Agents

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In order to analyze speech acts related to Cross-Strait relations, I will take a look at sources that provide insights into how norms and rules influence behavior, such as written official documents (white papers, laws etc.), texts of speeches given on meaningful occasions by agents, documents by key individuals, press releases, interviews etc. Therefore, in the following chapters, source or content analysis of speech acts in these documents will be conducted. Apart from these written accounts, there is also a non-linguistic component, such as the participation of key party or government leaders in certain festivals or other practices that these agents observe in order to convey their interests and meanings. Using secondary literature to supplement these sources will help to put them into the appropriate context. I will now turn to discuss some features of agents and how these “relevant participants” can be determined in the Cross-Strait relationship.

2.4 Agents

At various points in my reading of rule-based constructivist ontology and the particular focus on rules and speech acts, I have referred to agents. It has been mentioned before that agents use speech acts to respond to rules and thereby influence the environment they act in. By being able to affect rules, agents can be defined as the active participants in society that act on behalf of a larger collective, for “collectives do not make choices; individuals do as agents of collectives” (ONUF 1989: 260). In order to act on their respective environment, agents use speech acts, that is, they make statements that in turn are supposed to make other people act in a certain way. The way that people are able to act on the world in which they live makes agency a social condition (ONUF 1998: 60). Agency usually consists of statuses, offices, and roles which depend on the respective institutional context (ONUF 1998: 72).

The relationship between rules and agents is not one-sided, instead they are mutually dependent and constitutive: rules do present agents with certain choices in that they help to define situations from any agent's point of view (O^NUF 1998: 60) and prescribe what kind of goals are the appropriate ones to achieve; however the ability of agents to break rules shows that they “are not only programmed by rules and norms, but [that] they reproduce and change by their practice the normative structures by which they are able to act” (K^RATOCHWIL 1989: 61). Therefore, on the one hand,

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rules (as well as their related practices) form a stable pattern that functions as an institutional context in which agents make choices. On the other hand, agents may also chose to circumvent or redefine already existing rules or try to create new ones altogether. Whatever agents do (=say), they are usually aware of their own identities and their choices and they are only limited by the actions of other agents in society.

Agents try to get what they want by “skillful manipulation of symbols, control over material values, and use of violence” (ONUF 1989: 228).

Who, then, are the relevant agents in the Cross-Strait relationship, whose speech acts are used to deal with the predominant “one China” rule and who construct an identity for Taiwan vis-a-vis China? I will argue that the main agents can be summarized into the following three groups:

Firstly, they are the high-ranking government officials on both sides of the Taiwan Strait including the Chinese and Taiwanese presidents as well as officials who are involved in conducting foreign policy and the personnel that is directly responsible for conducting Cross-Strait relations. On the Taiwanese side these include officials working for the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). Their counterparts in China include China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) and China's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO). For Taiwan in particular the analysis has to further include politicians of the opposition parties, who as agents with very different ideas as to the nature of Cross-Strait relations, have tried to influence and limit the decision-making process of the respective government officials, especially since the late 1980s. The interaction between agents in the ruling and opposition parties has necessarily led to compromises, adjustments and concessions time and again and was one of the main factors that have prevented any side from only pursuing their own respective goals when in government. As a democratic society since the late 1980s, these interactions were furthermore grounded in the perception and the expectations of the general public regarding Cross-Strait relations. Although agents may act on behalf of a larger collective, due to the rules and practices of a democratic society, they still have to take the preferences of this collective into account. The effect of domestic politics on Cross-Strait policy makers in Taiwan has been analyzed in detail by W^U (2005b).

Over past decades several public and private institutions in Taiwan have conducted

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surveys and compiled statistics to find out what exactly the preferences of Taiwan's public are and they have documented how these preferences have changed over time.

Results of these surveys will be included in the analysis in order to find out how speech acts performed by agents relate to the ideas of the general public in Taiwan.

Secondly, there are the agents from the United States. Due to the US' close historical ties to Taiwan dating back to the early Cold War era, the US has always been an important player in the Cross-Strait relationship and continues to be involved in the island's security, for example through weapons sales but also by making certain statements. Any statement made and action taken by the US president or US foreign policy makers regarding the Cross-Strait relationship is widely perceived and scrutinized on both sides of the Strait as possible changes in US policies are generally assumed to have severe repercussions on Cross-Strait issues. This is even more the case as the US does not have a single authoritative document that characterizes its Taiwan policy and has for the most part adhered to an approach of “strategic ambiguity” (see C^HENG 2008; H^SU 2010).

Thirdly, academia has necessarily contributed to the construction of the Cross-Strait relationship by analyzing, discussing, giving opinions on Cross-Cross-Strait developments and especially by making policy recommendations.²² As Onuf has pointed out, students of International Relations (as well as any other discipline) may see themselves as observers, but while they communicate and speak about this world that they observe, they necessarily emphasize certain aspects over others, impose boundaries and otherwise influence the view of their subject matter. By making their observations normative, they actively take part in the process of construction for they themselves are never able to completely leave their own constructions (ONUF 1989:

43; ONUF 2002: 120-124).

I argue that together these three roughly defined groups of agents are mainly responsible for conducting the Cross-Strait relationship by what they say and do in the pursuit of their respective goals. Written materials, especially official documents by ROC, PRC and US agencies as well as academic literature will consequently be the main sources of analysis. A discussion of speech acts related to three discourses that are aimed at influencing the current institution of Cross-Strait relations will show how

22 For example, the role of intellectuals in developing nationalism on both sides has recently been analyzed by HAO (2010).

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these agents interact with that environment in the following chapters.