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.
account for the present situation of diversified layers of interactions.
During the Cold War, the realist tradition prevailed in the study of international relations. Within the influence of the realist tradition, James N. Rosenau and others in the late 1960s and the 1970s attempted to illustrate interactions between domestic and international dimensions by examining either domestic sources of foreign policy, frequently called
“linkage politics,”or international sources of domestic politics, called “the second image reversed.”9) However, their voice was overwhelmed by neorealism, mentored by Kenneth N. Waltz, who depicted international relations as an anarchy in which survival is the most important motivation of states.10) Neorealism is the view that the unit of analysis is the state, which is to say, the sovereign entity that, located at the top of the hierarchy, comprehends domestic politics. Neorealism posited that the state summarizes different interests and diverse processes into a single policy output in foreign affairs. On this ground, actors such as groups and organizations, as well as domestic political processes, have been considered subordinate to the state in its pursuit of survival.11)It was not until the late 1980s that Robert Putnam attracted new attention to domestic politics by theorizing the negotiator’s behavior between international relations and domestic politics into the notion of “two-level games.”12)
9) See James N. Rosenau, “Pre-theories and theories of foreign policy,” in R. Barry Farrell, ed., Approaches to Comparative and International Politics(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 27-92; Allison Graham, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis(Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Alexander L. George, “The case for multiple advocacy in making foreign policy,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 751-785; and Peter Gourevitch, “The second image reversed: the international sources of domestic politics,” International Organization, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Autumn 1978), pp. 881-912.
10) Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979), chapter 5.
11) It is ironic that neorealism has extensively utilized the term system. This term depicts a set of international relations among states as being an international system from which state behavior and state interests are deduced. The logic inherent in neorealism is that the relationship between the parts and the whole is uni-directional, which is to say, neither interactive nor mutually causal. However, this logic is not in accordance with the ideas presented by the interdisciplinary tradition of systems sciences, such as interconnectedness, indeterminacy, complexity, and the macro-micro link.
Recently, Robert Jervis, within the paradigm of neorealism, made an attempt to incorporate the propositions of systems sciences into the study of international relations. See his work, System Effects(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
12) Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games,” International Organization, Vol. 2, No.
3 (Summer, 1988), pp. 427-460.
Scholars have started to investigate pluralistic dispersion of power and its effect on foreign policy and international relations. Furthermore, they have asserted that in contrast to neorealism, decision-making processes are not directly related to survival of the state but to actors’ preferences, institutional arrangements, and coalitions.13)
Such theoretical revisits to domestic consideration on international relations is applicable to the Northeast Asian case. That is, recent interactions between countries in Northeast Asia cannot be explained simply by a realist interpretation of the world. A transition of domestic politics has mattered for the regional dimension, as seen in the impact of an electoral realignment on the national strategy in foreign affairs. For instance, in Japan, the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ)’s Tomiichi Murayama’s assumption to the position of Prime Minister in 1994 had two different meanings. Socialists for the first time took offices in the SDPJ-LDP coalitional government. At the same time, it has resulted in a continuous decline of public support for the socialists because of a policy failure stemming from the contradictory stance in the sense that the strengthening of the security alliance with the U.S. belied socialists’ previous commitment to a peace-prone policy orientation. Coupled with the negative effect on the socialists owing to the adoption of a single-seat electoral system in 1996, Murayama’s self-contradictory foreign policy resulted in the socialists never being able to restore their previous degree of public support. The situation of the decline of the socialist camp has moved Japanese politics towards a conservative direction.
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13) On the extending discussions of interactions between the domestic and the international, see Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Robert O. Keohane and Helen V. Milner, eds., Internationalization and Domestic Politics(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Helen V. Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Etel Solingen, Regional Orders at Century’s Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
The interactions between the domestic politics and the regional dynamics are multilayer in nature, as seen in Figure 2-1. As T. J. Pempel argues, interactions in a certain region are multiple, so that to exclusively examine one aspect is to miss the greater complex of relations.14)Indeed, the interactions relevant to regional dynamics in Northeast Asia take place at more than one layer, not just the interstate level. Each country has a unique vertical mode of state-society interactions. The interactions are not strictly confined to the domestic level but open to external interactions, either interstate relations, business relations, or activities of NGOs.
Figure 2-1. Multilayered Domestic-Regional Linkages
14) T. J. Pempel, “Introduction: emerging webs of regional connectedness,” in Pempel, ed., Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 6.
At the top, the interstate relations among Northeast Asian countries, which may be called the “first layer,”are built on the APT and East Asian summit, which are supported by individual countries’ study groups for agenda-setting functions. The three countries─China, South Korea, and Japan─have been enjoying an effect of the bandwagon of ASEAN, but the relationship between them is not solid enough yet for becoming a pillar to sustain the integration of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia completely.
For security purposes, the interstate relations have taken place at the ARF and Six-Party Talks.
In domestic politics, the “second layer,” the perception about one’s neighbors as well as political realignment has mattered for the regional dimension. This is particularly true in China, the two Koreas, and Japan, which are still not free of the lingering historical memory of victimizer- victim relations. Regarding Japan’s past acts, negative images are frequently stimulated at the public level, a situation that impedes cooperation between China and the two Koreas on the one hand and Japan on the other. Furthermore, there is a possibility that historical issues may be manipulated either by politicians for their demonstration of compassion or for the justification of the national strategy─for example, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine as a means of showing his determined patriotism and the Chinese leaders’de facto authorization of mass demonstrations against Japanese efforts for obtaining a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council.
At the bottom, most NGOs in Northeast Asian countries have had a relatively weak international orientation until now; however, some of them now extend the scope of their vision and their domain of activities by working together with INGOs. NGOs may press their political leaders to take the policies with universal values, even though the opposite cases also exist in reality. The expansion of cooperation among NGOs at the transnational level is the “third layer”of domestic-regional linkages. The third layer, in an
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analytical sense, is an addition to the “first layer”of interstate relations and to the “second layer”of domestic politics. Insofar as its role is concerned, the third layer has a great potential for the forging of regional cooperation in the coming years. In particular, the present information technology has, in a remarkable way, opened a new era in the sharing of information, one of the most essential elements for cooperation among NGOs. The significance of information for the third layer lies in its contribution to the disseminating of alternative sources that are frequently unavailable in the mass media and in the official propaganda of each country.15)
It is notable that the types of issues that they deal with matter for the effectiveness of the third layer. In general, the issues related to human security, rather than arms control issues, tend to promote effectiveness in terms of political influence. Humanitarian aid and human rights issues tend to positively influence the state. This is so because these issues involve the safety concerns of specific people or groups and because objectives and consequences of the engagement with these issues are visible and concrete. Furthermore, the universal characteristics of norms and values related to human security resonate powerfully in the minds of the general public, and thus the state cannot completely ignore this appeal.
The empirical fact that INGOs are more involved in human rights issues than in other issues partly evidences the effectiveness of the human security-related NGOs activities.16)In the northeastern part of China and North Korea, there are ample cases of NGOs’ engagement in human security problems of North Koreans, like famine and refugee issues. The World Food Program, Hong Kong Caritas, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and religious NGOs in South Korea─
15) Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics(Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 19.
16) Proportionally speaking, human rights organizations account for roughly a quarter of INGOs. See Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, p. 11.
Protestant, Catholic, and Buddhist─are ready examples with more or less successful outcomes of humanitarian engagements.