Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Studies in Asian Security) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804749787 ISBN 13: 9780804749787

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Is East Asia heading toward war? Throughout the 1990s, conventional wisdom among U.S. scholars of international relations held that institutionalized cooperation in Europe fosters peace, while its absence from East Asia portends conflict. Developments in Europe and Asia in the 1990s contradict the conventional wisdom without discrediting it. Explanations that derive from only one paradigm or research program have shortcomings beyond their inability to recognize important empirical anomalies. International relations research is better served by combining explanatory approaches from different research traditions.

This book makes a case for a new theoretical approach (called “analytical eclecticism” by the authors) to the study of Asian security. It informs the analysis in subsequent chapters of central topics in East Asian security, with specific reference to China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The authors conclude that the prospects for peace in East Asia look less dire than conventional―in many cases Eurocentric―theories of international relations suggest. At the same time, they point to a number of potentially destabilizing political developments.

About this title

About the Author

J. J. Suh is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. Allen Carlson is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University.

From the Back Cover

Is East Asia heading toward war? Throughout the 1990s, conventional wisdom among U.S. scholars of international relations held that institutionalized cooperation in Europe fosters peace, while its absence from East Asia portends conflict. Developments in Europe and Asia in the 1990s contradict the conventional wisdom without discrediting it. Explanations that derive from only one paradigm or research program have shortcomings beyond their inability to recognize important empirical anomalies. International relations research is better served by combining explanatory approaches from different research traditions.
This book makes a case for a new theoretical approach (called "analytical eclecticism" by the authors) to the study of Asian security. It informs the analysis in subsequent chapters of central topics in East Asian security, with specific reference to China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The authors conclude that the prospects for peace in East Asia look less dire than conventional--in many cases Eurocentric--theories of international relations suggest. At the same time, they point to a number of potentially destabilizing political developments.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rethinking Security in East Asia

IDENTITY, POWER, AND EFFICIENCY

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4978-7

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

Rethinking Asian Security A Case for Analytical Eclecticism

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 excludes economic aid, where the United States is exceptionally niggardly even after the promise of a doubling of the aid budget by President Bush in 2002. And in Beijing, narrow and broad conceptions of regional security remain deeply contested.

Beyond the varied security conceptions that actors hold, there are the varied lenses through which scholars analyze security. Different analytic lenses require different kinds of simplifications in how questions are posed, facts assembled, and explanations developed. Such differences, in turn, are shaped greatly by factors largely unrelated to issues of Asian security: metatheoretical considerations that define appropriate domains of inquiry, acceptable methods of analysis, and agreed-upon standards of evaluation. Although debates over such problems continue to shape research in other fields of political science and indeed the social sciences writ large (Hall 2003; Lichbach 2003; Shapiro 2002), the field of international relations in the United States has been especially affected by long-standing programmatic debates that divide "paradigms" or "research traditions" from one another. In the effort to make sense of the world, such paradigms or traditions invoke a particular vocabulary, adhere to a specific philosophical perspective, adopt a specific analytic framework, and develop a particular style of research. In noting fundamental incompatibilities between realist and Marxist theoretical perspectives, for example, Tony Smith (1994: 350) observes that "each paradigm is monotheistic, home to a jealous god." These different research traditions have become central to how we identify ourselves and others as social scientists and how we train the next generation of scholars. And they provide an enduring foundation for widely noted basic debates in the study of international affairs.

The growing interest in the existence of, and competition between, contending research traditions has not been without benefits. Indeed, one premier journal, International Security, has made a truly exceptional effort to present all sides of the debates, with extensive commentaries promoting or critiquing such research traditions as realism, rationalism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Similar interparadigm debates are also appearing regularly in European journals, although the tone, depth of philosophical grounding, and prevalent conceptions of world politics tend to be quite different than what one finds in the United States (Wæver 1999). This widespread attention to competing research traditions has marked international relations as a diverse field of scholarship and has contributed to increasingly nuanced articulations of theories and hypotheses within traditions. This is the sort of progress that some cite in advocating scholarship bounded within discrete research traditions (Sanderson 1987) as these contend with "the models and foils" put forward by competing traditions (Lichbach 2003: 214). This does not, however, mean that international relations research has embraced the spirit of intellectual pluralism or generated better solutions to existing problems. This is because paradigm-bound research can get in the way of better understanding as it tends to ignore insights and problems that are not readily translated into a particular theoretical language (Hirschman 1970). At the cost of sacrificing the complexity that policy makers and other actors encounter in the real world, problems are frequently sliced into narrow puzzles to suit the agenda of a given research tradition. As a result, whatever progress might be claimed by proponents of particular research traditions, there is little consensus on what progress, if any, has been achieved by the field as a whole.

The recognition of the existence of, and possible complementarities between, multiple research traditions holds forth the prospect of translating the analytic languages and theoretical insights of each in the process of improving transparadigmatic knowledge on specific substantive problems. For example, seemingly incompatible strands of liberal, constructivist, and realist thought offer different insights in different languages that can be cautiously translated and productively combined in problem-focused research. Scholars who champion the "triangulation" of methods as a promising avenue to more reliable knowledge (Jick 1979; Tarrow 1995) point the way to a different way of learning that transcends specific research traditions (Makinda 2000). Theoretical triangulation is certainly more complicated than methodological triangulation given the risk of intellectual incoherence across components of research traditions. Nevertheless, the risk is worth the potential payoffs of encouraging, in the interest of better understanding specific research problems, self-conscious efforts to selectively incorporate concepts and insights from varied research traditions.

A generation ago Anatol Rapoport (1960) pointed the way when he identified fights, games, and debates as three modal situations requiring a mixture of conflict and cooperation. Research traditions in international relations have tended to encourage conflict but have done little to foster cooperation. Fortunately, a number of international relations scholars are beginning to shun metatheoretical battles, preferring instead to turn their attention to the identification of politically important and analytically interesting problems that reflect the complexity of international life and require answers that no single research tradition is equipped to provide. In their synthetic treatment of different strands of institutional analysis, for example, John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen (2001: 249) seek to "stimulate dialogue among paradigms in order to explore the possibilities for theoretical cross-fertilization, rapprochement, and integration." Similarly, others have begun to transgress the boundaries between realism, liberalism, and constructivism for the purpose of developing more integrated perspectives on particular aspects of international politics (Hellman et al. 2003). Some have been exploring the sources of "prudence" in world politics by explicitly seeking a "sociological synthesis of realism and liberalism" (Hall and Paul 1999), while others have implicitly crossed the boundaries between research traditions in exploring how aspects of political economy can produce tendencies toward both war and peace (Wolfson 1998) or how issues of status and recognition intersect with security concerns to drive weapons proliferation or military industrialization (Kinsella and Chima 2001; Eyre and Suchman 1996). These are just a few examples of works that have moved away from interparadigm "fights" in order to develop more eclectic perspectives.

This book is part of that intellectual movement. It has two purposes. First, it offers an overdue examination and partial reformulation of claims embedded in both pessimistic and optimistic perspectives on Asian regional security. Case studies examine important national security issues for key countries and regions in Asia: China, Japan, and Korea, as well as the Southeast Asian region. Our aim is to reformulate and deepen theoretical and practical insights into the security problems, arrangements, and strategies in Asia. Second, the volume seeks to illustrate the value of relying on multiple explanatory frameworks that are consciously eclectic in language and substance rather than being driven by the tenets guiding particular research traditions. Such frameworks are formulated on pragmatic assumptions that permit us to sidestep clashes between irreconcilable metatheoretical postulates, and to draw upon different research traditions and the concepts, observations, and methods they generate in relation to particular problems.

Although cast at different levels of abstraction, the book's two objectives are related. Within a particular research tradition, substantive analysis provides a firm grasp of specific logics as they work themselves out in particular aspects of Asian security. It is, however, likely to come up short in generating deeper insights into the relationships among the many factors that bear on Asian states' understandings of, and approaches to, the "security" of their region. That is not to say that everything matters, or that specific research traditions do not generate useful ideas. Borrowing from Albert Hirschman (1981),we only suggest that "trespassing" across the sharp boundaries separating different traditions allows for new combinations of problem recognition and explanation that may be less parsimonious but intellectually more interesting or policy relevant.

In this chapter we discuss, first, the pragmatic quality and problem-focused character of eclecticism in the study of international affairs. Next,we articulate a general problematique for research on Asian security that draws attention to multiple and intersecting processes that shape how Asian states understand and address their security concerns. Finally, we introduce and preview the substantive contributions that, read collectively, represent an effort to build eclectic explanatory sketches not easily subsumed within existing research traditions.

Research Traditions and Explanatory Sketches in International Relations

Most scholars of international relations think of the theoretical universe as divided between different schools of thought to which scholars commit themselves in the belief that they generate better explanations with greater policy relevance. What ultimately distinguishes these schools, however, are not the substantive claims they produce but the underlying cognitive structures upon which these claims are formulated. These structures shape what phenomena are considered important and explainable, how research questions about such phenomena are posed, what concepts and methods are employed in generating explanations of the phenomena, and what standards are reasonable for evaluating these explanations. Such abstract specifications reflect enduring ontological and epistemological, that is metatheoretical, assumptions shared by members of some research communities but not others. Hence, as is true of the history of science and social science more generally, as a field of scholarship international relations is characterized by the emergence of, competition between, and evolution or degeneration of, discrete cognitive structures within which specific models and narratives are constructed, communicated, and evaluated.

Following Thomas Kuhn (1962), some scholars of international relations have referred to these structures as "paradigms." Paradigms are concerted intellectual efforts to make sense of the world. When fully institutionalized, their weak links are no longer recognized, their foundational assumptions are no longer questioned, and their anomalies are consistently overlooked or considered beyond the purview of specific research questions. Dissatisfied with the monism implied in a Kuhnian vision of normal science, or perhaps frustrated by the absence of criteria for comparing supposedly incommensurable paradigms, some international relations scholars have employed Lakatos's (1970) concept of "research programs" that are at least assumed to be comparable to each other in terms of how effectively the successive theories they produce deal with novel facts or anomalies over time. These scholars find Lakatosian research programs to be "intuitively appealing and attractive" (Elman and Elman 2003a, 2002: 253) in making sense of international relations scholarship because individual theories in the field have indeed come to be clustered around competing sets of "core" assumptions, and because debates among adherents of contending perspectives do frequently revolve around the question of whether one or the other perspective is "progressive" or "degenerative."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804749787
• ISBN 13: 9780804749787
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Suh J.J., Katzenstein Peter J., Carlson Allen