According to recent news reports, a growing group of Chinese officials and scholars has commenced a semiofficial campaign to challenge Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa. This is of course in addition to the widely publicized Chinese efforts to challenge Japanese control over the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands. The basis for the claim to Okinawa appears to be a combination of early history and the Cairo Declaration, which the United States, China, and the United Kingdom issued in 1943 to help prepare the post-war order in East Asia. The argument goes like this: Okinawa and the other Ryukyu Islands were originally Chinese territory because the Ryukyu Kingdom was a tributary state of the Ming and Qing Dynasties; Japan stole the Ryukyus by invading them in 1609 and formally annexing them in the late 1870s; the Allies demanded the reversion of sovereignty over Okinawa to China in 1943 by stating in the Cairo Declaration that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese . . . shall be restored to the Republic of China”; and Japan agreed to the reversion of sovereignty by accepting the 1945 Instrument of Surrender, which provided for the enforcement of the Cairo Declaration. In this post, I’d like to identify a few reasons why this argument is unpersuasive.

The Atlantic has a good article out right now on mayoral participation in global diplomacy. According to the authors, the practice is increasingly common and ambitious. Mayors of large cities have taken on issues ranging from global warming to nuclear disarmament, to economic growth and terrorism. These efforts are also becoming more institutionalized. The mayor of New York, for example, has a “Mayor’s Office for International Affairs,” and Europe has an “EU-China Mayors’ Forum” that promotes relations between European and Chinese municipal authorities. The authors use the term “diplomacity” to refer to the “expanding propensity of cities to develop the necessary mechanisms to autonomously navigate foreign relations on their own.”

These developments strike me as interesting for a couple of reasons. First, they form half of a two-dimensional assault on a classical model of international relations, which identifies heads of state and their agents as the critical channels for official communication. Diplomacity amounts to a vertical assault on that model because it reflects a dispersion of diplomatic activity among national and local authorities. Communication by national officials other than heads of state—such as legislators—forms the other half: a horizontal assault in the form of a dispersion of diplomatic acts among component parts of national governments. Neither of these is new, but both have intensified under globalization. The result is an entirely different picture of international relations. If diplomacy under the classical model was centralized and tidy, the contemporary counterpart is decentralized and cluttered with a broad range of actors. This has both benefits and disadvantages. States and localities, for example, will often possess unique perspectives on international problems and unique capacity to develop solutions, but the proliferation of voices may also complicate the management of inter-state relations.