Here, the Northeast Asia region includes China, Russia, Mongolia, North and South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. Why then, is Northeast Asia, instead of the entire East Asia, a special concern? This question is legitimate in the sense that the notion of regionalism or regional community draws scholarly attention in this globalizing era. Additionally, the question is important in that how to define Northeast Asia matters for both the identifying of relevant issues and the finding of ways to facilitate cooperation. It is apparent that this region is not mature enough to be considered a regional bloc, which requires both strong demand for economic interdependence and absence of a divisive situation in security affairs (or existence of an outside threat for regional cooperation). Along with a relatively high speed of integration into the global economy,1)there are growing trends of economic interdependence between China and
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1) Samuel S. Kim, “Northeast Asia in the local-regional-global nexus: multiple challenges and contending explanations,” in Samuel S. Kim, ed., International Relations of Northeast Asia(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 35.
Japan and an increasing desire of the “three countries”─meaning China, South Korea, and Japan─for a free trade agreement (FTA) with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, the North Korean nuclear crisis is the major obstructer to hinder such positive developments. Also, the security contention between the Japan-U.S.
alliance and China, particularly centered on the Taiwan Strait, has continued to produce tensions in this region. As seen in the U.S.-Japan Joint Security Agreement in February 2005 that stated Taiwan as a mutual security concern, Japan’s willingness─and the U.S. push for this─to cope with a the rising China is becoming evident.2) Therefore, it appears that Northeast Asia has a potential for the furthering of economic cooperation, while revealing serious vulnerability in security affairs.
The attempts for building a multilateral institution, especially a FTA in ASEAN Plus Three (APT), and a regional community cannot bear fruit without solving, or alleviating at the very least, the looming security threats, such as the North Korean nuclear crisis and the Taiwan Strait tension, both of which are in accordance with the post-Cold War nationalist phenomena in the region centered on history, territory, and energy, as shall be discussed later. Although an APT must be a promising institutional trial for economic cooperation encompassing East Asia and eventually for the building of a regional community, the “three countries” can take advantage of the bandwagon effect of the institutional arrangement and experience of ASEAN since the Asian financial crisis erupted in 1997. In spite of its own merit and the prospects of an APT, the lack of security cooperation between the three countries─China, South Korea, and Japan─would leave ASEAN a simple nodal point to separately link the three economies. Without security cooperation particularly between China on the one hand and the U.S. and Japan on the other, it
2) Washington Post, February 18, 2005.
would be difficult or would delay the time to achieve free trade among them.3)Furthermore, the security contention between China and Japan led them to compete with each other, with different strategies, for more privileged trade access to ASEAN. China has forged the negotiation for a FTA with ASEAN as a collectivity, whereas Japan has focused on bilateral FTAs with the member countries of ASEAN, based on the long history of engagement starting with war reparations in the 1950s and official development assistance since the second half of the 1960s.4)
It is also worth noting that the U.S. has opposed the ideal of community- building in East Asia, simply supporting APT as a pivot of regional cooperation.5)The American opposition to any attempt for the formation of a regional community in East Asia may be exemplified by its resistance to the Japanese proposal of the establishment of a regional financial institution, the Asian Monetary Fund, amid the financial crisis in 1997.
This opposition was a clear sign of its determination not to relinquish its national power over East Asian countries via the International Monetary Fund.6)The American opposition itself is not the determining factor that interferes with the regional cooperation in Northeast Asia per se. But the U.S.’s concern lies in the maintenance of the traditional strategic objective in Asia, that is, the bilateral relations within the scheme of Asia and Pacific cooperation. The U.S. still considers Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation a useful tool for binding Asia and the Pacific together and for economic collaboration and security talks in this extended region, maintaining the bilateral security alliances with South Korea and Japan. Such strategic
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3) In fact, Japan and South Korea have continued the FTA negotiation since late 2003, but China and Japan simply agreed in October 2004 to start a preliminary study of examining the FTA’s impact on their economy.
4) Toshiyuki Arai, ASEAN To Nihon (ASEAN and Japan)(Tokyo: Nitchu Shuppan, 2003), pp. 178-86.
5) For instance, the former Deputy Secretary of the State, Richard Armitage, opposed the idea of East Asian community, stressing significance of the Japan-U.S. alliance in coping with the rise of Chinese influence. Asahi Shimbun, May 1, 2005.
6) Saori N. Katada, “Determining factors in Japan’s cooperation and noncooperation with the United States: The case of Asian financial crisis management, 1997-1999,” in Akitoshi Miyashita and Yoichiro Sato, eds., Japanese Foreign Policy in Asian and the Pacific: Domestic Interests, American Pressure, and Regional Integration(New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 163.
objectives must be the legacy of the San Francisco system, which has constituted the American-led Asia-Pacific order since its birth in 1952.7) That is, regional cooperation in Northeast Asia, not to speak of the Northeast Asian community, is hampered not only by the security contention that stems from the North Korean nuclear crisis and the Taiwan Strait tension but also by the U.S. security commitment extended to Asia and the Pacific, coupled by Japan’s increasingly proactive engagement in the so-called “Arc of Instability,”which ranges from the Korean peninsula to the Middle East.
Furthermore, there exists a deep attitude gap between the Northeast Asian countries. Each country is more preoccupied by cultural superiority, foreign threats, and territorial disputes than Europe. As seen in Table 2-1, the Pew world-wide survey study shows that peoples in the five countries in this region record higher scales than those in the member countries of the European Union, even though theirs are relatively lower than those with experiences of violent conflict with neighbors. Considering that such an attitude gap originates from the public perceptional context of each country in Northeast Asia, as Peter J. Katzenstein and Rudra Sil note, the natural expectations about the European experience─a sequential shift from the military conflict during World War Two, to the economic prosperity in the EEC period, and finally to the integration of Europe in a supra-nationalist fashion─would not be repeated in this region.8)Because of the discordance between the demand for regional economic cooperation and the existing security contention, it is not an easy or optimistic task to envision regionalism in Northeast Asia. In this respect, it is fair to state that
7) Kent E. Calder, “Pacific co-prosperity? The San Francisco System and its implications in comparative perspective,” in David I. Steinberg, ed., Korean Attitudes toward the United States: Changing Dynamics(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), pp. 22-23.
8) Peter J. Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, “Rethinking Asian security: a case for analytical eclecticism,” in J. J. Suh, Peter J.
Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds., Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 16-20.
the regional cooperation here delivers the meaning of a desperate need of security cooperation broadly defined rather than anything else and that the functional development of regional integration, as seen in the European case, is not so suggestive in this region.
Table 2-1. Comparison of Mutual Attitudes
*The scale in the box indicates the percentage of respondents who completely agree with corresponding questionnaires of the survey. Source: The Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2003, pp. 95-109.