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Rethinking Security in East Asia

Stanford University Press

Contents

Figures and Table.......................................................................................................................................................ixContributors............................................................................................................................................................xiPreface.................................................................................................................................................................xiii1 Rethinking Asian Security: A Case for Analytical Eclecticism PETER J. KATZENSTEIN AND RUDRA SIL......................................................................12 Beijing's Security Behavior in the Asia-Pacific: Is China a Dissatisfied Power? ALASTAIR IAIN JOHNSTON...............................................................343 Japan and Asian-Pacific Security PETER J. KATZENSTEIN AND NOBUO OKAWARA..............................................................................................974 Bound to Last? The U.S.-Korea Alliance and Analytical Eclecticism J. J. SUH..........................................................................................1315 Coping with Strategic Uncertainty: The Role of Institutions and Soft Balancing in Southeast Asia's Post–Cold War Strategy YUEN FOONG KHONG.....................1726 The Value of Rethinking East Asian Security: Denaturalizing and Explaining a Complex Security Dynamic ALLEN CARLSON AND J. J. SUH....................................209Bibliography............................................................................................................................................................235Index...................................................................................................................................................................265

Chapter One

PETER J. KATZENSTEIN AND RUDRA SIL

Throughout the 1990s the conventional wisdom of international relations scholarship in the United States held that with the end of the Cold War and an intensification of institutionalized cooperation in Europe, Asia was ready to explode into violent conflicts. Large-scale war and rivalry were thought to be increasingly likely as an unpredictable North Korean government was teetering at the edge of an economic abyss on a divided Korean Peninsula; as an ascendant China was facing political succession in the midst of an enormous domestic transformation; as a more self-confident and nationalist Japan was bent on greater self-assertion in a time of increasing financial weakness; and as Southeast Asia remained deeply unsettled in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, with its largest country, a newly democratizing Indonesia, left in limbo following the debacle of East Timor and the fall of Suharto. None of these political constellations appeared to bode well for an era of peace and stable cooperation. Facing perhaps the most significant problems of any world region in adjusting to the post–Cold War era, Asia appeared to be "ripe for rivalry" (Bracken 1999; Betts 1993/94; Friedberg 1993/94).

The policies of the George W. Bush administration tend to reflect this view. Cautiously developed throughout the 1990s, the policy of engaging North Korea, for example, was put on ice after the November 2000 presidential election. Political relations with China worsened during the early months of the Bush presidency. Since September 11 the war on terrorism has further strengthened the Bush administration's perception of Asia as a volatile region in which a U.S. presence is necessary to prevent conflict. The war has deepened greatly U.S. involvement in Central Asia; produced a growing military presence in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, which had previously drawn little attention from the United States; and helped improve U.S. relations with China while worsening those with North Korea.

Lingering tensions over North Korea, the Taiwan Strait, and the war on terrorism notwithstanding, during much of the 1990s large-scale war was more evident in "peaceful" Europe than among Asian "rivals." More recently, it is in Europe that we witnessed the most vigorous challenges to the Bush administration's war in Iraq, raising new questions about the future coherence of NATO and transatlantic relations; by contrast, key Asian powers reacted with either official support for the United States ( Japan and South Korea) or remarkable restraint (China and India). And North Korea's decision to restart its nuclear weapons program has so far been met by countries in the region with calls for dialogue rather than military intervention. This undercuts the conventional wisdom about Asian security and suggests that an alternative perspective deserves serious examination (Alagappa 2003a; Ikenberry and Mastanduno 2003). Such a perspective takes a much broader view of what is meant by the term "security." Instead of referring to military security narrowly construed, it considers also the economic and social dimensions of security. Specifically, this perspective focuses on the regionwide consensus on the primacy of economic growth and its interconnectedness with social stability, societal order, and regional peace and stability. Spearheaded by Japan and the original six members of ASEAN, this view has spread, most importantly, to China and Vietnam and, with a helping U.S. hand, also to the Korean Peninsula. Previously dismissed by U.S. security specialists as abstruse scholarly rumination with no relationship to the tough problems of Asian security, these broader, multidimensional views on Asian security have taken center stage since September 11, thus giving the alternative perspective a credibility it sorely lacked before.

The arguments marshaled in support of this view differ, however. Some tend to credit the dominant role of the United States in world politics and in Asia as the advantages of engagement are increasingly viewed as outweighing the advantages of balancing (Kapstein 1999). Others see that dominance, especially in the unfolding war on terror, as a possible source of instability and the intensification of conflict as U.S. policy and Al Qaeda are offering global frames for local grievances and conflicts (Gershman 2002;Hedman 2002). Still others have suggested that the historical experiences and normative discourses shaping states' perceptions of their regional environment make the security problems in parts of Asia less serious than is conventionally assumed (Acharya 2001, 2000a; Kerr, Mack, and Evans 1995). In light of these fundamental differences in perspective and the data to which they point, whether Asia is "ripe for rivalry" or "plump for peace" remains an open question.

Political reality we surmise is more complex than any of these perspectives allows for. This is unavoidable for the simple reason that in different parts of Asia-Pacific we find actors embracing quite different definitions of security. In Tokyo that definition tends to be broad and encompasses not only the deployment of troops in battle, unimaginable at least for the time being, but also the giving of economic aid, something that Japan does a lot of. In Washington, that definition tends to be narrowly focused on the military, which is large and powerful and dwarfs those of the rest of the world, and...