The aff’s description of conflict with China is a self-fulfilling prophecy---it reinforces violent power relations and causes militarized policies aimed at countering China

Once we acknowledge that academic concepts and analyses can have constitutive effects, we need to analyze their performative role. This means addressing the “double hermeneutic”—the way “‘findings’ of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they describe” (Giddens 1987, 20)—and reflecting on what our interpretations might “do” (Guzzini 2007, 23). It is not necessary to accept social constructivism to recognize that the practice of social science is interlinked with power relations outside of academia. Far from scholarly navel-gazing, a reflexive attitude is arguably a necessary ingredient of any rigorous social science practice (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).¶ Hence, since the power-shift discourse is not simply a descriptive account of an independent reality but is destined to be constitutive of that reality, it is essential to explore its power. Thomas Diez (2005) makes a similar investigation into the power of the concept of “normative power Europe” (NPE). He finds that NPE constructs a benevolent and peaceful identity for Europe, but also that its alleged peacefulness is contrasted with and therefore dependent on an idea of what Europe is not—an outside consisting of “challenging threats” (2005, 636). The double hermeneutic twist is that the coining of the originally academic NPE concept has become an important instance of Europe’s “normative power.”¶ Diez (2013), however, seems to take for granted the distinction between post-Westphalian normative powers, which engage in a struggle over the definition of “normality” in world politics, and Westphalian great powers, which engage in war, empire building, and physical conquest. “Great powers,” however, are also the products of normative, discursive pressures, and they reproduce ideas of what is “normal” great-power behavior. Much of the power-shift discourse reproduces the same familiar self/ other dichotomy as the NPE literature. Here, the other is a rising and potentially threatening China, while the self is a weak but inherently righteous United States/West/Japan.¶ Pan argues that the “China threat discourse” is “always intrinsically linked to how US policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example)” (2004, 306). Hagström demonstrates how the discourse on Japan’s “abnormality” and “weakness” reproduces a standard of “normality” in world politics that is centered on the ability to go to war. Postwar Japan is socially constructed as deviant from this norm and thus as a threat to itself. This discourse, which emerges in both Japanese and Western academia and in Japanese political debate, legitimizes a road map for a more “realistic,” “active,” “responsible,” and “normal” Japan (Hagström 2014).¶ The power of the power-shift discourse does not stop at the production of identities and standards. The point is that identities and standards produce effects. Pan illustrates this by showing how the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995–1996 was often understood as “further objective proof of the long-suspected ‘China threat,’” but few acknowledged that “the ‘China threat’ discourse itself had played a constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis” (2004, 323, 320). Moreover, standards in Japan’s “normalization” discourse have enabled Realpolitik changes in its foreign security policy. Chinese vigilance vis-à-vis Japan and the United States might also be interpreted as discursive phenomena—the theme of national reinvigoration is a product of the lingering notion that China has been continually humiliated and victimized by the great powers since the nineteenth century. As these examples illustrate, the ultimate power of discourse is the production of self-fulfilling prophecies. When self-fulfilling prophecies occur on both sides of a dyad, we might end up with a socially generated security dilemma (Johnston 2004).¶ Much research has warned of self-fulfilling prophecies in the East Asian context. Some observers suggest that US or Japanese discourses about China might produce policies of containment, Japanese “normalization” and “remilitarization,” and US “rebalancing” toward East Asia (Pan 2004; 2012; Hagström 2012; Turner 2014a; 2014b). Nonetheless, Japan and the United States have not yet embarked on containing China. Instead, both countries have on the whole accommodated China’s rise (Christensen 2006; Jerdén and Hagström 2012). In a similar manner, perceived increases in bellicose or nationalistic representations in Chinese discourses led some observers to jump to the mistaken conclusion that this had already resulted in a more assertive Chinese foreign policy (Jerdén 2014). As important as it is to remain vigilant against the emergence of socially constructed security dilemmas, we need to bear in mind that there is no deterministic connection between discourse and policy—just an enabling one. Dominant discourses create propensities for action but do not make any action inevitable. More empirically informed theorizing is needed to address the questions of how, when, and why discourses make some actions politically conceivable, easy to communicate, and sometimes even coercive (Holland 2013).¶ Reflecting on the possible power exercised through the alternative approaches introduced in this special issue is also necessary. In this article we raise analytical and normative concerns about the ideas of a more “powerful” and “threatening” China, a “weak” Japan, and a “declining” United States. We argue that such representations risk offsetting balancing policies and a security dilemma in East Asia, in line with the self-fulfilling prophecy logic discussed above. These arguments clearly belong to another site of discursive power production. That we have not seen any obvious balancing policies in East Asia thus far might arguably be interpreted as one of its effects.