EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 3

요약문

South Korea needs a new strategy for managing triangular ties with China and Japan. It. must address the deteriorating state of Sino-Japanese relations as well as U.S. scepticism about China’s push for regionalism and the South’s autonomous inclinations through a patient role as a facilitator, not a balancer. In 2005 it overreached in a desperate response to a difficult environment. Tracing the dilemma the South faces, this paper focuses first on the U.S. factor and the frustrating impact on Roh Moo-hyun’s plans to engage North Korea. Then it evaluates ties with Japan, delineating causes and effects of the sharp slide in bilateral cooperation with restoration difficult. Next it assesses relations with China and how hard it is to synchronize them to other ties. The conclusion stresses the value to South Korea of a balance of power. As a middle power between assertive competitors, it must tread cautiously with special attention to shaping the triangle with China and Japan.

저자
Gilbert Rozman is Musgrave Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He specializes on comparisons and relations in Northeast Asia, including China, Japan, and Russia. In the year 2000-2001, he began to add Korea to this mix. He compares the historical development of these countries, their recent-day societies, their search for national identities, and their strategies for international relations.  His recent published works include ed., Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization 1949-1999, "Sino-Russian Cross-Border Relations: Turning Fortresses into Free Trade Zones," "Flawed Regionalism: Reconceptualizing Northeast Asia in the 1990s," "Backdoor Japan: The Search for a Way Out via Regionalism and Decentralization."

 본 working paper는 미국 헨리루스재단의 지원을 받은 "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia"에 제출된 논문이며, 온라인 버전으로만 배포됩니다.

South Korea is buffeted by four countries whose foreign policy does not measure up to the standards needed for our times. All have reacted to recent international events by accentuating worrisome trends seen in earlier policies and show no inclination of changing direction. George W. Bush has steered the US not only away from Clinton’s engagement policy toward China but also toward an inconsistent regional strategy in which Richard Armitage’s Japan first approach coupled with Robert Zoellick’s follow-up to encourage China to become a “stakeholder” has been interspersed with Dick Cheney’s neo-conservative quasi-containment of China combined with an ideological rejection of diplomacy with North Korea.1 Koizumi Junichiro has let his obsession with visiting the Yasukuni Shrine overwhelm traditional diplomatic professionalism, making no effort to staunch an upsurge of ultra-nationalist claims in Japan or to try to contain the damage across the region. Hu Jintao has been less flagrant about his transgressions of cautious diplomacy, but some would argue that he has betrayed early expectations that China was ready to find common language to reassure the US and Japan by exploring shared values with increasing transparency. Finally, Vladimir Putin has resuscitated the image of an authoritarian leader in Moscow narrowly concerned with supporting dictators in order to expand his state’s influence regardless of the impact on regional stability and human rights. In the shadow of the powerful US influence and a marginal Russian one, South Korea faces the challenge of managing the deepening rivalry between China and Japan.

Among three choices for South Korean diplomacy in the coming years, only one is bound to serve the national interest best. Yet, given the policy choices favored in the four competing powers and North Korea’s inclination to seek advantage from hyperbolic rhetoric and purposeful threats, the path forward is not easy. One choice is to accept the vision of US neoconservatives and Japanese ultranationalists and draw a taut line against North Korea in the Six-Party Talks while recognizing that a three-way alliance must stand firm against China’s drive for regionalism. Taking this approach would be an admission that the Sunshine Policy was wrong and that the cold war continues in Asia, reviving the logic of the 1950s to 1980s. A second choice is to accede to the rise of China as the center of regionalism, essentially reverting to the sinocentric order during the millennium before the end of the nineteenth century. Given the rapid Gilbert Rozman 4 economic integration of South Korea and China and the preeminent influence of China in dealing with North Korea, this might seem to be a realistic adjustment to ongoing trends if it were not obvious that it would be a betrayal of aspirations for autonomy and leverage in foreign policy that have escaped Koreans since the seventh century and only from 1990 became a serious possibility. Finally, South Korea could strive for a region in equilibrium where the weight of China would be balanced by the weight of nearby Japan coupled with that of distant US, and its own flexibility would be maximized. This is a worthy goal not contradictory to certain views advocated by US and Japanese diplomats as well as experts in China, but the way Sino-Japanese relations are evolving may now be the foremost barrier to its realization...(Continued)