Explaining surprises in Asian regionalism : the Japan-Korea-China trilateral cooperation

Why has the scholarship on ASEAN Plus Three not anticipated the emergence of the trilateral cooperative framework among Japan, Korea and China? The trilateral ‘dialogue’ that in 2008 took shape in a format separate from ASEAN has become a key surprise in Asian regionalism. Given the direct link to ASEAN Plus Three (APT), I review possible explanations based on trends in APT as they have been depicted in the literature. The implications of this exercise are as follows. While too much weight has been attached to promoting scholarly ‘labels’ – Sino-Japanese competition, power of ASEAN to socialize, and economic focus in APT – far too little attention on the other hand has been afforded to note Korea’s regional preferences, pre-existing contradictions, and varied roles of APT. To respond better to similar challenges in the future, the scholarship on Asian regionalism needs to attach more value to elaborating and testing of alternative scenarios

Two modes of dialogue in IR : testing on Western versus non-Western engagement with IR theory

Dialogue in International Relations (IR) is neither a unitary concept nor an undifferentiated process; the aim of this paper is to separate out two principal modes of dialogue, their attributes and differing efficacy in contributing to IR theory (IRT). The two mechanisms of 'competition' and 'learning' will be tested on selected cases of Western and non-Western applications of IRT to Asian international relations. By showing how 'competition' leads to sameness, I will explain current monolithic nature of IRT. The main argument I advance is that dialogue is particularly constructive when it operates in the responsive mode of 'learning', as contrasted with passive and reactive modes. This paper contributes to enhancing the application of dialogue as a method in IR. The applied analysis indicates that dialogue can be most fruitful via engagement with existing theory from Asian perspective. This finding could not be achieved when treating dialogue as a uniform practice

Equality through the crisis, in Europe as in Asia

The crisis is bringing Europe closer to Asia. There is less equality; there is a reluctant leader, Germany, like Japan in Asia – forever feared by the less powerful neighbours

A new development bank, an old dream coming true

At the recent summit of major emerging economies called the BRICS (B for Brazil, R for Russia, I for India, C for China, and S for South Africa), they announced the establishment of a new development bank and fund, in order to have an alternative to the old-order World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund). These institutions have served the world’s financing needs, especially in the areas of development and crisis management, since post-war times

The deliberate quest for causal explanations will reinvigorate social science’s relevance in mass media and policy

Daily news reports and journalistic coverage highlight the powerful traction of causality for our everyday understanding of events and phenomena. From the 2011 UK riots to traffic accidents, Kamila Pieczara argues social scientists offer a competitive advantage when it comes to case-specific explanations on how various mechanisms work in relation to other factors. But this relevance also calls to question the danger involved when making general explanations, which may lead to inflated or disproportionate causal understandings

In Singapore, the Shangri-La Dialogue reflected tensions in Asian security

2002 was a year of crisis between Pakistan and India, which almost resulted in war.This was also the year of the first Asia Security Summit, convened in Singapore by the London head-quartered International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS): the Shangri-La Dialogue. The IISS chief executive Dr John Chipman informed the audience in that year’s Dialogue about the connection between the Indo-Pakistani conflict and the summit’s mitigating role, showing that summit diplomacy can mean more than simply words to be forgotten. Apart from the role of the Shangri-La Dialogue in appeasing the Indo-Pakistani conflict, another example he quoted was of the IISS’s Middle East Manama Dialogue 2013, where Chuck Hagel promised to foster links with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and followed up on that task in 2014

How to spend it: Dividing the fruits of development in Asia

Economic growth has been a common thread running through the history of many an East Asian nation. But preferences over spending the hard-earned money diffe

What is “Vintage” in IR? A writer's note

The style of writing in international relations (IR) has evolved in recent decades. The lessons of “vintage” IR, to which we return in this article, have been largely forgotten by those writing in the discipline today. A merit will be substantial, we argue, in drawing more heavily from works by previous masters. Several lessons in style follow

The trilateral cooperation of China, South Korea and Japan : a sign of regional shifts

The separate trilateral cooperation mechanism among Japan, the Republic of Korea (thereafter Korea) and the People’s Republic of China (thereafter China) emerged from a wider framework for cooperation, the ASEAN Plus Three. To the scholarship on that framework, the new development constituted a puzzle, as the scholars considered a scenario for trilateral cooperation mechanism without ASEAN as highly unlikely. Instead, it took seriously prospects for Sino-Japanese competition and divisions running deep throughout all of Northeast Asia. Despite the obstacles that seemed insurmountable, a separate trilateral cooperation mechanism emerged in 2008. My argument to explain this development reaches back to regional sources. I introduce the analytical framework centred on foreign-policy preferences and outcomes to argue that collective outcomes originate neither in strategies of individual states nor in their bilateral relations, but through interaction at the level of a region; I also argue that the Trilateral Cooperation is a shift in regional affairs, but it is far from being a genuine revolution. I argue that ASEAN Plus Three provided a cooperative context for their relations in Asia. This thesis argues that for Asian international relations, the Trilateral Cooperation mechanism is neither a revolution nor an insignificant development, but a sign of shifts in regional affairs. While previous scholarship–as reviewed in chap. 2–focused on obstacles to cooperation, my research emphasised the incentives. Even though a ‘trilateral cooperation’ may seem a vision too distant from the three states’ preferences, through interaction they achieved an outcome of cooperation in International Relations (chap. 1). Intentions of Japan, Korea, and China vis-à-vis Northeast Asian regional cooperation differ (chaps. 3, 4, and 5), but they share a participation in regional initiatives. Through a study of literature, official documents, and interviews, I re-picture foreign-policy profiles of these Northeast Asian states: albeit none of them was reaching for the Trilateral Cooperation in its specific form, this forum emerged as a side-effect of their regional interactions. This research implies that picturing state interests per ‘nation’ state leads to a stalemate in explanations. We can overcome this through allowing for side-effects of state interactions, which explain more effectively how preferences of the states can produce outcomes in International Relations

Getting Asia right and advancing the field of IR

Why, we have to ask, have putatively inadequate ‘Western’ IR theories been applied over and over again to explain and understand Asian international relations? How can we develop more satisfying explanations of the international politics of Asia? In relation to such questions, this article demonstrates how academic disciplinary socialisation entails competition and selection, which tends towards the elimination of approaches or explanations that do not fit into the socialised practice, without generating new ones. It is argued here that interweaving existing IR theories with Asia's empirical material and remoulding the theories through gathering empirical evidence on the regional reality and converting it into theoretical variables, comparable in the field of IR, should be our goal. In order to apprehend Asian international relations better and to contribute to advancing the discipline of IR, we need an accumulation of theoretical knowledge sensitive to and attentive to local difference