and autonomy associated with state sovereignty. This counterintuitive finding comes from studying the collective effects of foreign contestation over a weak state as informed by changes in the expected opportunity cost of intervention for outside actors. When interveners associate high opportunity costs with intervention, they bolster sovereign statehood as a next best alternative to their worst fear - domination of that polity by adversaries. Sovereign statehood develops if foreign actors concurrently and consistently behave this way toward a weak state. This book evaluates that argument against three 'least likely' cases - China, Indonesia and Thailand between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

1. Molding the institutions of governance: theories of state formation and the contingency of sovereignty in fragile polities
2. Imposing states: foreign rivalries, local collaboration, and state form in peripheral polities
3. Feudalizing the Chinese polity, 1893–1922: assessing the adequacy of alternative takes on state reorganization
4. External influence and China's feudalization, 1893–1922: opportunity costs and patterns of foreign intervention
5. The evolution of foreign involvement in China, 1923–52: rising opportunity costs and convergent approaches to intervention
6. How intervention remade the Chinese state, 1923–52: foreign sponsorship and the building of sovereign China
7. Creating Indonesia, 1893–1952: major power rivalry and the making of sovereign statehood
8. Siam stands apart, 1893–1952: external intervention and rise of a sovereign Thai state
9. Domesticating international relations, externalizing comparative politics: foreign intervention and the state in world politics.

Subject Areas: Microeconomics [KCC], Economic theory & philosophy [KCA], Economics [KC]