To analyze how regional cooperation strategies for Northeast Asia’s regionalism initiated by governments of three major countries ,Korea, Japan, and China, have been chronologically evolved within the context of regional dynamics and international p...
To analyze how regional cooperation strategies for Northeast Asia’s regionalism initiated by governments of three major countries ,Korea, Japan, and China, have been chronologically evolved within the context of regional dynamics and international paradigm shift, this thesis examined how, when, why Northeast Asia’s regional institutionalization has been advanced to some degree on the basis of the recent literatures on Northeast Asia’s regionalism - the Critical Juncture Framework model and Political Will model. The thesis conducted a comparative analysis, with three variables: Security-related Crisis (SRC), Financially induced Crisis (FIC), and Political Will (PW), to find out which factor has mainly affected the evolution of Northeast Asia’s regionalism. The thesis classified every regional cooperation strategies of three countries into three different categories: SRC, FIC, and PW based on the initial condition of each strategy whether it was a product of crisis or top leader’s political leadership, analyzes whether each regional cooperation strategy brought about any variations in regional institutional arrangement or not, and figures out which variable among three is the most effective one in explaining the evolution of Northeast Asia’s institutionalization at the regional level. Finally, the thesis, based on the comparative analysis, concluded that Political Will (PW) has been the most effective factor to gear up Northeast Asia’s regionalism.