The Sources of Japanese Conduct: Asymmetric Security Dependence, Role Conceptions, and the Reactive Behavior in Response to U.S. Demands

Japan;Korea;reactive;foreign policy;Gulf War;Iraq War;security dependence;alliance management;Political Science

Chang, BooseungDoran, Charles F. ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Japan;    Korea;    reactive;    foreign policy;    Gulf War;    Iraq War;    security dependence;    alliance management;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37187/CHANG-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

Despite her enormous economic size and large population, Japan was reluctant to participate in the management of global affairs during the Cold War, but once the United States made her request clear, Japan tended to be flexible in accommodating U.S. demands. In 1988, Kent E. Calder presented the reactive state thesis (RST), calling this peculiar aspect of Japanese policy behavior reactive. According to Calder, Japanese foreign policy behavior remains to be reactive and its main explanatory variable is the fragmented governmental structure. The main arguments of this dissertation are (1) that the Japanese reactive behavior in the area of security policy indeed changed little, but (2) that the main explanatory variable is external rather than domestic. As an alternative causal variable, this thesis indicates the asymmetric security dependence on the United States. We reached these arguments through operationalization and comparison. In order to test the validity of the RST, we operationalized the concept of reactivity and applied it to the Japanese responses to the Gulf War and the Iraq War. The result showed no significant behavioral variation between the cases. In order to test the causal argument of the RST, we selected South Korea, where, unlike Japan, the executive power is highly concentrated, and compared the two countries’ responses to the two wars. The reactive behavior was uniformly observed across the cases despite the cross-national difference in domestic environments. The suggested causal chain for the reactive behavior is that the security dependence limits the capacity of the reactive state, and suppresses the proactivity towards external challenges. At the same time, it influences the role conceptions of core decision-makers, creating a shared feeling that once the United States demands assistance, it is inevitable to provide it. In addition to the continuity, we also noted the variations across the cases. We found two types of variations: the variation in the extent that the reactive states tried to discount U.S. demands under the limit of the reactivity and the variation in the size of the actually delivered assistance. As the causal variables for the first type, we suggested the degree of fragmentation and the existence of a veto player within the decision unit, and for the second type, we suggested the U.S. preconception on the providing capacity of a reactive state as an explanatory variable.