CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION
6.1 RESEARCH FINDINGS
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Chapter 6: Conclusion
6.1 Research Findings
The comfort women, Dokdo Island and East Sea all have an extremely important symbolic meaning for Korean national identity. South Korean domestic and political conditions slowly changed as a result of democratization in 1987, and this in turn gave rise to a plethora of new civil society, governmental and non-governmental groups dedicated to these issues. For this reason, these three issues have emerged as critical diplomatic points of contention between Korea and Japan following the ROK’s democratization.
Since the 1990s, the comfort women, Dokdo and the East Sea have typically reemerged as bilateral conflicts between Korea and Japan whenever the question of Japan's past actions has been raised in response to comments made by Japanese officials, or due to the approval by Japan's Ministry of Education of textbooks with content unappealing to Koreans. Moreover, politicians have frequently relied on anti-Japanese sentiments for various political purposes, for example when their domestic popularity was low.
Also beginning in the 1990s, the idea of middlepowerism began to enter into the political culture of South Korea, and in the subsequent decades, Korean scholars and officials have consistently proclaimed their country and its foreign policy to be based on the theory of middle power. Academic observers of the nation’s alleged middlepowerism, whether supportive or critical, have mostly analyzed the county by looking at its policies and actions at the global level, without paying sufficient attention to Korea’s problematic bilateral relationship with Japan.
.According to Chapnick (1999), approaches to analyzing middle powers can be organized into three broad categories: functional, positional and behavioral. The behavioral perspective
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holds that middle powers’ foreign policies are defined by their commitment to multilateralism, to compromise and to conflict resolution. Middle powers tend to bring problems for multilateral arbitration to project an image of good international citizenship, tend to seek compromise in international disputes, and tend to exercise leadership on major issues to prevent conflict and promote stability. However, the prevailing assumption throughout the literature is that middle powers are not among the disputants in international conflicts.
For this research, the behavioral perspective was applied to three different examples of ROK-Japan disputes as a way of testing middle power foreign policy when the middle power is itself one of the disputants. The three bilateral disputes were regarding the comfort women, sovereignty over Dokdo Island and the naming of the East Sea/Sea of Japan. In an attempt to evaluate Korea’s middlepowerness in bilateral disputes with Japan, this thesis sought to answer three questions:
1. MULTILATERALISM: When it comes to Korea’s historical and territorial disputes with Japan, do they favor bilateral or multilateral solutions?
2. COMPROMISE: When there’s a chance to make a deal in each of their disputes with Japan, does Korea offer to negotiate, or show willingness to accept negotiations from the Japanese side? Or do they shun compromise when the opportunities arise?
3. LEADERSHIP: In each of the three disputes, does Korea take initiative to move the conflicts in the direction of peace & stability, or do they tend to take provocative actions that aggravate the problems even further?
Comfort Women
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Although multiple Korean administrations have tried to exercise leadership in an effort to work toward resolving the comfort women conflict, their ability to maintain this posture is limited by powerful and sometimes violent domestic opposition. And although they seem willing to negotiate, all negotiations with Japan have been bilateral rather than multilateral. Finally, Park Geun-hye’s formulation of an agreement with Japan in secret, and Seoul’s general predisposition to downplay the issue, hint at Korean leaders’ desire to compromise. So on the comfort women issue, Korea confidently passed only 1 (compromise) out of the 3 key criteria of middlepowermanship.
Dokdo
Unlike with the comfort women issue, which is primarily led from the bottom up through civil society, action on the Dokdo issue has been taken up by the state as much as it has been by citizen activism. When the Korean government has pressured Japan, it has come about by domestic pressure on the national government to take action, as well as independent action of the state without any citizen pressure. In many cases the state and society have reinforced one another.
To summarize, Korea has repeatedly turned down opportunities to solve the Dokdo problem multilaterally at the ICJ, its domestic politics reward leaders for shunning compromise, and indulging in hardline rhetoric as a way to boost popularity amid scandals has been a popular approach by many of Korea’s former Presidents. Altogether, this prevents Korea from exercising leadership to enhance peace and regional stability. So on the Dokdo dispute, Korea failed to perform in all three of the key areas of middlepowermanship.
East Sea
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Korea has engaged in decades of work with multilateral organizations to try and settle the issue, though ultimately decided to bypass these groups in order to achieve its goal of dual name usage for the Sea. This has proven to be more effective tactic for them. Moreover, Korea asserts that since “East Sea” doesn’t name any specific country, its a neutral name and considers that a compromise. But since East Sea also happens to be the name that the ROK prefers, this can’t actually be considered a compromise position.15
Finally, the ROK’s apparent disinterest in promoting the term West Sea or South Sea suggests that nationalism plays a major role in their East Sea agenda; drawing on anti-Japanese nationalism is not an effective way to gain cooperation from Japan, and thus isn't in line with middle power foreign policy because does the exact opposite of encouraging conflict resolution.
So on the East Sea issue, Korea partially passes only 1 (multilateralism) and fails on 2 (compromise and leadership) of the key criteria of middlepowermanship.
Below is a summary of the results of this study. In the category of multilateralism, Korea passes in only one case - East Sea. In the category of compromise, Korea again passes in only one case - the comfort women. In its willingness and ability to exercise leadership toward peace and stability, Korea fails in all three test cases. Failures are marked with an “X” and successes are marked with an“O.”
Comfort Women
Dokdo East Sea
Multilateralism X X O
Compromise O X X
15 Except for the single case of Roh Myu-hun’s “Sea of Friendship” offer.
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Leadership X X X
Table 1: Results of the analysis of ROK’s behaviors in three bilateral disputes with Japan.