EAI MPDI Working Paper No. 2

Author

Sangbae Kim is a professor of international relations, at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Seoul National University. His major research concerns are with information, communication, and networks in international relations. His selected works include Standards Competition in the Information Age: Wintelism and the Japanese Computer Industry (in Korean), (Paju: Hanul Academy, 2007); Information Revolution and Power Transformation: A Perspective of Network Politics (in Korean), (Paju: Hanul Academy, 2010); International Relations of Arachne: Challenge of the Network Theory of World Politics (in Korean) (forthcoming).

I. Introduction

In recent years, South Korea has gained attention as a middle power in the diplomatic arena. For example, it played impressive roles in the various diplomatic conferences held in South Korea, such as the G20 Summit in Seoul (2010), High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan (2011), Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul (2012), and Seoul Conference on Cyberspace (2013). Behind these increased diplomatic roles lay South Korea’s military and economic capabilities which have been achieved in the past several decades. In 2010, South Korea’s military budget ranked 12th in the world and its GDP put it in 15th place. Indeed, South Korea has come to be regarded as one of the leading middle powers in world politics. Now, there is a growing consensus that South Korea should play a middle power’s role corresponding to its increased material capabilities; it should figure out a new vision of middle power diplomacy in the twenty-first century. In particular, South Korea should realize what kinds of roles are expected of it, and under what structural conditions it can play those roles in effective ways.

The existing studies of middle power are inadequate in providing a guideline for the new roles of South Korea. They mostly look to individual countries’ attributes or capabilities to explain the generalized responsibilities of middle powers in world politics. Thus, they fail to explain the proper roles for middle power under certain structural conditions that might be more essential determinants for middle powers’ actions than for great powers’ actions. In contrast, some theorists in International Relations (IR) adopt an anti-attribute imperative that rejects all attempts to explain actors’ actions solely in terms of actors’ attributes (Hafner-Burton and Montgomery, 2006; Goddard, 2009; Nexon and Wright, 2007; Nexon, 2009). These IR theorists maintain that it is an actor’s “position,” not its attributes, that creates opportunities for a country and that how an actor is connected to others influences its diplomatic direction. In this context, a new approach to middle power must consider the structural attributes of a system rather than those of an actor.

Network theories in natural and social sciences complement this positional perspective to middle power’s diplomatic strategies in world politics. Network theorists hold that how actors are positioned in a network facilitates their ability to compete or cooperate with others. While certain networks are very dense and stable, others contain fragmentations that allow middle powers to emerge. A particular type of network creates favorable conditions for the so-called middlepowermanship. Moreover, network theories help configure conceptual frameworks to understand how some actors compete or cooperate to build stronger ties than others do in a network. In this way, network theories provide IR theorists with an alternative account of middle power, one designed to take both structure and agency seriously. This paper adopts three notions from network theories: “structural holes” and “positional power” from social network theory, and “translation strategies” from actor-network theory (ANT).

Relying on these notions, this paper attempts to develop a theoretical framework to understand the diplomatic strategies of South Korea as a middle power.3 This paper applies the framework to empirical cases of international politics in Northeast Asia. The cases include the configuration of network structure in the region, the nature of structural holes within the network, and strategic options for South Korea under the structural conditions. In handling these cases, this paper uses network theories to deduce a series of conditions under which South Korea’s middlepowermanship is more or less likely and the possibilities of positional power held by South Korea. In this sense, the major concern of this paper is theory development rather than empirical analysis.

This paper consists of three sections. In the first section, this paper examines the new concept of structure in network perspective and explores the meaning of position in the network structure. In the second section, it introduces three critical notions — structural holes, positional power, and translation strategies — from network theories to conceptualize structural attributes of networks and the roles of middle powers in a dynamic sense. In the third section, along with providing a theoretical platform for middle power strategies, it briefly presents empirical cases from Northeast Asian regional politics, in which the two Koreas and four great powers — the United States, China, Japan, and Russia — are main players. The conclusion summarizes the opportunities for South Korea’s middle power diplomacy and briefly points out some empirical cases that have policy implications.

II. Middle Power in a Network Perspective

The existing studies, which could be called the “attribute-approach,” mainly look to actors’ attributes to define middle power. For example, where neo-realists would look to military and economic capabilities (i.e., resource power) to explain the category of middle powers, liberal approaches define middle power by its behavioral tendency or intrinsic disposition, which is usually called middlepowermanship, to engage in international affairs. The attribute-approach locates a middle power at a middle point in the spectrum between great and small powers in terms of population, economic strength, and military capability. These indicators could be the basic premise for discussing the category of middle power. It is true that South Korea has come to be regarded as a middle power because it has met this standard of middle power attributes (Holbraad, 1984; Cooper, Higgott and Nossal, 1993; Cooper ed. 1997; Ping, 2005).

However, the existing approach that pays attention to actors’ attributes or behavioral features is inadequate in conceptualizing middle power in a dynamic sense. In particular, if the concept of middle power is understood in this way, it may be only partially applied to the case of South Korea, which is faced with structural problems due to the rise of China and threats from North Korea. It is useful in delineating potential candidates for middle powers who have a certain amount of material resources, but it fails to explain what kinds of specific roles are necessary to qualify a country as a middle power. In this view, it is not clear under what conditions middle powers are likely to emerge, or why some actors play more effective roles as middle power than others. Indeed, more often than not, international outcomes cannot be reduced to actors’ intentions or capabilities. Therefore, to explain a middle power’s agency, we need to understand how middle power is defined in terms of structural positions in a system and to explore how an actor’s structural position affects its capacity. A middle power’s actions are dependent upon the structural attributes of the network in which the country connects to others (Goddard, 2009: p.253).

1. Rethinking Structure: From Distribution to Configuration

In this context, it is useful to reintroduce the concept of “structure” into the discussion of middle power. In existing IR theories, there has been a discussion about “structure” of the international system. Most IR scholars would agree that “structure” refers to durable patterns of interaction. However, they tend to present their ideas in different ways. Many think of international politics as a “system” composed of overarching structures: the condition of anarchy, the distribution of power, sets of regulative and constitutive norms, primary and secondary institutions, and so forth. This mode of analysis treats, at least implicitly, structures as entities defined by their categorical attributes (Nexon, 2009: p.24).

For example, a neo-realist, Kenneth Waltz, conceptualized structure as a distribution of power among nations in terms of the actors’ capabilities (Waltz, 1979). The neorealist concept of structure is useful in revealing the overall outline of material structure in the international system. However, it basically reduces the concept of structure to the level of internal properties or material resources held by nation-states. Thus, neo-realists neglect the relative context of actors’ interaction itself when they conceptualize the elements that form the structure of international politics. They understand structure as an entity that is derived from the categorical attributes of actors. For this reason, it has been criticized that it takes too abstract and macro of an approach to properly grasp the dynamics between actors’ strategies and the structure of international politics.

For social network theorists, however, it is not actors’ interests, capability, or ideology, but the relations among actors that are causally significant. Structure emerges from a “continuing series of transactions to which participants attach shared understandings, memories, forecasts, rights, and obligation” (Tilly, 1998: p.456; Goddard, 2009: p.254). Network is a structural representation of relations among actors (Wellman and Berkowitz, 1988). In this view, structure is understood as the relational configuration among actors or the patterns of transactions themselves. Actors derive many of their attributes from their participation in the ongoing process of social interaction. As they pursue goals, such as resources and status, they reproduce, modify, create, and sever relatively durable material and symbolic exchange relationships. These relatively durable, but fundamentally dynamic interactions constitute the structural context in which actors operate (Nexon, 2009: p.25).

Introducing this relational approach to IR, we can understand the concept of structure as the patterns of dynamic transactions at the level of relationship among actors, without reducing the concept of structure to the level of a unit. In other words, we conceptualize structure, not as a kind of fixed entity reduced to actors’ internal properties or attributes, but as a social relationship among, or across, actors. Compared to the neorealist macroscopic concept of structure, this concept in network perspective understands structure at the meso-scopic level. The meso-scopic concept of structure portrays the dynamics between an actor’s choice and structural changes (Nexon and Wright, 2007; Nexon, 2009)...(Continued)