Japan, the US, and Regional Institution-Building in the New Asia

When Identity Matters

K. Ashizawa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349455645, 9781137307736
• eBook ISBN: 9781137307743
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

Providing a thorough and novel account of US and Japanese foreign policymaking toward regional institution-building in post-Cold War Asia, this study serves as the first comparative analysis of these two major actors in this realm of regional cooperation and demonstrates not only how but also when state identity shapes a state's foreign policy.

1

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, the issues concerning regional institutions have increasingly become a key focal point in policy formulation among leaders and foreign policy practitioners in Asia and the Pacific. This is partly due to the growing salience of intraregional policy issues that call for multilateral cooperation, such as environmental degradation, maritime piracy, and transnational terrorism. And this is also because existing regional institutions, as well as new institution-building initiatives, have often become a kind of platform where regional states sought to exercise their power and diplomacy, leaving some notable power struggles and political bargaining to take place. Accordingly, despite the persistent skepticism about the significance and effectiveness of existing multilateral mechanisms in Asia,¹ the question of regional institution-building has, to date, received considerable scrutiny by academics and foreign policy experts both in and outside the region.

Japan and the United States have been important actors among others, namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, in those institution-building dramas. Although in some cases Washington was excluded from membership, it has often made its presence felt in those relatively new, Asian-exclusive groupings, most notably the ASEAN plus Three (APT). Yet, despite the obvious indispensability of positive Japanese and US participation, or support in the case of US toward Asian-exclusive groupings, for any successful institution-building in Asia,² their overall attitude toward such regional collaborations has been rather ambivalent and uncertain in the eyes of many Asians. During the Cold War, the two countries’ almost exclusive adherence to their bilateral alliance as the central mechanism for regional security management (and for maintaining Japan’s security) served as a major obstacle to the idea of regional institution-building, hence contributing substantially to the conspicuous scarcity of successful multilateral enterprises in the region at the time. Although both countries joined the new regional trend of multilateral institution-building beginning in the late 1980s, their respective contributions in this area of regional collaboration have been rather mixed. Neither exerting pivotal leadership nor assuming a mere follower role, Tokyo and Washington’s actions (and, at time, the lack of them) and attitude toward matters of regional institution-building—whether independently or collectively—were often characterized by close observers as “problematic” or “obstructive.”³

This book seeks to understand the roots of such an uncertain attitude of the two countries, by focusing on their respective foreign policymaking toward the creation of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the origins of post–Cold War regional institutions in Asia. APEC was formed in 1989, through an Australian initiative, as the first pan-regional, intergovernmental economic institution, while the establishment of the ARF in 1994—the first region-wide framework to deal with regional security matters—was led by ASEAN, the sole viable subregional organization in Asia at the time. Tokyo and Washington joined these two regional groupings as original members.⁴

Given their prior and almost exclusive reliance on bilateral mechanisms for intraregional management in Asia, Tokyo and Washington’s participation in APEC and the ARF represent an important break in their respective policies toward the region, and their policy shifts were certainly critical factors for the realization of APEC and the ARF. Yet, another critical, but less known, aspect of the two countries’ participation in these pan-regional institutions is the distinctive behavior pattern demonstrated by Japan and the United States, respectively, across the cases of APEC and the ARF. In the case of Japan, foreign policymakers in Tokyo conceived the idea of creating region-wide arrangements relatively early, and put forth the idea as concrete proposals, in the form of the report issued by Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in 1988 for the case of APEC, and of the Foreign Minister Nakayama’s proposal at the 1991 ASEAN Post-Ministerial meeting (ASEAN-PMC) in the ARF case. Around the same period, some other countries in the region also arrived at similar proposals, and Japan favored these countries, namely Australia for APEC and ASEAN for the ARF, to play leading roles to actualize the first region-wide institutions in both the economic and security spheres. Tokyo consistently supported the institution-building processes, conducting quiet diplomacy to persuade other prospective members, particularly the United States, to agree to join. Close observers unfailingly recognized this characteristic behavior, dubbing for example “directional leadership”⁵ or “leadership from behind,”⁶ and generally viewed Japan’s roles as significant, if not the most critical, for the birth of APEC and the ARF.

The US attitude toward these regional multilateral initiatives, on the other hand, was largely reactive and noticeably ambivalent. The U.S government took no formal initiatives for both APEC and the ARF’s creation. Its initial response to the proposals by other Asian countries was either reserved (APEC) or skeptical (the ARF). Harry Harding observed this particular disposition by noting, “It is remarkable how small a role the United States government initially played in the creation of multilateral institutions in the Asia-Pacific region.”⁷ Conspicuously though, when the new administration came to the office (George W. H. Bush succeeding Ronald Reagan for the case of APEC, and Bill Clinton replacing Bush for the ARF), Washington began to view more favorably the idea to set up region-wide multilateral arrangements, and then officially announced its approval for both the cases. In the end, each new administration positively participated in a newly born regional institution with at least guarded enthusiasm.

In short, Japan, in both cases of APEC and the ARF, was an early proponent for the idea to create a region-wide multilateral institution in Asia, put forth its own institution-building proposal, and conducted a quiet, but persistent, form of diplomacy to realize the proposal. The United States was, in contrast, initially a skeptical and reactive observer to both the APEC and ARF proposals, but later shifted its attitude, and participated rather positively in the processes leading up to the creation of those regional institutions. Each country behaved in a strikingly consistent manner in their respective foreign policymaking across the two different institution-building cases.

Observing a particular pattern in a social actor is one of the moments that intrigues researchers in social sciences, and I was no exception. Why then did each country behave in a consistent manner in their respective foreign policies across the two different institution-building cases? How can these behavior patterns of Japan and the United States be explained? What factors brought about the unique behavior patterns across these two cases of institution-building? These are the central questions this book seeks to address.

The Argument

This book makes a three-pronged argument. The first line of the argument is that a “concept of state identity,” as perceived by policymakers, was the primary determinant of the preference of the Japanese and US government for pan-regional, multilateral arrangements in both the case of APEC and the ARF’s founding. More precisely, a conception about state identity—what their country is and what it represents—perceived by foreign policymakers in Tokyo and Washington provided those policymakers particular values (defined here as proattitude toward a certain action), which in turn, predominantly determined each country’s preference for the option to create a multilateral framework with an Asia-Pacific geographical scope. As detailed in the next chapter, the theoretical foundation of this argument rests in the study’s original analytical framework, termed “the value-action framework,” which draws important insights from works in the field of foreign policy analysis (FPA) and the philosophy of social science.

The identity-preference nexus in each country’s policymaking toward the creation of APEC and the ARF is observed in a concrete manner as follows (and in table 1.1). In the case of Japan, foreign policymakers in Tokyo conceived of their state identity as “a dual member of Asia and the West” (in both the cases of APEC and the ARF) and “a past aggressor in the region” (in the ARF case). These concepts of state identity generated the specific values—“keeping the United States in Asia,” “devising an Asian model of regionalism,” and “reassuring Asian countries about Japan’s activism,” respectively—that together shaped Japanese policymakers’ preference for creating a pan-regional multilateral framework in Asia. US policymakers, on the other hand, conceived their country as “a Pacific power” (APEC and the ARF) and “an international institution-builder” (APEC), from which the value of “staying engaged in Asia” and “planting international institutions,” respectively, emerged. These values, in turn, led the US policymakers to find it preferable to support and participate in establishing a region-wide multilateral institution in both the economic and security areas.

The book’s second line of argument is that although state identity was the primary factor to determine the multilateral, pan-regional preference of the two countries, the identity factor alone is insufficient to address the respective behavior patterns in Tokyo and Washington’s policymaking toward APEC and the ARF. In order to grasp their behavior patterns properly, the “international structural attributes” of these two countries need to be brought in as an additional explanatory factor. This is because, as the present study maintains, the structural attributions of Japan and the United States determined the two countries’ general dispositions—structurally-disposed orientations—toward regional matters, including regional institution-building. More specifically, Japan’s attributes of international structure in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, defined as “the largest regional power and a component of Asia,” brought about Tokyo’s unusual activism and enthusiasm during the course of APEC and the ARF’s creation. The structural attributes of the United States—“the sole superpower and an external being to Asia (with a second-level proximity),” on the other hand, resulted in Washington’s initial skepticism and overall reactive attitude toward both regional institution-building projects (see table 1.2).

Table 1.1 Concept of State Identity, Values, and Preferences (Japanese and US foreign policymaking toward the creation of APEC and the ARF)

As will be shown in the next chapter, these two lines of argument are incorporated together in a theoretically coherent manner as key constitutive elements of the value-action framework. And their incorporation is, it should be noted, essential to resolve the inherent “outcome bias” in mainstream International Relations (IR) studies. Here, the function of state identity specifically concerns the outcome of an actor’s foreign policymaking, whereas the function of international structural attributes from these same actors primarily involves a process of policymaking. Accordingly, this study maintains that these two factors—the concept of state identity and international structural attributes—were the essence of the distinctive foreign policy behavior of Tokyo and Washington toward the two cases of institution-building of APEC and the ARF.

Table 1.2 Structural Attributes and Structurally-Disposed Orientation

Thirdly, and as the last line of its central argument, this book puts forward that recognizing the nature of a decision-making context is necessary to properly appreciate the function of state identity as a primary determinant of a state’s preference. This is because, as discussed in detail in the next chapter, the function of identity is by nature context-dependent. And the present book’s four cases of foreign policymaking provide valuable data that signify this particular nature of identity.

To put more concretely, my close examination of the study’s cases discovered that when foreign policymakers in each country came to prefer the pan-regional and multilateral option, they were indeed placed in an almost identical decision-making context across the cases of APEC and the ARF. More specifically, Japanese policymakers conceived an idea to create a region-wide multilateral framework as part of their conscious effort to conceptualize a new vision of regional order, first in the economic arena and then in the security realm. Similarly, US policymakers came to think positively about the multilateral option for intraregional management in both cases of institution-building, as part of a government-wide comprehensive policy review necessitated by the change in administration, from Reagan to Bush and from Bush to Clinton, that occurred during the course of institution-building of APEC and the ARF, respectively.

What is particular to their respective decision-making contexts—the conceptualization of regional order (Japan) and the government-wide comprehensive policy review (United States)—is that both are the very type of decision-making context in which the concept of state identity intrinsically becomes most salient in the deliberation process. In other words, given its context-dependent nature, the concept of state identity manifests itself prominently in certain types of decision-making contexts but not in others. This, in turn, points to the need to classify decision-making contexts. I will present a provisional typology of decision-making contexts in terms of the function of state identity in the next chapter. And it should be noted here that although the context-dependent nature of identity has been discussed at length in works from social psychology and sociology, it rarely received conscious attention from those in the IR field. In this sense, the study will shed light on this particular nature of identity through an original theoretical discussion and empirical analysis.

All in all, the study defines two separate factors—“a concept of state identity as perceived by policymakers” and “international structural attributes of the state”—as the primary determinants of Japanese and US foreign policy behaviors toward the creation of APEC and the ARF. In all four cases, the nature of the decision-making context is identified as the important circumstantial condition under which the state identity concept was manifested as a primary determinant. As touched upon above and later detailed, each country’s actual features for these key factors—state identity concepts, structural attributes, and decision-making context—are strikingly similar, though not identical, between the two cases of APEC and the ARF. This similarity in these key factors resulted in the distinctive pattern of each country’s foreign policy behavior across the two cases of institution-building: the behavior pattern, in which Japan became one of the early proponents, put forth its own institution-building proposal, and conducted a persistent form of diplomacy to realize it, while the United States initially remained skeptical and uncommitted, made a major shift in its attitude at one point, and positively joined other prospective member countries to set up a new regional institution.

Where Does This Stand?

The foregoing three lines of argument sit at the core of this study, and they will be elaborate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Value-Action Framework and State Identity
• 3 Japan and the Creation of APEC: MITI’s Quiet Maneuver, 1988–1989
• 4 The United States and the Creation of APEC: Global Hegemon and Regional Cooperation, 1988–1989
• 5 Japan and the Creation of the ARF: MOFA in Motion, 1991–1994
• 6 The United States and the Creation of the ARF: Hegemonic Approach toward the Post–Cold War Asian Security Order, 1990–1994
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index