Performance without belief: As-if engagement and order-making in ancient East Asia

Abstract How does international order persist when actors neither share norms nor submit to coercive authority? This article develops the concepts of the as-if international system and as-if engagement to explain how order can be sustained through performance without belief—deliberate, routinized enactments of diplomatic roles that all parties recognize as fictive yet strategically maintain. Drawing on early East Asian diplomatic history, the study shows how Japan, China, and the Korean polities stabilized relations through mutually intelligible ritual practices despite divergent worldviews and contested understandings of status and authority. Japan’s shifting participation in the Chinese world order, its construction of a Japan-centered as-if system, and the coexistence of overlapping regional frameworks demonstrate how ambiguity and symbolic performance produced durable patterned interaction. The article concludes by applying this mechanism to contemporary Asia-Pacific politics, where states navigate both U.S.- and China-led orders by behaving as if these competing arrangements are compatible—thereby sustaining order amid deep normative divergence.