Regionalism and Critical Junctures: Explaining the "Organization Gap" in Northeast Asia

Kent Calder,Min Ye 동아시아연구원 2004 Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.4 No.2

Northeast Asia, consisting of Japan, Korea, and China, has featured a distinct paradox: growing economic integration and stagnant political cooperation for over three decades. Indeed, the regions political cooperation has traditionally lacked formal, multilateral, and regionally exclusive institutions, producing a pronounced organization gap compared with Europe, the Americas, Africa, and even the Gulf. After critically assessing current literature explaining this organization gap, this paper offers an alternative framework, that of critical juncture, explaining regional institution building in terms of a crisis-driven dynamic. This framework incorporates the significant role that crisis plays as catalyst for regional cooperation; it argues that crisis can help the region transcend the endemic collective action problem in Northeast Asia, and open windows of opportunity for regional institution building. Two sets of before and after case comparisons are used to test the framework. A Korean War comparison explains the origins of the organization gap, while an Asian financial crisis comparison elucidates its narrowing. This paper concludes with an analytical discourse on why critical junctures shape institutional profiles in Northeast Asia, and how the concept may have heuristic value in explaining regionalism worldwide.

Security and Democratization in East Asia

Kent E. Calder 한국국제정치학회 2004 國際政治論叢 Vol.44 No.5

70 Years after WW2: The Dynamics of the Northeast Asian Security Environment : Remembering from Afar: The United States and the Seventieth Anniversary of Peace in the Pacific

( Kent E. Calder ) 한국국방연구원 2015 The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis Vol.27 No.2

The United States shares with many Pacific powers both relief that the world returned to peace, after the greatest conflagration in world history, and pride in its role in the subsequent transformation of world affairs. Human rights and human dignity strike a deep chord with Americans. Distinct from Asian nations on whose soil the war was largely fought, however, the United States is more detached, in general, from wartime bitterness, and places priority on forward-looking, multi-tiered institution-building across Northeast Asia. Stable relations of mutual respect among the United States and its two major regional allies, the Republic of Korea and Japan, are a special priority, with broader regional confidence-building also considered important.

Renaissance of the Rimlands: How Eurasia’s Transformation at Sea Re-Shapes Geopolitics on Land

Kent E. Calder 고려대학교 일민국제관계연구원 2023 국제관계연구 Vol.28 No.2

The functional role of Eurasia’s surrounding sea lanes has changed substantially over the past three decades, with broader implications on land for the continent’s role in world affairs. Until recent decades largely a venue for local trading, since the early 1990s the Indian Ocean and surrounding bodies of water have become arenas for intense, large-scale trans-continental commerce, as the economies of the rimlands have expanded. Energy, industrial raw materials, and food products have flowed to Northeast Asia and Europe, balanced by industrial exports. The expansion of commodity trade has much further to go, especially in the South and Southeast Asian rimlands of the Indian Ocean, as both energy and food consumption expand from their still-low per capita base in these heavily populated nations. Three other dimensions of transformation complement the expansion of commodity trade and manufactured exports. Beneath the seas, raw material extraction is rising, even as the information revolution transforms Eurasia’s oceans, through the rapid expansion of undersea fiber-optic cables, and sub-surface military technology advances. Global warming is also making Arctic transport and resource development, long rendered impractical by climate, increasingly feasible. These multiple maritime transformations all have geopolitical implications on land. In the aggregate, the changes benefit China and Russia, rendering their prospective partnership of enhanced global strategic value. The embedded strengths of the industrial democracies, however, remain formidable, especially in the technological realm, leveraged by their market orientation. The changing geopolitics of Eurasia’s waterways thus intensifies challenges to the industrial democracies, increasing the future importance of multilateral collaboration, although whether these marginal changes in capacity will provoke thorough going systemic transformation still remains unlikely.

Asian Public Diplomacy in the US

Kent E. Calder 동아시아재단 2015 Global Asia Vol.10 No.4

The Outlier Alliance: US-Japan Security Ties in Comparative Perspective

( Kent E Calder ) 한국국방연구원 2003 The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis Vol.15 No.2

This paper examines the US-Japan bilateral security alliance in comparative perspective in an effort to identify distinctive structural features and evolutionary trends. The policy objective is to understand the prospective cohesion of the alliance relationship between these two political/economic powers, which between them generate over 46 percent of global GDP and account for nearly 50 percent of the world`s military expenditure. A comparison is made with the contemporary US-Japan alliance and other security alliances in the Pacific and the rest of the industrialized world. Comparisons are made within three basic dimensions: (A) Patterns of security cooperation; (B) Political-economic linkages within bilateral alliance-related relationships; and (C) Asymmetries in security and economic spheres. The final section of the paper asks: "Why?"-after identifying the underlying causal dynamics that have forged the current US-Japan alliance, it enquires what these imply for that partnership`s future operation. It concludes that future consolidation is likely, with broad geo-political consequences that urgently need further exploration.

Regionalism, Alliance, and Domestic Politics: The Benelux Model and Northeast Asian Cooperation

Kent E. Calder 통일연구원 2006 International journal of korean unification studie Vol.15 No.1

Most of the literature in International Relations stresses the central role of large states in international affairs. Yet smaller states too can at times play a role more than commensurate with their economic and geo.political scale. This paper explores the potentially important role of smaller states in regional economic integration, explicating the historical role of Benelux in European integration, and extrapolating implications for Northeast Asia. Particular attention is given to the prospectively important role of Korea, and of what the Benelux precedent suggests about what that Korean role in Northeast Asian regional integration processes might prospectively be. The comparative analysis devotes special attention to the incentive structure of key sub.national interests, and to how their aggregation through democratic political processes in turn affects broader regional integration prospects. Most of the literature in International Relations stresses the central role of large states in international affairs. Yet smaller states too can at times play a role more than commensurate with their economic and geo.political scale. This paper explores the potentially important role of smaller states in regional economic integration, explicating the historical role of Benelux in European integration, and extrapolating implications for Northeast Asia. Particular attention is given to the prospectively important role of Korea, and of what the Benelux precedent suggests about what that Korean role in Northeast Asian regional integration processes might prospectively be. The comparative analysis devotes special attention to the incentive structure of key sub.national interests, and to how their aggregation through democratic political processes in turn affects broader regional integration prospects.

The Traps of Geopolitical Discourse and the Mandate for New Thinking

Kent E. Calder 동아시아재단 2014 Global Asia Vol.9 No.3

Quiet Crisis Beneath the Waves: Fiber-Optic Cables, Internet Revolution, and International Order

Kent Calder,백민정 한국국방연구원 2024 The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis Vol.36 No.1

Undersea cables have been a strategic resource for major nation-states over the years. The first international undersea cable was laid between Europe and North America in 1858, just over a decade after the first telegraph message was sent in 1844. With the advent of fiber-optic technology in the late 1980s, undersea cables took on a drastically enhanced functional role in the global political economy. Fiber-optic communications led to an explosive expansion of Internet connectivity, which inevitably flowed beneath the seas due to its cost-effectiveness and freedom from regulation. Despite its critical and rapidly increasing global importance, the undersea cable network has faced formidable challenges in its evolution over the past three decades. Most importantly, there needs to be a clearly defined, practical legal framework that regulates this profitable, high-growth, and strategically important sector. This lack of regulation has proved both a blessing and a curse for Big Tech firms that are the principal owners of undersea cables, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. A second major challenge has been the rise of mercantilist challengers to Big Tech preeminence, especially from state-sponsored Chinese enterprises. The Chinese share of international subsea fiber-optic cable has doubled over the past decade. China has also broadened cable coverage systematically to developing nations of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, with broader geopolitical implications. Concrete suggestions on how to better protect sensitive data mainly when they are physically located in international waters inside undersea cables, are explored in this article.