There is absolutely no doubt that the Northeast Asian region â China, Japan and Korea â is absolutely critical to global peace and stability in the twenty-first century. Northeast Asia is the centre of global economic development. It has a land mass 15% bigger than all of Europe and a combined population of 1.5 billion people or over one fifth of all the people of the world. What happens in Northeast Asia (economically, socially and politically) is going to have a major impact on levels of prosperity, well-being and political stability in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In the twenty-first century, it is no longer just a question of the world catching cold when âWall Streetâ sneezes, it is clear that when China, Japan or South Korea sneeze, the rest of the world will get colds as well.
It is vital, therefore, to ensure that the social, political and military relationships between all three countries are as positive as the economic links so that each country can contribute what it can to regional and, by extension, global peace and security.
There is certainly no space for competitive or, worse, destructive nationalism, in Northeast Asia. If these countries were to revert to their pre-Second World War and immediate postwar conflict patterns, it would have major negative implications for regional and global peace and stability. The challenge, therefore, is how to deepen and expand strong and robust bilateral and trilateral socio-economic and political relationships within the region while minimising incompatible and conflictual relationships. If trilateral relationships flourish, Northeast Asiaâs claims to global economic and political leadership in the twenty-first century will be secure. If there are tensions in these relationships, then Northeast Asian global leadership will be less secure and once again Northeast Asia could become a region of instability rather than stability. The election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States adds another layer of complexity to those who already exist in East Asia. His threatened challenge to the âOne Chinaâ policy, for example, will significantly problematise US-East Asian relationships.
From 1945 to the 1980s, Northeast and Southeast Asia accounted for most of the major wars of the postwar period (Gleditsch et al., 2002). Once Asian political leaders chose economic development and nation building over armed conflict, however, most of the worldâs violent conflict shifted from the East and Southeast Asian regions to the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. Thus began the period now known as the East Asian Peace (see Stein Tønnessen, 2009). As director of the East Asian Peace Project, Tønnesson argued that peace emerged in East Asia because of explicit choices on the part of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean political leaders in favour of economic development over national rivalry and competition. During the regimes of Deng Xiaopeng and Shigeru Yoshida, for example, both leaders intentionally opted for (i) crisis management (ii) internal priority shifts aimed at stimulating growth and development, (iii) prioritising the economy, (iv) accommodating the United States and its regional interests and (v) peace with neighbours.
The results of these leadership choices were internally and externally stabilising and peaceful (Stein Tønnessen, 2017). According to Tønnessenâs argument, it was Deng Xiaoping and Yoshida Shigeruâs commitment to open capitalist development that was critical to ensuring stable peace between China and Japan and the wider region. This âopen market peaceâ rests on high levels of economic interdependence, financial and market integration. These findings are consistent with other capitalist and liberal peace theorists who argue that economic integration will drive stable peaceful relationships.
Liberal Peace theorists predict that commitment to capitalist economic development everywhere will result in higher levels of financial and market integration, domestic pluralism and the rapid evolution of the rule of law and democracy. These dynamics are assumed to generate economic and peace dividends for all economies and polities. Liberal Peace theory also predicts the development of regional institutions to consolidate these gains transnationally thereby ensuring political and peaceful stablility. While this prediction has been most successful in Western Europe, neither democratic nor regional integrative agendas have advanced very much in Northeast Asia (Peou, 2009) or in many other parts of the world (Richmond and Franks, 2009). Even in Southeast Asia, however, which has seen the successful growth of ASEAN over the past fifty years, recent elections and political changes in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand (2016) have seen significant challenges to democratic dynamics and the re-emergence of autocratic rather than democratic leadership.
Similarly, in Northeast Asia, over the past five years, there has been a resurgence of nationalism, elite nervousness about democratic pluralism, the emergence of autocratic leadership and the re-activation of unresolved deep and painful historic memories between Japan, China and Korea. These have challenged taken-for-granted economic relationships and exchanges and placed a question mark over the solidity and reliability of the Asian Peace hypotheses.
The East Asian experience is not unique, however, and there has been a radical questioning of both capitalist and liberal peace theories all around the world (Paris, 2010). These have been focused in recent times by a popular rejection of what has been thought of as ânegative globalisationâ and an embrace of atavistic nationalism as demonstrated by the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in the United States.
In 2012, for example, when Shinzo Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party won the Japanese election with a two thirds majority, Japanese politics took a dramatic turn to the right (Muneo, 2013). Abe was elected because of widespread disillusionment with the Democratic Party of Japan, and a deep sense that Japan was unable to break out of the economic doldrums of the time. But the 2012 election was also fuelled by a strong nationalist platform. This was driven by pressure from right-wing politicians like Shintaro Ishihara, ex-governor of Tokyo, who was hawkish on foreign policy and a long-time opponent of China on a range of sensitive political and security issues. But these hawkish dynamics also coincided with Shinzo Abeâs own nationalist inclinations and connections to ultra right groups within Japan. Before the 2012 election, for example, he adopted a more assertive stance towards China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands issue. He also initiated campaign goals to revise the countryâs pacifist constitution and to review Japanese postwar history. This reassertion of Japanese exceptionalism and nationalism stimulated very negative reactions in Korea and China. The political relationships between all three countries deteriorated very rapidly after the 2012 election and remain stressed.
It was into this increasingly toxic environment that the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago and the Toda Peace Institute in Japan, initiated a series of analytical problem-solving workshops on East Asia (Mitchell and Banks, 1999) (Kelman, 1998). These took place between 2013 and 2015. They were aimed, among other things, at seeking to understand how strong economic exchanges and relationships could be so easily compromised by the reassertion of nationalist identity politics in Japan, China and Korea. In particular, we wanted to understand why historic grievances and painful memories were surfacing sixty-six years after the end of the Second World War and how and why political leaders were using these grievances (or in Japanâs case, defence against Chinese and Korean war complaints) to stimulate nationalist sentiments in an era of regional and global integration. Finally, we were concerned to understand how all of these dynamics were generating a rather rapid decline in trust, confidence and functional cooperation between the leaders of all three countries.
The chapters in this book, therefore, are written by academics and policy makers from China, Japan and South Korea who attended these workshops.1 The workshops enabled key opinion leaders to reflect on why transnational relationships in Northeast Asia were deteriorating and becoming more volatile. While there was a general acceptance, within the workshops, that market and financial integration had been useful in promoting negative peace in Northeast Asia for thirty-six years; the emergence of multiple unresolved and divisive issues between the political leaders and peoples of all three countries provided some challenging theoretical and practical puzzles.
Some of these were explicable in terms of realpolitik and big power transition theory but most required much deeper cultural, historical and social-psychological explanations. In particular, all of the contributors to this book acknowledge the centrality of âidentityâ, memory and âidentity-based politicsâ in understanding why âfunctionally drivenâ relationships can and do turn toxic. With the advantage of hindsight it is clear that the 2012â2016 period in East Asian relationships has strong parallels with the 2016 global disenchantment with domestic politics in Europe, North America and other parts of Asia.
Throughout 2016, for example, many political leaders in Europe, Asia and the United States, have experienced trouble maintaining high levels of inclusion, engagement and participation in democratic politics. This is because of high levels of alienation from elite politics generally, a rejection of negative globalisation, resistance to national âpolitical establishmentsâ and a susceptibility to what Kinnval and Jonsson (Kinnvall and JĂśnsson, 2002) call autocratic nationalist populism. While East Asian politics have not been as stark as those that generated Brexit or the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States; political leaders in Japan, China and the Republic of Korea have not been averse to playing the nationalist card for domestic political purpose and in doing so have generated environments inimical to cosmopolitanism, diversity and transnational solidarity.
As we started the workshop discussions2 participants articulated the relationships between unresolved domestic issues and foreign policy positions. Japan, China and South Korea, for example, despite having high levels of economic growth and development, all face a variety of economic, social and political challenges. These are reflected in popular disenchantment with the capacity of state systems in East Asia to both facilitate growth and address growing levels of inequality, marginalisation, exclusion and corruption. Faced with these problems, political leaders in all three countries have regularly sought to divert attention from domestic issues through an intentional heightening of fear levels and ânegative otheringâ, that is, critical comments about foreigners, and the articulation of nationalist sentiments in the face of domestic, regional and global challenges. These nationalist narratives in Japan, China and South Korea (Deans, 2007) have activated or re-activated deep and painful historic memories and conflicts over past perpetrator-victim roles; spoiled political reputations; and deeper questions about collective responsibility for past acts of aggression. These have then become the optics through which politicians and people view the future military and political intentions of political leaders in all three countries.
The very first problem-solving workshop started with an exploration of national visions for a peaceful region. These took place in national groups. It was interesting that Japanese participants had the most trouble articulating and agreeing on a national vision for Japan in Northeast Asia. Some felt that Japan should build on its âpacifistâ constitution to become a permanent pacifist state. As part of this they wanted more attention to a Northeast Asian nuclear weapon-free zone while admitting that the obstacles to realising this were enormous. Their more realistic vision was linked to a continuing role for the United States in Northeast Asian trade and security issues. At the same time, Japanese participants hoped that other Asian countries would become more actively involved in Northeast Asia in order to balance the US engagement and to mute some of the divisive issues that were beginning to emerge within the region. They also articulated a strong concern to increase people to people exchanges and cross-border contacts with Korea and China. The innovative part of the Japanese groupâs vision was on environmental cooperation. It was felt that this was a superordinate issue affecting China, Japan Korea equally and that Japan could offer technological know-how to help China and Korea solve some of their environmental problems. Participants argued that Japan could provide Overseas Development Assistance plus technological expertise to help address Chinaâs environmental headaches. In doing so, it was assumed that Japanese self-interest would be served by altruistic sharing. Focusing on something like environmental pollution provided a reasonably safe superordinate goal to bring the countries a little closer together. This vision was subsequently sharpened into coâmanagement of environmentally significant areas like the Yellow Sea area and a desire to develop a collaborative Japan-China-Korea institution to deal with environmental issues. There was also a desire for all countries to develop mechanisms for collaborative responses to natural emergencies and maritime surveillance.
Korean participants had a somewhat sharper vision. They were united on the need for the eventual reunification of Korea but were conscious that this was not an imminent possibility because neither the North nor the South were willing to sacrifice their sovereignty. A loose union between North and South Korea, modelled on the European Union, would enable higher levels of integration and generate a de facto unification in the interim. They felt it would be easier to talk about unification possibilities if there were higher levels of regional economic unity, including an integrated and institutionalised mechanism like the European Union, which would include Russia and Mongolia. In addition, the Korean group was also in favour of developing regional security architecture and changing from defence mechanisms based on confrontational alliances (there was particular concern about the US pivot in this context) to a regional collective security mechanism. Collective security was seen in an inclusive sense, that is, as a reversion to traditional concepts of collective, co-operative and common security. In particular, the group felt that there should be a rejection of realist NATO-type security architecture and that China, Japan and Korea should form a âConfucian triangleâ for defence and security instead of living in an extended cold war environment. Koreans wanted China and Japan to make joint non-intervention and non-aggression declarations as symbolic confidence building measures. They also had practical proposals for a maritime code of conduct, which would address the use of force in resolving maritime and other territorial disputes. Culturally, there was a strong sense that China-Korea-Japan should work to build trust and confidence based on a shared cultural identity and language and enhanced cooperation on such things as regional disaster management. Along with other groups, participants thought that the emphasis should be on enhancing the rich cultural heritage of the three Asian countries (e.g. common Chinese Kanji characters; traditional ethical values, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism and an emergent embrace of universal norms of mutual respect as embodied in the UN Charter). Finally, there was a vision of a region where there was a free flow of goods and people without any passport controls and a free regulatory environment.
Chinese participants were in favour of establishing an East Asian community: based on ec...