Legal Positivization and Sovereign Recognition: A Comparative Analysis of Japan and the Ottoman Empire

Sammanfattning

Renewed scholarly interest in the category of history within the field of International Relations has prompted a revival of the so-called English School and its analytic emphasis on the concept of international society. This study examines the expansion of nineteenth century European international society through the theory of legal reception applied to the cases of Japan and the Ottoman empire. Methodologically the study employs sequential process tracing and the Millian logic of difference in order to gauge the power of legal reform as an independent variable in explaining Japanese success and Ottoman failure at entry into European international society. Our findings suggest that despite their varying degrees of success in their respective reform movements, legal reception alone cannot account for the outcome. The importance of European perceptions of the success of legal reforms in securing entry into international society suggests the need to develop a rudimentary analytic distinction within the theory of legal reception between legal reform at the level of substantial institutional change and legal reform at the level of perception.