Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia

Architecture and Beyond

T.J. Pempel, Chung-Min Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415811866
• eBook ISBN: 9781136309847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Defining and conceptualizing Northeast Asia's security complex poses unique quandaries. The security architecture in Northeast Asia to date has been predominately U.S.-dominated bilateral alliances, weak institutional structures and the current Six Party Talks dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue. There has been a distinct lack of desire among regional countries as well as the U.S. to follow in the footsteps of Europe with its robust set of multilateral institutions. However, since the late 1990s, there has been burgeoning interest among regional states towards forming new multilateral institutions as well as reforming and revitalizing existing mechanisms. Much of this effort has been in the economic and political arenas, with the creation of bodies such as the East Asian Summit, but there have also been important initiatives in the security sphere.

This book offers detailed examinations about how this potentially tense region of the world is redefining certain longstanding national interests, and shows how this shift is the result of changing power relations, the desire to protect hard-won economic gains, as well as growing trust in new processes designed to foster regional cooperation over regional conflict.

Presenting new and timely research on topics that are vital to the security future of one of the world's most important geographical regions, this book will be of great value to students and scholars of Asian politics, regionalism, international politics and security studies.

Part I

The Northeast Asian security complex

1 The Northeast Asian security complex

History, power, and strategic choices

Chung Min Lee and T.J. Pempel

Northeast Asia and the international system: strategic legacies and future trajectories

The significance of Northeast Asia’s rise

Defining and conceptualizing Northeast Asia’s security complex poses unique quandaries. Certainly, one of the most vexing and consequential security challenges confronting Greater Asia and the world in the early twenty-first century lies in co-shaping and forecasting the evolution of its most dynamic, powerful, and historically discordant sub-region—Northeast Asia: home to the world’s most populous nation, the second and third most powerful economies in the global system, and three of the world’s five largest armies (including two nuclear weapon states— China and Russia—as well as a nuclear weapons-capable North Korea). Even more problematic are projections about the future and how best to shape it in ways that might reduce the chances that security dilemmas will become exacerbated.

Northeast Asia’s strategic future—including its potential security architectures—is likely to hinge on the convergence of four interrelated developments. First, the adroit management of China’s rise not only by China’s own leadership, but by all of its strategically consequential neighbors and other key stakeholders such as the United States and the European Union. China’s unparalleled economic growth since the introduction of economic reforms in the late 1970s has already ushered in a deeply significant development at the end of 2010: China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy after the United States.

Unlike the case of the former Soviet Union, which was never an economic super-power, the evolution of the “China Question” throughout the first half of this century will be dominated by the pros and cons of China’s economic might concomitant with its growing ability to project power beyond its shores. One of Beijing’s greatest diplomatic feats since the late 1970s has been in the field of “normalizing” its relations with almost all of its fourteen border-sharing states. While China’s accelerated economic growth has provided Beijing with new opportunities, it also creates enormous obstacles domestically as the economy already begins to show signs of maturity (and attendant slower growth rates). In essence, the economics of geopolitics is already emerging as one key determinant of Northeast Asia’s security futures.

Second, the web of alliances created and fostered by the United States in the era following the Korean War is now entering its sixth decade. Following the election of a new government headed by the Democratic Party of Japan there was a bout of strategic discord between Japan and the United States concerning military bases on Okinawa. Similarly, the Roh Moo-hyun government in South Korea had enormous difficulties with the Bush administration in revamping the Republic of Korea (ROK)–US alliance. Difficulties such as these in bilateral security relations stand in stark contrast to the rather harmonious bilateralism of the Cold War era. These tensions make clear that reformulating America’s Asian alliances for the twenty-first century is bound to be affected increasingly by shifting domestic political forces and a fundamentally different economic template. Japan and South Korea, not to mention Australia and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies, now trade more with China than with the United States. How these traditional US allies co-shape their respective security linkages with the United States is bound to influence Northeast Asia’s security milieu well into the mid-century.

Despite commentaries suggesting the inevitability of a US–China “G-2” system, the United States continues to enjoy strategic advantages in the region that stem from its decades-long security presence, its overwhelming military superiority, the sharing of key political values and norms with its principal allies in the region, and continued perceptions of it as an honest broker. These critical assets, however, are being increasingly contested by a rising China and the associated complexities confronting America’s traditional alliance partners with the difficulty of pursuing two seemingly bifurcated goals: strengthening and maintaining security ties with the United States at a time of deepening economic linkages with China.

Third, the economies of China, Japan, and South Korea together account for 70 percent of East Asia’s GDP and Northeast Asia has fully emerged as the world’s third economic pillar, meaning that the region’s future is indelibly tied to that of the world’s and vice versa. Yet a much more globalized Northeast Asia also poses significant new challenges to policymakers and their respective political constituents. Every major global issue such as climate change, stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), fighting transnational terrorism and networked crime syndicates, and key socio-demographic trends, to mention only a few, cannot be resolved in part or in whole without the active participation of the principal Northeast Asian states. Rhetorical commitments to addressing endemic global challenges must be matched by financial, technological, and political commitments by all Northeast Asian governments.

Fourth, despite the rising importance of asymmetrical terrorist threats and the growing importance of dealing with failed states, Northeast Asia is still uniquely challenging as the main repository of the world’s outstanding traditional security quandaries. Not only does the region house some of the world’s largest and increasingly sophisticated armies, it also includes key geopolitical hotspots such as the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. Toxic historical legacies have yet to be fully overcome, and abidingly nationalistic worldviews persist. Overcoming a confluence of hard and traditional security challenges in addition to building more enduring political trust continues to elude the region’s leaders. It is true that certain valuable steps have been taken, such as the institutionalization of annual Northeast Asian summits, and new architectures designed to mitigate tensions are being put in place. And the chapters in this book make clear how valuable this changing architecture can be. At the same time, important as any new architecture may be, the unique set of circumstances that makes up the Northeast Asian security complex suggests that adhering to post-conflict norms and, to the extent possible, less politicized bilateral relationships is likely to pay heavier dividends, at least until some of the more vexing security quagmires are resolved. Architecture alone will not resolve the region’s emerging security problems.

Northeast Asia’s forced entry into the modern world system began in earnest with Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868, which in turn triggered the demise of the Sino-centric world order, leading ultimately to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in China and the Yi Dynasty in Korea. Subsequently, Northeast Asia was engulfed in half a century of virtually incessant conflicts including civil wars, struggles for independence, and major wars including World War II and the Korean War. If the first half of Northeast Asia’s twentieth-century journey was emblematic of the recurrence of potent clashes such as marked the world at large, the second half could not be more different. Indeed, Northeast Asia’s economic rise in the post-Korean War era, but particularly since China’s post-reform era from the late 1970s, has been equally prophetic for large parts of the world which have enjoyed unprecedented socio-economic development and rejection of inter-state wars.

This is not to suggest that political disputes, internal perturbations, and even outof-area conflicts have been dormant. China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) resulted in unparalleled discord and mayhem in China, and the 1989 protests posed a major challenge to the regime. While not directly impinging on strategic stability in Northeast Asia, the Vietnam War that ended with North Vietnam’s victory in 1975 ushered in a period of strategic uncertainty throughout much of East Asia. The Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the short but intense border war between China and Vietnam in January 1979, and the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam also in 1979 all attest to the prevalence of rippling conflicts in Southeast Asia. Tensions across the Taiwan Strait have periodically exploded into missile launches and threats of military conflict. North Korean shelling of Yeongpyeong at the end of 2010 served as a reminder that the Korean Peninsula is still technically at war. Since the early 1980s, however, and notwithstanding the continuing relevance of key geopolitical hotspots (notably the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait), Northeast Asia’s overall trajectory has indelibly been shifting from conflict to cooperation.

In and of itself, such a paradigm shift is not remarkable, since Western Europe also embarked on a similar path following World War II. Yet, whereas Europe’s postwar rebirth (symbolized in its final stages by the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the consolidation of the European Union) coincided with the historical ebbing of Western Europe’s geopolitical and geo-economic influences that had spanned nearly five centuries, East Asia’s postwar rebirth is occurring precisely at another turning-point in world history: the emergence of East Asia, and in particular China, as a principal driver of the international system. That said, it would be far too optimistic to suggest that, going into the second decade of the twenty-first century, Asia’s rise will be marked by essentially linear trajectories marked by sustained economic growth, political stability, and a significant cooling of key geopolitical hotspots. Equally important, Asia’s rise does not necessarily mean that the region’s strategically consequential states will assume a larger share of an increasingly common security and economic burden across a spectrum of issues. Three other key points need to be emphasized in assessing East Asia’s emerging role in the world system.

Pre-conditions for Asia’s “peaceful rise”

First, the much talked about demise of the West, and the alleged decline in US influence in particular, is far from certain, given its ability for regeneration, rejuvenation, and reassessment.¹ US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated in a November 2010 speech on Asian security that the “US is a Pacific nation and is, and will remain, a power in the Pacific.” As he stated: “I do so for a reason: with sovereign territory and longstanding economic and cultural ties to this region, America’s security interests and economic well-being are integrally tied to Asia’s” (Gates 5 June 2010). He also went on to say:

My government’s overriding obligation to allies, partners, and the region is to reaffirm America’s security commitments in this region . . . It has become clear to us that an effective, affordable, and sustainable US defense posture requires a broad portfolio of military capabilities with maximum versatility across the widest possible spectrum of conflict. Fielding these capabilities, and demonstrating the resolve to use them if necessary, assures friends and potential adversaries alike of the credibility of US security commitments through our ability to defend against the full range of potential threats . . . There is no question that, in the future, even more than in the past, the safety, security, and economic well-being of the US will be increasingly linked to Asia. The US defense strategy in this region reflects continuing recognition of both old and new challenges to peace and security, from North Korea to extremist terrorism, while acknowledging the many changes that have taken place in recent years, especially the rise of Asia and its place in the global order.

(Ibid.)

Second, the growing importance and adoption of intrinsically universal values, norms, and institutions along with accelerating globalization have continued to dilute more traditional (i.e., nationalistic and geographic) conceptions of identity and the subsequent enlargement of more “regional” identities and groupings. This is certainly happening in Northeast Asia.

Third, East Asia’s pronounced and unprecedented societal, intra-regional, and supra-national challenges are likely to curtail significantly East Asia’s much-vaunted emerging role as the epicenter of world politics and economics in the twenty-first century and beyond. Or as one analyst has written, “theories of functional integration are sorely tested by the fact that the deepest disputes are between the economies of Northeast Asia that have a very high degree of interdependence, namely, Taiwan, Japan, China and the divided Korean Peninsula” (Hughes 2007: 320).

There is an ongoing debate between views that “Asia has arrived” and those that stress “Asia has arrived but is replete with indigenous problems.” This debate really centers on the long-standing realist versus liberal theories of international relations or “the relative importance and efficacy of material capabilities versus institutions in world politics” (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002: 576). Yet Northeast Asia stands out as a unique laboratory for world politics precisely because it simultaneously embodies, embraces, but also seemingly falsifies these two contending schools of thought. Competing bodies of empirical evidence that can easily lend credibility to realist or liberal traditions miss the more important point that neither school fully meets the most basic theoretical requirement: more universal explanatory and predictive capacity. Thus, while the term has been over-used and misused, conceptualizing Northeast Asia’s security complex should begin by exploring the very nexus of neo-realism and neo-liberalism or a “third way,” given the preponderance of centrifugal and centripetal forces that have come to define Northeast Asia in the post-World War II era.

History has amply shown that peace and conflict, discord and cooperation, hierarchies and non-hierarchies, and justice and injustice have always co-existed. Mitigating these and other tensions between opposites by strengthening norms about non-use of force, institutionalization of CBMs (confidence building measures) through multilateral mechanisms and regimes, and arms control could substantially mitigate existing security dilemmas in Northeast Asia. In these ways institutionalists have evidence supporting their arguments. Viewed through a realist lens, however, Northeast Asia’s prospects for multilateral security cooperation are significantly curtailed by the preponderance of “hard security” threats such as great power military competition, increasingly sophisticated power projection capabilities, a prevailing strategic culture characterized by lasting historical animosities, and the proliferation of WMD. The continuing relevance of Cold War-era alliances (US–Japan, ROK–US, China–Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and US–Australia) suggests that even with increasingly waning prospects for major wars between the great powers, America’s Asian alliances remain the primary guarantor of regional stability, while those ties as well as the links between China and the DPRK reduce the capacity to speak meaningfully of a post-Cold War era of regional cooperation. Robust military capabilities, extended deterrence guarantees, and crisis stability dynamics continue to remain valid in maintaining stability and security in Northeast Asia.

This last point was brought to the fore on March 26, 2010 when a North Korean torpedo sank the South Korean naval vessel the Cheonan, resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors. A multi-national investigation panel released its findings on May 24 and the South Korean government subsequently implemented a range of responses including diplomatic pressure through the United Nations that virtually cut off inter-Korean trade, while the ROK also upgraded its previously conservative rules of engagement.² Equally supportive of realist views was the rapidity with which traditional military alliances were reaffirmed following North Korea’s shelling of Yeongpyeong eighteen months later.

Equally convincingly, however, one could argue from a liberalist perspective that precisely because of growing economic interdependence, the extremely high opportunity costs associated with any major breakdown in the status quo, and growing aversion to the use of force, Northeast ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Northeast Asian security complex
• Part II Security challenges, drivers, and issues
• Part III State interests and strategies
• Part IV Actualizing security cooperation and its future
• Index