CIAO DATE: 06/2012
Volume: 12, Issue: 2
May 2012
China's rise and middle power democracies: Canada and Australia compared (PDF)
Andrew O'Neil, James Manicom
Assessments of how international actors are responding to China's rise typically focus on rival great powers or on China's Asian neighbors. In these cases, relative power, geographic proximity, and regional institutions have conditioned relationships with China. The relationship of China with the developing world has mainly been defined by power asymmetry and the appeal of the Chinese governance model to authoritarian regimes. Largely absent from this discussion is an understanding of how Western middle power democracies are responding to China's rise. This article compares how Canada and Australia - two Western democratic states with prominent middle power foreign policy traditions - are responding to the rise of China. The two case studies are similar in many respects: both are resource-based economies with a track record of bilateral and institutional engagement in the Asia-Pacific, and both are key US allies. These similarities allow differences in the Canadian and Australian responses to China's rise to be isolated in the political, economic, and strategic realms.
Japan's response to the changing global order: the case of a 'Gaggle of Gs' (PDF)
Hugo Dobson
Over recent years, media, academic, and policy-makers' attention has focused on changes in the global order from a unipolar to a multipolar world. The emergence of the Group of 20 (G20) since 2008 as the ‘premier forum for international economic cooperation', which includes a number of developed and developing countries, and its ‘eclipse' of the Group of 8 (G8) summit are acknowledged as some of the most salient symptoms of this shift. This article takes the intensive period of ‘G' summitry between 2008 and 2011 as a pertinent case study to begin to explore the concrete responses of key protagonists to this reconfiguration of the architecture of global governance specifically and thereby the recent shift in the global order more broadly. In the specific case of Japan, widely assumed to be a declining power, the article highlights both consistency and change in the responses of and strategies employed by Japanese policy-makers within ‘G' summitry. Various theoretical positions can account for this to differing degrees which also bring into relief the ultimately contradictory trajectory of Japan's response to the changing global order.
Debating Japan's intervention to tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden: beyond mainstream paradigms (PDF)
L. Black
The literature on Japan's international security policy, including overseas interventions, since the end of the Cold War has focused on Japan's emergence as a ‘normal' state. This discourse is informed by realist theory, which posits that states aim to increase their material power to secure themselves in a hostile anarchical order. This article explores the maritime security role of the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) to elucidate alternative theoretical paths that shed new light on Japan's foreign interventions. Specifically, a critical constructivist approach is applied to demonstrate the unique maritime security responsibilities that the JCG has assumed in line with Japan's pacifist identity and even at the expense of the Maritime Self-defence Forces, as demonstrated in Diet debates on Japan's Anti-Piracy Measures Bill in April 2009. Rather than pressuring states to become ‘normal', there is much to be gained from understanding how identities inform alternative approaches in International Relations.
Japan's Middle East policy: 'still mercantile realism' (PDF)
Yukiko Miyagi
Japan's vital interests, both its energy security and US alliance, are at stake in the Middle East. Change in Japan's Middle East policy is charted over three periods, from a stance independent of the United States to one increasingly aligned with US policy. This is explained in terms of four variables: level of US hegemony, threats in East Asia, energy vulnerabilities in the Middle East, and normative change inside Japan. Japan's policy in Middle East/North Africa reflects its general move toward a more militarily enhanced version of mercantile realism.
Hyon Joo Yoo
Since the 1990s, Japan and the Republic of Korea have chosen dissimilar policy options with respect to the US-led missile defense (MD) systems in East Asia. What explains the two countries' dissimilar MD strategies? Inspired by neoclassical realism, this study introduces a framework of domestic hurdles that combines Randall Schweller's cohesion model and Jeffry Taliaferro's resource extraction model. It sheds light on the degree of elite cohesion and social and economic impediments as key causal determinants that impede balancing against external threats. Although the influence of systemic variables that suppose optimal policy options, such as balancing, domestic hurdles impede or delay such options. This study will provide useful contributions to international relations by offering comparative and theoretical analyses on different paths that Tokyo and Seoul have chosen for their MD policies.
The Diplomatic History of Postwar Japan edited by Makoto Iokibe (PDF)
Christopher W. Hughes
Makoto Iokibe is, without question, the leading academic and public intellectual of his generation working on issues of Japan's diplomacy both historically and in the contemporary period. Iokibe has done great service for the Japanese academy in his authoritative studies of United States–Japan relations, and in his contribution to public life through performing key roles on prime ministerial advisory commissions and as president of the National Defense Academy. Iokibe is also known for helping to nurture a generation of highly talented Japanese researchers in the fields of diplomatic history and contemporary international relations.
China, The United States, and Global Order by Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter (PDF)
Shogo Suzuki
At a time when American power is seen by many pundits to be in decline, one of the most important and pressing security issues that continue to capture the attention of the policy and scholarly communities is the rise of China and the threat it may pose to the global order. The People's Republic of China (PRC) is the last remaining communist great power, and its different system of governance makes it the ‘odd one out' in the post-Cold War international community, with seemingly different values which are often antithetical to the West. This, coupled with its rapidly growing economic, political, and military power, is what makes China a source of anxiety. As China is not a democracy, is it more prone to belligerent behavior? Furthermore, how long is it going to be satisfied with the status quo, where Western liberal democracies have long been in a position to set the ‘rules of the game'? Is Beijing going to use its newly found power to challenge Western dominance?