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The year 2018 marks the 370th year since the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties extolled for establishing the matrix of modern international order based on diplomacy and nation-state sovereignty. The West thereafter realized the Westphalian system by organically fusing the expansion of foreign trade with colonization. Two characteristics emerged through this realization: the scale of state economies became global and wars central governments conducted abroad came to occupy a considerable share in national industries. The path the Westphalian system opened up for international order ultimately led the West to seize world hegemony since the eighteenth century. This is why research on certain imperial powers like Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain, Germany, and the United States has settled down as a tradition of sorts in Western academia. Conditions to forming an empire that have mostly been identified through such research are as follows: maintaining an external, internal balance between economic and military expansion, securing an economic, military, technological superiority over neighboring countries, and having the political capability to fine-tune and constantly manage an internal balance as well as an external predominance. These three conditions are all based on competition and expansion at a global scale. And such competition and expansion’s dialectical process of development is what evolved into the condition and reality of a modern international order.

What, then, were circumstances in Northeast Asia like around the same time? Maps related to world history or civilizations that are appended to history or social study textbooks for American or European middle and high school students either assign the same color to 16-17th century China proper and the Korean peninsula or describe the Korean peninsula as a vassal state of China. And although northern forces like the Jurchens or the Mongols wreaked havoc in China proper, descriptions commonly suggest that they eventually became assimilated into China and the Han Chinese culture once they took over China proper and thereby contributed to extending Sinicization into China's periphery. Such depictions of Joseon, the Jurchens, and the Mongols have resulted from the malady of attempting to explain Northeast Asia as well as East Asian power dynamics within a rigid frame of obsequious, Sinocentric diplomacy since John Fairbank's time. Viewing the Northeast Asian order at the time upon a dichotomy between Chinese and non-Chinese, or more specifically, Han Chinese dynasties and their neighbors causes conflicts and disputes in the region to become silenced by Chinese diplomacy and allows sovereignty and state to become buried under a Sinocentric order. This corresponds with the East Asian traditional order even we Koreans are familiar with that revolves around China, Sinicization, and the Han Chinese. Above all, this sort of recognition runs along the same vein as the idea of a Zhonghua empire the Chinese academia has lately been developing by tailoring East Asia's past to suit today's China and create the historical basis for a unified, multi-ethnic state. In other words, it would no doubt be a Western-centric error to compare the East and West by mechanically juxtaposing the Westphalian system with Northeast Asian circumstances at the time, but what is more concerning is that a lack of understanding about the Northeast Asian order at the time could cause the spread of Sinocentrism.

Many aspects of the order in Northeast Asia at the time were different from that in the West. One fundamental difference worth mentioning would be the multiple layers present in the historicity of Northeast Asian states and in interactions among them. Even amid internal division, the Jurchens sought for a breakthrough and ensured their interests and security by using dual tactics against hardline and softline policies Ming and Joseon were practicing. The Jurchens used titles Ming and Joseon bestowed them with as a major source of political authority to maintain internal order and secure trading rights to boost their economic power. And when Joseon and Ming's national defense and border policies began to grow less effective in the early seventeenth century, the Jurchens founded Later Jin and then finally established Qing as a unified dynasty in China proper. Meanwhile, for nearly two hundred years between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ming employed diverse routes including war, diplomacy, and trade to prevent the Mongols and Jurchens from expanding and to keep northern dynasties led by Aguda (Emperor Taizu of Jin) and Genghis Khan from merging with one another. It also employed various political, cultural means to subjugate neighboring countries under an absolute hierarchy akin to that of the Yuan dynasty. Military-wise, Ming devoted itself to national defense and security by securing strategic points in areas along the northern border including the Liaodong peninsula and adopting an internalization strategy. Did Joseon merely stick to serving the powerful? While sharing borders with Ming, Joseon meticulously dealt with security issues involving Manchuria as well as the Liaodong peninsula, and although relations seemed peaceful on the surface, Joseon's policy toward the Jurchens continued to go through conflicts and strains. At the same time, Joseon was wary of the Jurchens falling too deeply under Ming's control. So, although cooperating in principle with Ming in being aggressive toward the Jurchens, Joseon also employed other means of drawing the Jurchens along its border under its own regional order and embracing them as a constituent of autonomous civilization (enlightenment).

Unlike the modern state system that was formed or had to be formed in the West over the mid seventeenth century, the establishment of state-based polities and a tradition of state-based governance had already been present centuries ago in Northeast Asia where the administration of internal and external affairs were structurally interconnected in terms of foreign relations. In particular, a central government's various border, territorial, economic, cultural policies exercised internally and externally formed the basis of a state's survival. This means that, when focusing on a state's survival as the summation of internal and external security, it becomes possible to more comprehensively reconstruct the views and logics of individual historical agents that anchored Northeast Asian power relations.

As for Joseon, the king and central government dominated state power to be able to channel efforts toward implementing socio-economic policies that also covered public welfare, focusing on civil administration to conduct state affairs, and building a centralized governance system. Even so, such a governance strategy could only be justified by guaranteeing national security so as to earn consent from members of society. Hence, throughout the process of exercising and maintaining state power, national security functioned as the key mechanism of a ruling discourse that encompasses both material and mental domains. Internally, legitimate exercise of state power was achieved across the entire society, while it externally defended national sovereignty in carrying out military, diplomatic polices, including those against Ming and the Jurchens.

From the viewpoint of state survival, building a systematic border management system forever remained an ongoing issue and challenge to state administration. Joseon's central government tried to secure the upper hand or at least preserve the status quo when it came to border issues, and only resorted to military operations when circumstances deemed it necessary. Demonstrating courtesy toward Ming envoys and embracing the Jurchens visiting Joseon were at the backbone of Joseon's diplomacy and state authority took the lead in gathering intelligence from diverse routes. It would be no exaggeration to say that it was a state survival tactic for Joseon to maintain a power balance between Ming and the Jurchens by trying to not to contradict the Ming-centered diplomatic order as it attempted to attain its regional hegemony over the Jurchens.

In conclusion, the relations between Joseon, the Jurchens/Later Jin/Qing, and Ming as well as the tensions, disputes, mediations, and checks and balances that occurred within individual polities cannot be entirely defined by the practice of submitting to the powerful, the tribute-investiture system, and the traditional Sinocentric East Asian order. Attempting to more closely examine their relations and internal situations will contribute to unveiling the dynamism in a Northeast Asian international order full of multilateral interactions between Joseon, the Jurchens/Later Jin/Qing, and Ming. If continuous research can be done to expose how individual polities carried out their foreign polices upon an intersection of internal and external layers of administration, we may be able to gain a deeper understanding of the 16-17th century East Asian order and promote de-Sinocentric views of history. And rather than being confined to consuming interpretations over whether notions of state and sovereignty existed or not, we would instead be able to secure the scalability of research capable of drawing in-depth, structured comparisons between the Northeast Asian order and other regional orders in Eurasia that unfolded around the same time.