World order is often described spatially, as states defends borders, build spheres of influence, contest maritime zones, secure supply chains, and compete for institutional influence and positions. Yet, often underappreciated in international relations (IR), international politics are also organized temporally because categories such as order, power, crisis, and strategy depend on assumptions about political time, albeit those assumptions typically remain implicit (Hom 2020, 106–7; Hutchings 2008, 11–13). It is clear that political actors, whether states, multilateral organizations, or individuals, do not operate in the present irrespective of the future while passively awaiting it; they govern through expectations, warnings, deadlines, narratives, technology, and promises of renewal and progress.
This article argues that the future is not a neutral horizon besides or outside of international politics, but instead a means through which international relations are conducted. Future projections shape action by connecting inherited experiences of the past to expected possibility of the future, and, critically, “imagined futures” can even coordinate present behaviour under the condition of uncertainty in IR (Beckert 2016, 20–24; Mische 2009, 697–99; Koselleck 2004, 256–60). I argue that East Asia is a crucial site where global imaginaries, expectations, risks, hopes, and political struggles alike are observable today. What is at stake ultimately is which actor has temporal authority or the ability to define which futures count as legitimate, desirable, dangerous, or governable.
For simple reasons China offers the clearest case because its official and intellectual narratives pertaining to future range from national rejuvenation, to global governance, various future-facing initiatives, and ambition of technological preponderance (SCIO 2023; Callahan 2013, 1–8). But the other actors in the region – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – likewise indicate distinct modes of future-making through the use of strategic narratives and security adaptation, respective positioning under ongoing and intensifying great-power competition, as well as unresolved temporalities of sovereignty and political identity (Kang et al. 2025, 70–79; Yoshimatsu 2025, 374–76, 378–81; Cook et al. 2024, 1–10). East Asian Futures thus constitute a plural field where regional and global futures are imagined and contested, and the question is how actors in East Asia use the future to structure authority in the present. This matters for students of IR because a world order is defined not merely through institutions, alliances, or coercion, but also through claims about what type of future is desirable and legitimate, which is particularly salient as order in East Asia has long been hierarchical and contested (Goh 2013, 209–12; Duara 2013, 5–6; Cook et al. 2025, 24).
Time and International Relations
IR has often treated time and temporality as a given or implicitly as background. In most work, events occur in a chronological sequence with a given causality. For instance, wars begin and end, or states rise and then decline. But an emergent body of work on temporality posits that time influences IR through “timing activities” and “temporal assumptions,” making international politics possible in the first place. Narrative emplotment, too, is itself a timing activity through which various political events become subjects of IR. Theories of world politics similarly depend on contested assumptions about political time, including narratives of repetition, progress, decline, crisis, and transformation (Hom 2020, 2, 21; Hutchings 2008, 5–9). Naturally, the future, unlike forecasting, is central to the question of temporality in IR. Koselleck’s (2004, 256–57) classical work distinguishes between “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expectation,” explaining why futures are potentially powerful in how they affect politics, as states interpret the present by relating inherited pasts to projected possibilities of what is to come. Later literature specifies that future projections do not necessarily have to be accurate, they only have to shape how actors think, feel, organize, or act in the present. Additionally, fictional expectation and stories about uncertain futures have been proven to coordinate economic and institutional action (Beckert 2016, 23; Mische 2009, 699–701).
These insights affect IR because states often govern through future claims. For example, military modernization plans work by projecting danger, development strategies promise modernization and progress, climate targets bind present future to future catastrophe or security, and narratives of national rejuvenation instrumentalize unreflected history into a mandate for political action. Such claims define what should be accelerated or must be defended, and what can be sacrificed and given up. Yet, there are also issues with target objectives since modern states often create consequences with long temporal reach while their institutions only assign responsibility within short political and epistemic horizons. Besides, the capacity to aspire, or project imagined futures, is inherently unequally distributed. Some richer and privileged – ergo more powerful – members of the international society can project and institutionalize futures and govern time, but most poorer and marginalized – ergo less powerful – members encounter the future as a narrowing field of possibilities (Adam and Groves 2007, 181–84; Appadurai 2013, 188–89). The politics of the future is therefore also a politics of inequality. Some futures and the states producing them are authoritative; but most others are implausible.
Why East Asian Futures?
East Asia is a revealing site to examine temporality and futures because its modern politics have been defined by overlapping temporal projects such as imperial regionalism, anti-imperial nationalism, postwar reconstruction, developmental catch-up, socialist- and post-socialist revolution, the US-led security order, demographic anxiety, technological modernization, and disputes over sovereignty and territories. These temporal projects conspicuously coexist and collide at times. Nonetheless, there is a difference between region and regionalization, as regions emerge through interdependence and regionalization emerges through active projects of region-making (Duara 2013, 5–6). In the past decades, East Asia has been made through empire, capitalism, migration, war, and security hierarchies. Its numerous imagined futures are therefore highly relational. A Chinese future of rejuvenation and shared fate, a Japanese future of an open Indo-Pacific, a Korean future of strategic autonomy, and a Taiwanese future of democratic self-determination are mutually constitutive and entangled.
Stressing the nature of relationality in East Asia, Womack argues that contemporary world order is best understood as “multinodal” instead of multipolar. He defines multinodality as an “asymmetric matrix of actors in which each is located in a web of relationships” where actions produce wider reverberations and where managing uncertainty becomes a strategic task for the state (Womack 2024, 24). In that setting, East Asia is a nodal site whose imagined futures are produced through industrial production networks, global standards, trade routes, investment flows, alliances, sanctions, and strategic expectations. As a key feature of multinodality, rhetoric debates as well as concrete on the ground developments surrounding AI standards or supply chains all reverberate within East Asia but also outward to Europe, Africa, South- and North America, influencing trade and security. Future-making in East Asia helps define regional and global hierarchies, and determine what forms of leadership are legitimate. Claims to East Asian Futures are thus claims to temporal authority, a powerful form of influence touching every aspect of IR, and allowing a wide range of actors with various interests, be they liberal, autocratic, democratic, civilizational, or technocratic.
China: Rejuvenation and Shared Future
For many, China is the most obvious and conspicuous actor aiming to exercise temporal authority because its future-oriented rhetoric explicitly links domestic legitimacy to world order. The “China Dream” (zhongguo meng) conceptualizes the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people” (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) as an imagined future and answer to narratives of historical rejuvenation and lack of modernization, and status. But the China Dream is not merely a slogan by the Chinese Party-state; rather, it is a discursive field in which officials, intellectuals, cultural producers, and the general population debate China’s positionality in international politics as well as its future in the world (Callahan 2013, 1–8). The political power lies in the precise link between knowledge and power, as defining China’s future equals the conception of China’s current role in the world. The official concept of a “Global Community of Shared Future” (renlei mingyun gongtongti, previously often translated as “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind”) and the 2023 white paper present the concept as China’s vision and answer to what kind of world should be built and how it should be built. It links peace, development, security, civilization, and the ecology into one future-oriented political concept, constituting the most succinct form of self-representation by China to date (SCIO 2023). The GCSF utilizes futurity to make an explicit order claim by narrating a future world in which Beijing’s preferred concepts become the core of legitimate global governance
Additionally, China often refers to “tianxia” (All under Heaven) as a timeless Chinese alternative to Western forms of order. Traditionally, tianxia has often been explained as a changing “world-scape” that is shaped through cosmology, hierarchy, ritual, and geography across large periods of Chinese history, indicating that a Sinocentric world order has been the norm for IR of the past (Wang 2012, 369–70). However, the scholarship has argued that although Chinese intellectuals actively attempt to mobilize past traditions to imagine alternative futures, such “back-to-the-future” narratives remain incomplete for contemporary understanding of IR if they are detached from modern forms of capitalism, nationalism, and institutions (Murthy 2022, 1–3). China’s future-making is this neither propaganda nor a coherent blueprint. It is a negotiation over the specific concepts and terminology, one might say the infrastructure of global governance, through which sovereignty, hierarchy, and order become thinkable. National rejuvenation, shared future, tianxia – these all tell different temporal stories with China at their centre.
Japan and Korea: Competing Regional Futures
Japan portrays a different mode of future politics, as it is partly defensive and partly normative by involving a required adaptation to China’s rise, the aim to preserve regional order, and narrating Japan’s own constraint role. Scholars compare Chinese and Japanese diplomatic narratives by treating China’s GCSF with Japan’s concept of a FOIP as competing narrative instruments, which are tied to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and normative values, respectively. For Japan the FOIP constitutes a “third way” of development between Chinese and US pressures (Yoshimatsu 2025, 373, 378). However, Japan’s future politics also involve an institutional production of “threat” and “concern” (kenen). The increasing securitization of China in Japan cannot merely be explained away through Chinese behaviour; particularly the upgrade of the Japan Defence Agency into the Japan Ministry of Defence resulted in a harsher security discourse, and earlier than conventional timelines suggest, too (Schulze 2018, 241–42). Threat narratives are particularly temporal and consequential in nature, as they identify a developing danger, project that danger’s trajectory, and justify changes to institutions and behaviours before the feared future fully arrives.
South Korea adds another dimension of future-making in form of strategic positioning under conditions of geopolitical uncertainty. Sitting at the intersection of North Korea contingencies, US alliance politics, economic exposure to China, historical memory vis-à-vis Japan, and domestic political contestation, South Korea appears particularly at the wims of temporality and imagined futures from multiple vectors and actors. Cook et al. argue that Seoul has been “trimming the hedge” by removing earlier policy stopgaps that temporarily stabilized relations with China (THAAD debacle) and aligning increasingly with the US for security while remaining constrained by economic interdependence with China, though this too seems in flux under the erratic behaviour of the US under the Trump administration (Cook et al. 2024, 1–3, 10). Notably, this is an ongoing struggle over the future-oriented statecraft by South Korea; whether to preserve ambiguity, consolidate alignment, or keep hedging under great power competition remains, next to security, also a question of temporality and imagined futures.
Taiwan and the Future of Sovereignty
Taiwan and its future as politics represents a sharp form of temporal development as sovereignty remains an unresolved temporal claim. Critically, Taiwan is not just about territory, deterrence, and diplomatic recognition, but touches upon whether political time is imagined as a state of unfinished civil war, national rejuvenation, democratic self-determination, inherited sovereignty, or permanent strategic ambiguity. Each form of political time enables a distinct present. Within Chinese thinking, Taiwan likewise is a non-negotiable issue of sovereignty and national identity, though recent scholarship indicates that China’s aims are “trans-dynastic” and “not increasing in scope,” and far less hegemonic than many Western analysts posit (Kang et al. 2025, 75, 80–81). Ultimately, narrating Taiwan as an unresolved question of national identity and territorial unity explains why Taiwan is more than just a geopolitical flashpoint pertaining to the ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ and critical semiconductors. For Beijing, unification of Taiwan with the mainland is an imagined future of historical closure, and for Taipei, its imagined futures focus on democratic self-determination, political autonomy, and the refusal to give up the status-quo, albeit being threatened by China’s claim to the island. Hence, the question of temporality becomes: who can become the orchestrator of a convincing and successful – and ideally peaceful – future of a political community, and how can this future be sold to the prospective members of that community?
What This Changes for IR
I argue that taking East Asian Futures seriously changes four things for IR and its students. First, it shifts analytical attention from passive prediction to active production of future. Which vision of future ultimately unfolds exactly as claimed – China’s GCSF, Japan’s FOIP, South Korea’s alignment choices, or Taiwan’s political autonomy – is less relevant than what these imagined futures affect and enable in the present. The fact of the matter is that these imagined futures justify investments, alliance structures, institutional change, mobilization of the public, deterrence, and diplomatic efforts. Second, East Asian imagine futures show that world order is made before it is fully settled. Where IR often studies order through institutions, hierarchy, and rules, future narratives and imagined futures define which type of hierarchies should be accepted and which rules should be defended or revised. Third, analyzing East Asian Futures prevents the region and its influence to be simplified to either just “China’s rise” or the “US-China rivalry.” Although China is central, other actors such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, too, matter by narrating imagined futures of regional order, risks, threats, and economic exposure, which are developed in relation to each other as well as to Beijing’s vision of future. Fourth, East Asian Futures and their individual as well as cumulative imagined futures do not remain local or regional; in a multinodal order security contingencies, economic coercion, alliance restructuring, and risk calculations reverberate far beyond the region and influence politics on all continents as well as the world order at large. Not to say that East Asia determines what happens in other regions of the world, but East Asian Futures redistribute uncertainty, opportunity, risk, and constraint across the multinodal wider web of international relations.
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