12 Buoyancy Blue Territorialization of Asian Power AIHWA ONG Are nations frmly delimited by national terrain? Can sovereignty be expanded through the zoning of ocean and sky? What are the implications of sovereign buoyancy for the world order? Fixed and Contained? Our notion of the nation-state as a physically fxed territoriality contained by its formally delineated boundaries is increasingly difcult to uphold. It ap- pears that the late twentieth-century global order is turning out to have been a brief interregnum of agreed-upon sovereign power as contained within fxed national borders. The League of Nations frst proposed an international sys- tem of nation-states in the 1930s, and a global arrangement was formalized in the aftermath of the Second World War. Defeated countries and newly inde- pendent ones were recognized as independent nation-states each with its own politico-legal territoriality. Nevertheless, the requisite political infrastructure of formal government with its own territoriality was not fully realized every- where, and on some continents (with decolonized states or former Communist 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 218-85414_ch01_1P.indd 191 12/03/20 4:23 AM PROOF