The US-Japan Security Community

Theoretical Understanding of Transpacific Relationships

Hidekazu Sakai

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138486676
• eBook ISBN: 9781351044899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on the work of Karl W. Deutsch, this book argues that the United States and Japan have formed their own security community, based on a sense of "collective identity." In so doing, it provides a new theoretical outlook on co- operation between the United States and Japan, offering a fresh understanding of their bilateral relationship as one that goes beyond a mere military alliance or free trade partnership.

Taking an empirical approach, Sakai analyzes three key case studies: the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011. He examines how the United States and Japan interacted with one another in their discourses and behaviors in these three instances and thus demonstrates the existence of a collective identity between the two nations.

1Puzzles

Introduction

A “friend” is someone who behaves altruistically toward another. Altruism is “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998: 50). Friends mutually help and make sacrifices to meet their needs without reward or profit. In international relations (IR), “friend” may have been an excessively naïve and even inappropriate term to be utilized in research. Nevertheless, after the Cold War, IR scholars gradually and consistently have paid attention to friendly international relations (Russet, 1993; Risse-Kappen, 1995; Adler and Barnett, 1998c; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, 1998; Cronin, 1999; Wendt, 1999; Mattern, 2001; Buzan and Hansen, 2009; Kupchan, 2010).

Why have Japan and the United States been friends since 1945? This naïve query grew from my observations, over many years, of postwar US-Japan relations. Japan and the United States fought in the Pacific War that began with Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, and ended with the US atomic bombings in Hiroshima on August 6 and in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Over generations, American citizens were taught of the military tragedies at Oahu Island, an event which became so synonymous with a contemptible act that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were referred to as “the Second Pearl Harbor.” Japanese people have made social efforts to recapture the nuclear attack’s tragedies, which instantly killed 120,000 citizens in Hiroshima and 70,000 citizens in Nagasaki and became known as the worst nuclear tragedies ever experienced by humankind. This was symbolized by ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. One could believe that these traumatic experiences would hamper the development of a genuine mutual friendship between these two countries. Nevertheless, the Japanese have never considered revenge on the United States for these tragedies. Most Japanese cannot imagine today that there will be another war against the United States, while Americans also no longer consider Japan a military foe.

A similar case is US-German relations. The United States and Germany fought two major wars: World War I and World War II. In World War II, the Bombing of Dresden killed more than 25,000 German citizens. Despite these past tragedies, Germany (once West Germany) has become one of the most trusted US partners in Europe since 1945. A future war between the United States and Germany is unimaginable at present.

US-Japan relations, US-German relations, and an even larger area, the entire North Atlantic (Western Europe, Canada, and the United States) have built the most stable and peaceful relations in the world. Both areas have maintained tight security arrangements and institutionalizations through the North Atlantic Treaty and the US-Japan Security Treaty. Both relationships have shared ideas of liberty, democracy, and the market economy. Nevertheless, while the former area has often been referred to as what IR scholars call a security community (Deutsch et al., 1957; Risse-Kappen, 1996; Adler, 1997b, 1998a; Adler and Barnet, 1998c; Ruggie, 1998: 229–39; Adler, 2008), the latter has rarely been considered a case of such a community.¹ This book argues that the US-Japan friendship can be explained as “a security community” by showing their collective identity.

Theoretical Explanations of “Friend” in IR

Conceptualization and discourse on friendship vary among schools of IR. This section will review arguments of the three major schools of friendship: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. In doing so, I will clarify their strengths and weaknesses to explain friendship in IR.

Realism

In the discourse of realism, “friend” is apparently an odd word. As Hobbes (trans. and ed., 1996: 88) stated, “there is always war of everyone against everyone.” Realism has been constructed on this premise. Nevertheless, realism is not monolithic. There are as many variants of realism as there are Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors (Nye and Welch, 2013: 64). Let us survey their arguments on friendship by examining mainly offensive realism, defensive realism, and neo-classical realism, which provide their own sense of friendship.

In realism, a friendship has been translated into an “alliance.” The alliance is merely an expedient tool for the state’s survival in the anarchical world. The characterization of an alliance is symbolized by the words of Viscount Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow” (Brown, 2003: 82–3). Liska (1962: 12) argues:

alliances are against, and only derivatively for someone and something … Cooperation in alliance is in large part the consequence of conflicts with adversaries and may submerge only temporarily the conflicts among allies.

States ally with “the devil” to avoid the hell of military defeat. It is decisively important for the state to ally with the devil (Waltz, 1979: 166). This is far from the sense in which we grasp our intimate relationships with people as friends in our daily life. The suspicious view of other states is presumptuous, and alliance is carefully observed. This reflects the notion that security is scarce in Hobbesian international anarchy, a cognitive tradition that is particularly prominent in the arguments of offensive realism (Rose, 1998: 149; Mearsheimer, 1990).

Defensive realists such as Glaser (1995) tend to be more optimistic about relationships with other states than offensive realists. They tend to view the world as a benign system where security is not scarce, but plentiful. The state often pursues security rather than power, as offensive realists contend. State behavior is usually relaxed and only aggressively responds to external threats (Zakaria, 1998 476–7; Schweller, 1996: 114–15). If there is no geopolitical competition among states, the international system will only be composed of security-seekers. Therefore, status-quo states send signals to revisionist states suggesting procuring defensive weapons as opposed to offensive ones, and they also suggest arms control (Kupchan, 2010: 28–9; Glaser, 1995). For this reason, in contrast with offensive realists, defensive realists stress the importance of communication on intent. This argument can nurture a seed toward something close to friendship if the relationship is not threatened.

Neo-classical realists view the international system as neither Hobbesian nor benign. Rather, they see it as murky and difficult to understand. Neo-classical realists inevitably pay attention to the state-level factor (Rose, 1998: 147, 152–3). This notion leads us to contemplate what state power means for foreign policy making. Zakaria (1998: 9) argues:

Foreign Policy is made not by the nation as a whole but by its government. Consequently, what matters is state power, not national power. State power is that portion of national power the government can extract for its purpose and reflects the ease with which central decision-makers can achieve their ends.

Edelstein (2002) examines how the state invests enormous energy and time to assess intentions of other states for the formulation of foreign policy. Schweller (1998: 21–2) argues that if the state interprets international structure as discontented, it challenges it, even if it is not simply about national survival but about power and prestige. Neo-classical realism insists that the worldview of state leaders plays a major role in international security. Wohlforth (1993) argues the entire history of the Cold War to be a changing cycle of mutual perception between the US and Soviet leaders.

In contrast to Waltz’s neorealism and Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, defensive realists and neo-classical realists share the notion that each national government’s cognitive lens of international structure and other states plays a decisive role for foreign policy. This implies that intergovernmental understanding of foreign policies can reduce uncertainty in the process of foreign policy-making. Transnational policy coordination or policy-making would then alter perceptions between parties and might be a prescription to avoid unnecessary conflicts with other states. This can lead to the concept of a “community of practice,” which will be discussed in Chapter 2.

Liberalism

Liberalism stresses cooperation as the central concept in their traditional discourse. Regarding neoliberalism, Keohane (1984) emphasizes the importance of institutions in generating cooperation among states. Cooperation is a mutual adjustment based on active attempts to prevail over disagreements on particular policy areas that arise from common interests. Various economic activities such as trade and monetary, investment, and energy decisions requiring policy coordination are created by international interdependence. This leads to the emergence of an international regime that can sustain itself as an autonomous entity from the hegemonic grips of a particular state (Keohane, 1984: 8–14).

Security organizations are not even an exception. NATO was initially a typical military alliance aimed at assuring Western Europe’s security against Soviet threats; its foundation was US unilateral action. Nevertheless, the escalation of the Korean War in the 1950s shocked the United States and European leaders into reevaluating Soviet threats. This led to the “institutionalization” of NATO, which included the integration of West German as well as US forces stationed in European defense positions, with a heavy emphasis on “intra-alliance consultation,” with rules, procedures, and processes (Keohane and Wallander, 1999). NATO then transformed into a “security management institution,” acquiring various purposes, including partnerships with former Warsaw Pact members and Russia as well as UN military operations.² Kawasaki (2007) made a similar argument on the US-Japan security arrangement. It is a case of institutional transformation by adding several layers for regional security, such as the US-Japan-South Korea Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG) for the Korean Peninsula, the Japan–Canada security cooperation, and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).

These institutional liberal arguments on friendship overlap queerly with the realist discourse on alliance. The common characteristic of both arguments on international relations is a “utilitarian” mode (Ruggie, 1998: 23, 28–9); this is the interest-based notion that states are engaged in alignment or cooperation as “a means to an end” for common interests. This type of notion focuses on exogenous factors. Exogenous reasoning is perhaps a minimum impulse toward friendship, but it is still far from altruism-based friendship, unless the discussion steps further toward endogenous factors. To overcome it, Ruggie (1998: 62–84) introduced an ideational element, which he calls “embedded liberalism,” that is derived from the discourse of economics. Nevertheless, it cannot promise to generate altruism. Altruism involves self-sacrifice, which is opposed to the presumption of liberal economics that humans are rational actors pursuing the maximization of benefit.

Rather than relying on a discourse of economic and strategic cooperation, Owen (1997: 4–5) emphasizes liberalism as a political ideology. He asserts that only “liberal states” can generate peace with other liberal states. Liberalism contains the seeds of altruism because liberals believe it to be in their interest to respect the rights of others, as long as those others will in turn respect their rights (Owen, 1997: 19). Liberals perceive their circumstances, and the actions that should be taken, through their liberal lens. Liberalism is a worldview that represents an array of individuals and the world (Owen, 1997: 19). The liberal worldview generates “favoritism” on liberal polity among national elites. Their positive identification of themselves as liberals motivates them to seek other liberals with common interests and to create institutions (Owen, 1997: 24–7). This leads national liberal elites to construct good relations with foreign states, having liberal institutions that they objectively judge (Owen, 1997: 49). This argument resonates with the concept of a community of practice, which leads to discussion on the construction of the security community (this will be argued in Chapter 2). Nevertheless, Owen’s argument does not inform us of what kind of peace among liberal states emerges as an outcome. Owen’s work deepened our understanding of how states “enter” peace by shedding new light on ideational aspects, but does not inform us of what kind of structures or relationships exist among liberal states.

In this regard, Ikenberry (2006: 6, 10) generated his image of the “liberal international structure,” which he calls “security co-binding.” In it, the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan are tightly connected in an economic, political, and security partnership. This structure is characterized by the nature of US hegemony, the role of capitalism in solving the issues of relative gains, and a distinctive civic culture (Ikenberry, 2006: 89). The open system of US hegemony has created its empire by invitation (Ikenberry, 2006: 94). He calls an international system based on such a structure the “liberal leviathan” (Ikenberry, 2011).

However, this hegemonic discourse on liberalism excessively stresses hierarchical characters rather than horizontal ones. It is a vertical structure reigned over by the United States. Hence, it is not about mutual exchanges in horizontal relations, and is rather about whether or not the states discussed below accept the US rules discussed above. Echoing Gilpin’s (1981) hegemonic stability thesis, Ikenberry’s power-oriented notion is incompatible with altruism because altruism does not seek power but rather seeks others’ well-being with self-sacrifice.

Constructivism

Constructivists do not view the international anarchical system as a given, as realists or liberalists presume. Rather, they grasp it as transformable, with changes in state identity and their consequent changes in interests (Gould, 1998: 90). Wendt (1992) argues that a “process” of interactions among the states constructs their identities and interests. These arguments overlap with Owen’s liberal peace theory, but constructivism’s depth is greater. Borrowing many concepts and notions from psychology, constructivists have developed their discourse on how identity can be formed, shared with others, and then become collective. Hogg and Abrams (1988), Stryker (1980), and Cronin (1999: 30) argue that everyone has several conflicting identities that form a “salience hierarchy” that identifies the relative location of one particular identity. The salience hierarchy of identity is dependent upon how much an individual commits to a particular relationship. Likewise, the state maintains its commitment to relationships with other states. The degree of its commitment can determine the salience of identity (Cronin, 1999 31). Mutual recognition among particular states with a high degree of commitment can generate a sense of belonging to a certain group and form the basis for transnational identities (Cronin, 1999 31).

A transnational or collective identity can transform the anarchical character of international relations to a cooperative one (Acharya, 1998: 27; Wendt, 1994). This leads to a discourse on transnational community. Collective identities are not created in an exogenous process, but instead are created and recreated through interaction and socialization (Acharya, 1998: 27). Geographic proximity, given physical location, cultural and linguistic affinities, and a common historical experience are not decisive elements, but processes of interaction and socialization nurture a sense of belonging to a different conception of community from a regional sense, that is, an “imagined community” (Acharya, 1998: 27; Anderson, 2016). Like a nation-state, a security community can be grasped as an “imagined community” (Adler, 1997b: 257–60).

The role of ideology is essentially important for the development of collective identity. Cronin’s (1999) studies on “a community of monarchs,” “a pan-Italian Community,” and “a pan-German Community” suggest the power of ideology, such as the Holy Alliance against nationalism and liberalism, and nationalism tying states together. In particular, Adler (1997b: 257–60) stresses liberal values that can only bring international relations to the most stable and peaceful communities, which Deutsch calls security communities. Liberal values are superior to other value systems such as Nazism or communism because liberal values can make people feel safe and develop mutual trust through civic culture, the role of government, legitimacy, duties of citizenship, and the rule of law. The quality of relationships between people is crucial in such a system. In this sense, Adler agrees with Owen and Ikenberry on the role of liberal values in international friendship.

The Concept of the Security Community

According to Deutsch, who invented the term “security community” in his landmark study with his associates Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, published in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Puzzles
• 2 Theory and Methodology
• 3 Emerging Collective Identity: The Persian Gulf War (1990–1)
• 4 Nurturing Collective Identity: The September 11 Terrorist Attacks (2001)
• 5 Cementing Collective Identity: The Tohoku Earthquake (2011)
• 6 Conclusion: New Understanding on the US-Japan Relationship
• Bibliography
• Index