EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.32

저자  

Dr. Evelyn Goh joined Royal Holloway on 1 September 2008. From January 2006 to August 2008, she was University Lecturer in International Relations and Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Before that, she was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (now the Rajaratnam School of International Studies) in Singapore from 2002 to 2005.

Dr. Goh has held various visiting positions: Public Policy Scholar in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC September-October 2008; Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University September 2007; and Southeast Asian Fellow at the East-West Center Washington September-December 2004.

She was trained initially as a geographer at the undergraduate level in Oxford, going on to complete an M.Phil. in Environment & Development at Cambridge in 1997. After that, she studied International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford, earning an M.Phil. before completing her D.Phil. in 2001.

The two decades since the end of the Cold War have been marked by uncertainties about triumphant unipolarity, the rapid rise of new great powers, and unprecedented globalised interdependence. The imperative at both the global and regional level is to create a new, stable international order. Since the end of World War II, East Asian order has been shaped most profoundly by external powers, especially the United States through its regional bilateral alliances, global strategic priorities, and military and political interventions. At the same time, the U.S. presence has been regarded as stabilising because it has deterred regional rivals from conflict. Yet, Kupchan was correct in his observation that “American might and diplomacy prevent conflict, but they do so by keeping apart the parties that must ultimately learn to live comfortably alongside each other if regional stability is to endure”. The imperative for China and Japan to negotiate a modus vivendi for peaceful coexistence has grown with the end of the Cold War, U.S. preoccupation in the Middle East, China’s rapid rise, and Japan’s gradual steps towards ‘normalisation’. The recent exacerbation of Sino-Japan territorial and historical disputes, and their competition for leadership in key regional security and economic institutions highlight the urgency of this task.

In the existing literature, the shortcomings of regional efforts at conflict mediation, institution-building, and crisis resolution are increasingly attributed to geopolitical rivalry between Tokyo and Beijing, and calls for historical reconciliation between Japan and China are commonplace. But these works tend to focus either on balance of power politics, or on the domestic dynamics of these bilateral conflicts. In contrast, this paper argues that regional security in East Asia will increasingly depend on the successful negotiation of what I term a “great power bargain” between China and Japan. This bargain must encompass a range of fundamental geopolitical compromises, and must be based upon a basic understanding of power-sharing, not power competition. In so doing, I focus firmly on the roles of the two East Asian great powers in the changing regional security order.

Conceptual framework

Order and great power bargains

The conceptual framework advanced in this project derives from ‘English School’ approaches that emphasise the social and normative underpinnings to international relations. From this perspective, even the anarchical international landscape exhibits social norms significant enough to constitute an ‘order’ rather than a ‘system’. International order may be defined basically as rule-governed interaction among states; it must involve limits on behaviour, the management of conflict, and the preservation of wider social goals. At base, it is premised upon a complex, contingent consensus about the basic goals and values of the international society, and means of conducting international affairs. This consensus is difficult to achieve and maintain not just because of power politics but also normative competition. Thus, as Alagappa put it, “the construction of order is a historical process in which inter-subjective understandings and their translations into institutions are reached through struggle, conflict, accommodation, and cooperation”.

Great powers and the relationships and understandings between them significantly constitute international order. In Bull’s definitive conception, great power management is a central pillar of international order. Via collaborative management, great powers consolidate and sustain the privileges of their special position in international society by promoting the very order which produces for them these benefits. This management is aimed at preserving the society of states itself by regulating the boundaries within which great powers exercise their influence. Hence, great powers promote international order in two keys ways. First, by managing their relations with each other in order to ensure that their rivalries do not spill over into disrupting the society of states. This is achieved through maintaining the balance of power and by limiting the systemic impacts of their conflicts through crisis management and war limitation. Second, great powers mange international order by using their preponderance to impart “central direction” to international affairs, by means ranging from the imposition of their will to legitimate leadership.

Yet, Bull’s somewhat realist conception is founded upon the more fundamental twin imperatives of unequal power in any functioning society: the drive of superior power to shape disproportionately the shared order; and the need to tame the excesses of this unequal power by constraining it within agreed practices and norms. Hence, while the ascent of China and other great powers represent a significant redistribution of global power, the issue is not simply or even primarily the need to counter-veil rising power with similar opposing capabilities. Rather, the main challenge is how to harness great powers to some collective authority, or to embed them within stable structures of interstate cooperation – not just to prevent war between them, but more to protect the orderly functioning of international life along agreed rules and norms. Another way to put this is that the position of great powers depends not only on material dominance, but crucially on their ability to negotiate a common understanding about the legitimate rights and duties associated with their special status, and the means by which their unequal power can be constrained.

As a social institution propagating unequal power, the privileged position of great powers is based not just on the structural logic of material superiority, but substantiated and sustained by a social compact implicit between them and with smaller states – great powers are conceded special rights in return for performing special duties that uphold international society. The specifics of these special rights and duties come under constant negotiation since “the legitimacy of the institution of the great powers depends upon how far their special privileges are made acceptable to others”. Thus, this great power compact is what allows great management of international order to take place. I propose that the most useful lens through which to analyse this normative element is the great power bargain. Such a bargain consists of two levels: (1) the commitments and assurances that great powers extend to smaller states, in exchange for the latter’s adherence and deference to institutionalized great power leadership and dominance; and (2) the mutual assurances and agreement on terms that allow negotiated power sharing between the great powers themselves. My focus here is on the latter.

East Asia’s order transition

The most significant disruptions to international order are wrought by major war, while the most significant opportunities for re-creating this order are presented by post-war peace-making settlements. The ending of the Cold War was, of course, unusual in that it did not involve peace treaties. Instead, the new order was negotiated in piecemeal fashion between the superpowers themselves, and with others using a range of instruments and modalities and with varying degrees of effectiveness in fronts scattered across the globe. East Asia’s post-Cold War order transition has been complicated further by the persistence of regional conflicts, China’s changing role in the superpower conflict during the Cold War and its subsequent strategic ascendance in the 1990s, and the United State’s continued strategic dominance of the region. As a result, re-creating regional order still requires the re-negotiation of the parties to, and nature of, the great power bargain in East Asia.

The contemporary East Asian order is best understood against the context of a longer process of transition that began during the mid-19th century rupture between China and Japan with Japan’s self-removal from the Sino-centric regional society and China’s decline in the face of domestic dissent, and western technological competition and imperial encroachment. The China-centred tributary order finally disappeared in the Sino-Japanese war, but Japan’s ultimate defeat by the U.S. in the course of the wider Second World War, the Chinese civil war, and the onset of the Cold War conspired to keep China and Japan from a bilateral peace settlement. Instead, the main post-war settlement was struck between the U.S. and Japan, emasculating the latter strategically with a ‘peace’ constitution and security dependence on Washington. Communist China, meanwhile, was isolated from the non-communist world but free to pursue its strategic interest vis-à-vis its neighbours and superpower allies and enemies. The unresolved conflict and power transition between China and Japan left East Asia without indigenous great power leadership while the extraordinary penetration of and dependence upon external great powers during the Cold War grafted selected East Asia states onto their global strategic preoccupations...(Continued)