EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.3

요약문
South Korea lacks a clear strategy for adjusting triangular ties with China and Japan in the shadow of strained relations with its ally, the United States. While taking into account U.S. scepticism toward China’s push for regionalism and its own autonomous inclinations, it has yet to adjust to deteriorating Sino-Japanese relations. Bandwagoning with China or strong balancing with the U.S. and Japan are unlikely choices, leaving as the optimal option the role of a patient facilitator concentrating on linkages with both close neighbors. Recently Seoul overreached in a desperate response to a difficult environment. This paper traces the historical background of this triangle and the recent U.S. impact on it. It evaluates ties with Japan, putting in a triangular context the sharp slide in cooperation. Next it assesses relations with China and how hard the challenge is of synchronizing them to other ties. As a middle power facing both North Korean threats and the goal of reunification, Seoul has reason to tread cautiously as it tries to maintain a balance between two assertive, nearby competitors.

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.

As a middle power (economically and militarily ranked about tenth in the world), South Korea is situated at the crossroads of four great powers, each of which considers itself in the tops ranks and entitled to an assertive regional policy. This is a unique environment, strikingly different from that of a European middle power such as Italy without assertive neighbors or some scattered middle powers such as Brazil far from great power competition. South Korea also has the unparalleled challenge of seeking reunification with a state that is militarily and economically beyond the normal means of control of the global community and even poses an enormous threat to it. Thus, it has an abiding need for support from other states to meet this threat, to persuade North Korea, and eventually to embrace reunification and its enormous costs. In these enduring circumstances, a new phenomenon has arisen: the South’s two closest neighbors have, on fairly equal terms, begun an intense rivalry. How it responds is likely to have significant consequences for its relations with its lone ally, the U.S., its ties to North Korea, and its ability to convert its middle power status into a meaningful asset in the world’s most ascendant region.

After successfully following the policy of nordpolitik to entice Moscow and then Beijing into normalized relations and then launching the Sunshine Policy by rallying support from these two capitals as well as Washington and Tokyo, Seoul has since 2001 and especially in 2005-06 lost ground in working with the great powers. It is not easy to be buffeted by four states whose foreign policy, arguably, does not measure up to the standards needed for our times, each reacting to recent international events by accentuating worrisome trends. George W. Bush has steered the U.S. toward an inconsistent regional strategy in which Richard Armitage’s Japan first approach followed by Robert Zoellick’s encouragement of China to become a “stakeholder” has been interspersed with Dick Cheney’s neo-conservative quasi-containment of China and ideological rejection of diplomacy with North Korea.1 Simultaneously, Koizumi Junichiro’s obsession with visiting the Yasukuni Shrine overwhelms traditional diplomacy, denying efforts to staunch an upsurge of ultra-nationalist claims in Japan or to try to contain the damage across the region. Hu Jintao’s transgressions are less flagrant, but some would argue that he has betrayed early expectations that China was ready to find common language to reassure the U.S. and Japan by exploring shared values with increasing transparency. Finally, Vladimir Putin 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 urgent U.S. drive to sustain its influence and Russia’s struggle to reassert its, South Korea is challenged to adjust to a new Sino-Japanese rivalry that looms as the most destabilizing consequence in Northeast Asia of altered great power ties.

The intensified rivalry between China and Japan poses new challenges for many countries. The U.S. faced unprecedented concern that this rivalry was spoiling the atmosphere for strategic cooperation in East Asia, leading officials to debate quiet intervention to find a way to ameliorate damage from Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine while still giving priority to boosting Japan versus China. ASEAN states struggled with the impact of the rivalry on plans for regionalism, agreeing with Japan’s desire to expand the new East Asian Summit with three additional members that had the effect of diluting China’s potential dominance but then welcoming China’s call to confine discussion on forging an East Asian Community to the more compact ASEAN + 3 setting. Russia and India debated counteroffers by these two other claimants to Asian great power status, without making abrupt changes. Yet, the most important battleground for China and Japan once again became the Korean peninsula, which faces the most urgent decisions on how to manage this rivalry and a fraying U.S. alliance...(Continued)