Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Asia
Author(s): Kent Calder and Min Ye
Source: Journal of East Asian Studies , MAY–AUGUST 2004, Vol. 4, No. 2
(MAY–AUGUST 2004), pp. 191-226
Published by: Cambridge University Press
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23417914?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Journal of East Asian Studies
191
Current Explanations
Critical Juncture
Security Crises
Likelv Unlikelv
Southern Cone
Northeast Asia
Mexico
Critical Juncture
War) (problems
with
deepening)
ADB (1965) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Success
(US/Japan) (Vietnam)
ASPAC (1966) Yes Yes Yes Failure—
(ROK) (ROK) defunct
1974—
anti-PRC
(consultative/
nongov.)
continues
Table 2 continued
Preexisting Conditions
Critical Juncture
OPTAD (late
1970s)
PEBC (1980) Yes Partial
(US/Aus success
Source: Peter Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, eds., Network Power (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997), and supplementary data.
The historic origins of the Northeast Asian organization gap lie in the
tumultuous early Korean War era, particularly from November 1950 to
the spring of 1951, during which China's abrupt and massive military
intervention greatly intensified the general sense of political-military
urgency in the region. This was the turbulent period during which the
San Francisco system emerged, used here to refer to the comprehensive
structure of interrelated political-military and economic commitments
between the United States and its Pacific allies, epitomized by the San
Francisco Peace Treaty of September 1951 and related arrangements.26
We regard the complex and pressured process in which San Fran
cisco was negotiated among the United States and its allies as crucial in
determining the profile of the subsequent Northeast Asian Cold War
regional setting. Indeed, that process gave birth, against the initial pref
erence of multilateralists at the U.S. State Department not to mention
leaders in Seoul, Manila, and Taipei, to the hub-and-spokes network of
bilateral security arrangements that was perpetuated throughout the
1950s and beyond. This framework fundamentally distanced Japan,
Korea, and Taiwan from one another diplomatically, despite their sub
stantial mutual economic integration and similarities in domestic politi
cal structure.27
From the Pacific Pact to the San Francisco System. Looking at the
preferences of countries involved in the postwar negotiations on a
Forty years after the Korean conflict, as the Cold War that it catalyzed
was finally waning, a rethinking of Asian institutions took on momen
tum from a new regionalism emerging worldwide40 and from the steady
economic rise of Asia. Formal and multilateral institution-building
concepts were proposed recurrently across the region. Despite the intel
lectual ferment, however, these proposals for smaller and more exclu
sively Asian organizations failed miserably in the decade prior to 1997.
Only when the traumatic financial crisis of 1997-1998 struck Asia
were regionalist ideas resurgent and transformed into collective action,
as demonstrated by the vigorous postcrisis networking and institution
building of the 1999-2000 period.
From the AMF to the CM1. In the late 1980s, the East Asian Economic
Grouping (EAEG) was first proposed by Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad of Malaysia as the Uruguay Round seemed to falter. From
the start, Mahathir's initiative was roundly attacked by the United
States. Indonesia, the largest member of the Association of South East
Asian Nations (ASEAN), was also immediately cool to the EAEG con
cept. The Japanese government, with conflicting incentives and con
fronted with internal cross-pressures, proved wary of antagonism from
Washington, indicating equivocally that it would wait for an ASEAN
decision before clarifying its own stance.
Mahathir revived his regionalist proposal at the 1991 ASEAN meet
ing in Kuala Lumpur, urging ASEAN endorsement. "If ASEAN is to
have a bigger say in trade negotiations internationally, it must work
together with the Northeast Asian countries," Mahathir argued.41
Mahathir broached the idea of EAEG uniting ASEAN with Indochina,
China, South Korea, and Japan as a joint lobby to counter Western pre
eminence.42 He conceived of EAEG serving as an exclusivist alternative
to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, including
only the eleven Asian members in APEC but omitting the Anglo-Sax
ons: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
EAEG proved to be extremely controversial in later years. Critics
of the initiative argued that it threatened to divide the Pacific down the
middle and was thus politically and economically infeasible. After
lengthy debates and intense exchanges between the opposing sides, the
proposal was ultimately renamed and substantially reshaped, being
accepted in diluted form, as the East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC)
within APEC. It has in effect been kept on the backburner ever since.43
In sharp contrast to Japan's 1991 hesitation in entertaining the
EAEG idea, Tokyo itself initiated an even more controversial regional
proposal for the Asian Monetary Fund, which was informally circulat
ing well before the onset of financial crisis in 1997. The Japanese vice
minister of finance for international affairs, Sakakikara Eisuke, had
been canvassing support for the AMF idea since at least 1995, and a
well-formulated concept was being circulated during the year before
the Asian financial crisis. The AMF was officially proposed at the G7
meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Hong Kong in
September 1997, with Japan offering to create a U.S.$100 billion fund
to stabilize exchange rates in Asia. If realized, the AMF would have
allowed Japan to shape regional policy outcomes more effectively
while also providing a greater headline figure for the overall bailout
package, thus helping to calm financial markets.
The AMF received a warm reception in virtually every Southeast
Asian capital. Taiwan and South Korea were also favorably disposed.44
The United States, however, strongly opposed the plan and lobbied
China to resist it also, invoking the specter of Japanese hegemony to
reinforce residual Chinese aversion.
The whole affair reached a climax at the Regional Finance Minis
ters' meeting on November 21 in Hong Kong, which the United States
and IMF attended as observers. Whereas ASEAN and South Korea
expressed support for the AMF proposal, Hong Kong and Australia
remained neutral, and China voiced no opinion. The AMF proposal was
summarily rejected. In its place came a substantially downgraded
Manila Framework, which quietly dropped the AMF's most controver
sial features and brought the regionalist challenge in Asian interna
tional finance to a temporary end.
The 1997 financial crisis in Asia started with a slump in the Thai
baht. After Thailand came Indonesia. When Indonesia was forced to
devalue in August 1997, speculation began against Korea, whose banks
were heavily invested in Indonesia and which itself was heavily lever
the arrangements that they announced. And the IMF did not endorse them
until a year later.
Within three years of the Chiangmai meeting, eleven bilateral
swap arrangements had been put into place, with three more being
negotiated.51 These arrangements now include all the major nations of
the East Asian region, with three Northeast Asian countries holding
particularly large foreign exchange reserves—Japan, China, and South
Korea—playing the central role. These three nations have also con
cluded substantial swap agreements with one another.
Important new patterns of Northeast Asian regionalist networking,
with policy implications, have gradually emerged since Chiangmai, in
the context of East Asian financial cooperation.52 Most spectacular
have been the Boao Northeast Asian Economic Summits, held on
Hainan since 2000, at the initiative of China. In 2002 Japanese prime
minister Koizumi and a broad range of other regional leaders attended,
with the gathering beginning to rival regional activities of the Davos
World Economic Forum in stature.
Critical junctures can explain both the origin and the narrowing of the
organization gap in Northeast Asia. The contexts of the two periods,
Northeast Asia in the 1950s and the 1990s—both in power structure
and institutional setting—are sharply different. The war-torn region
amounted to little in the global economy four decades ago, but by the
1990s it had become one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing eco
nomic zones in the world. In the 1950s the region consisted of either
former colonies or areas previously under militarist and fascist rule.
Today Japan and South Korea are mature democratic countries, and
China's political regime has become more liberal and pluralistic than it
was in the 1950s. Yet the critical juncture framework applies in both
contexts, with critical junctures deeply influencing the institutional
configuration in both eras.
The critical juncture approach, it must be reiterated, does not
ignore the importance of institutions, culture, or changing power con
figurations. It only maintains that these important background parame
ters operate through the concrete decisions of individuals because those
individuals have multiple options among which to choose, outcomes
are indeterminate, and the dynamics of the decision process itself have
important bearing on ultimate outcomes.
As the foregoing process tracing of the Korean War period made
clear, a war-driven critical juncture fundamentally changed the bar
gaining structure in the region and the preferences of the nations
involved. The time pressure was so pervasive that the realist concept of
power distribution failed to determine the outcome: the powerful
United States initially contemplated a multilateral Pacific Pact yet set
tled for the more limited, bilateral San Francisco system. The outbreak
of the Korean War changed national perception of interests, with
national policies shifting significantly during the interactions among
individual decisionmakers.
Process tracing also makes clear that a critical juncture was central
to the creation of the San Francisco system of political-economic rela
tions in the Pacific. The Korean War and the political imperatives of the
San Francisco Treaty process limited the time available to realize a col
lective security arrangement in Asia, analogous to the NATO frame
work. Yet the United States, represented by Dulles, was profoundly
convinced that a limited bilateral arrangement to consolidate the U.S.
relationship with Japan should be the highest priority for the United
States.
Despite an overwhelming political-military presence in the region,
the United States still lacked the time and capacity to fully coordinate
the establishment of collective security architecture in Northeast Asia;
it settled instead for the second-best San Francisco system. The contrast
between the Pacific Pact's failure and the San Francisco system's real
ization clearly shows that crisis as a catalyst can change important indi
vidual decisions and contextual factors. The critical juncture model
thus cogently explains the regional institution-building of the 1950s
surrounding the Korean Peninsula.
The Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s, like its Korean War
counterpart nearly half a century earlier, similarly shows that major
political-economic turbulence can be a catalyst for formal regionalist
institution-building in Northeast Asia. Before the financial crisis-driven
critical juncture was visible, the AMF, supported with both material
resources and political will, effectively failed. When the critical juncture
was clearly present, in the perceptions of decisionmakers and technical
specialists, formal regionalism, epitomized in ASEAN+3 and the CMI,
achieved major progress. Correlation is clear. The explicit causal link,
however, remains missing.53
To clarify causation, a different sort of analysis is needed. In this
section, we draw on the general logic of collective action. We explain
the failure of formal regionalism in Asia from the 1950s to the 1990s as
a combined product of its complicated collective action problem and
the failure of outside powers to support a resolution of that problem.
The institution-building effect of the region's post-financial crisis crit
ical juncture flows directly from that period's catalytic capacity to alle
viate collective action problems.
In the behavioral sciences, two general obstacles are said to hinder col
lective action, even when interests are congruent.54 One is the incentive
to free-ride, and the other is the logical difficulty that the individual
fraction of the common interest is insufficient to justify the cost of indi
The Asian financial crisis eased Northeast Asia's four collective action
problems. The critical juncture had three major consequences: (1) mak
ing common interests visible;55 (2) establishing personal networks
among national leaders; and (3) developing political-economic mecha
nisms to counterbalance the United States.
East Asian countries have traditionally failed to see the danger of
individualistic market operations in a highly interdependent world. The
financial crisis of 1997 suddenly exposed their developmental weak
nesses, as well as their inability to cooperate, serving as rude wakeup
calls for Korea, China, Japan, and the ASEAN countries. Their strong
common interest in a more integrated regional financial market that
could insulate them from ruinous outside speculation provided power
ful incentives for activism. This visible common interest changed the
cost-benefit logic of formal regional institutions; the marginal utility of
such bodies increased, while agenda-setting and political coalition
building problems were alleviated greatly in the nations involved.
The critical juncture also produced systemic impacts facilitating
communication and coordination within the region. It began to create
networks that allowed people with few previous contacts across the
long-standing Cold War divide to systematically communicate with one
another. These networks have already begun provoking joint policy
research among such nations as China, Japan, and South Korea. The
emerging policy contacts have allowed advocates of closer integration,
in think tanks like Japan's National Institute for Research Advancement
(NIRA) and the Korean Institute for Economic Policy (KIEP), for
example, to engage in agenda-setting, leading potentially to enhanced
future regional collective action.56
Existing think tanks and epistemic communities were sensitized by
the trauma of the 1997 financial upheaval to both the possibility and the
inherent dangers of potential regional crises. By instilling a new crisis
consciousness, the unforeseen events of 1997-1998 caused them
simultaneously to reach out to counterparts elsewhere in the region and
to devise new ideas for contingency cooperation in the event of future
crises. The new organizational stimulus was compounded, in synergis
tic fashion, by new requests from top leadership, spurred by the critical
juncture of the financial crisis, for contingency planning. Japan's
NIRA, for example, thus began to focus in ways that it never had before
1997 on regional crisis management, as well as on cooperative activi
ties with regional counterparts to promote it. Such activity has laid the
Revisiting Theory
Critical Historical
Cases Juncture Realism Institutionalism
Overall (a) Explains change (a) Can explain (a) Can explain
(product of change when it continuity
individual volition results from new (b) Cannot
and imperatives power easily explain
for collective configuration discontinuous
action) (b) Cannot explain change
(b) Explains continuity in the
continuity face of changing
(general power
implication of configuration
institutions)
Kent Calder is the director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and
Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of East Asian Studies at the School of
Advanced International Studies, in Washington, D.C. He has previously taught
Notes
Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1968),
pp. 1-63. Kent Calder, as well, stresses the importance of "climactic periods"
in Japan's policymaking and political development; Kent Calder, Crisis and
Compensation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 29.
20. Joseph Nye, "Patterns and Catalysts in Regional Integration," Inter
national Organization 19, no. 4 (1965): 882.
21. Herbert Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1982).
22. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 2nd ed.
(New York: Longman, 1999).
23. Aggarwal and Morrison, Asian Pacific Crossroads, p. 36.
24. On how this makes crisis decisionmaking salient in Japanese domes
tic policy change, see Calder, Crisis and Compensation, p. 40. On the domes
tic structural factors that render at least Japanese foreign policy reactive, see
Kent Calder, "Japanese Foreign Economic Policy Formation: Explaining the
Reactive State," World Politics 40, no. 4 (1988): 517-541.
25. On the forces at work in such "debt-driven industrialization," clearly
salient in South Korea, see Jeffrey Frieden, Debt, Development, and Democ
racy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
26. On this concept, and its relationship to broader international relations
theory, see Kent E. Calder, "Securing Security Through Prosperity: The San
Francisco System in Comparative Perspective," Pacific Review 17, no. 1 (Jan
uary 2004): 135-157. Some related elements of the overall political-economic
structure, such as the ANZUS Treaty among the United States, Australia, and
New Zealand, predated the San Francisco Treaty, while other elements like the
U.S.-Japan Treaty of Commerce and Navigation succeeded it.
27. The developmental path taken by Japan, and subsequently pursued by
Korea and Taiwan, has conformed nicely to the flying-geese model and pro
duction cycle, with Taiwan and Korea following smoothly in Japan's wake.
Economic development naturally linked Japan, the newly industrialized areas,
and subsequently China through integration in a production cycle and deepen
ing intraregion trade and investment. Yet intimacy in economic terms has never
been able to produce anything close to formal regional institutions. See Bruce
Cumings, "The Origin and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Econ
omy," International Organization 38, no. 1 (1984): 1-40.
28. On the idea of indeterminate prediction of regional institutions, see
Steve Weber, "Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power," International Organi
zation 46, no. 3 (1992): 633-680.
29. Michael Schaller, "Japan and the United States Reconsidered," www.
econstrate.org.
30. Ibid.
31. Michael Schaller, Altered States: The United States and Japan Since
the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 33; and U.S.
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: East Asia (Wash
ington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1951), p. 132.