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The business of nationalism: how commodification sustains bilateral tensions
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The business of nationalism: how commodification sustains bilateral tensions
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
The Business of Nationalism:
How Commodification Sustains Bilateral Tensions
Jiun Bang
Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
(Political Science and International Relations)
August 2016
Committee Members
(Chair) David C. Kang, Political Science and International Relations (POIR)
Patrick James, Political Science and International Relations (POIR)
Saori N. Katada, Political Science and International Relations (POIR)
Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Sociology
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................ 1-17
Chapter 2: ‘Arrested Peace’ in Northeast Asia........................................................... 18-40
Chapter 3: Problematizing the V olcanic Model of Tensions ...................................... 41-68
Chapter 4: Measuring the Dependent Variable (DV) of Tensions ............................. 69-96
Chapter 5: The Business of Nationalism Hypothesis .............................................. 97-118
Chapter 6: A Comparative Study of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia .......... 119-160
Chapter 7: Conclusion............................................................................................ 161-176
Appendix ................................................................................................................ 177-178
References .............................................................................................................. 179-197
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
Figure 1. Different Conceptions of Tension in Inter-state Relations ............................................ 4
Figure 2. The Role of Commercial Actors in the NIC ................................................................ 11
Figure 3. COW Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) Data on Northeast Asia ....................... 28
Figure 4. Crisis Phases ................................................................................................................ 54
Figure 5. Punctuated Equilibrium and Incrementalist Models (of Rivalries) ............................. 61
Figure 6. Representational Typology of Tension Studies ........................................................... 63
Figure 7. Longitudinal Analysis of Tensions in Three Dyads (1998-2014) ................................ 83
Figure 8. Thematic Break-down of Summons ............................................................................ 86
Figure 9. Summons Based on Reciprocity .................................................................................. 92
Figure 10. The Standard One-Dimensional Conceptualization of Tensions ............................... 97
Figure 11. Anatomy of a Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC) .............................................. 111
Figure 12. Ongoing Territorial Disputes Plotted against Tension V olume and Intensity .......... 120
Figure 13. Trend in Hometown Taxes/Dues to Tsushima City ................................................. 126
Figure 14. Trend in South Korean Tourists to Tsushima Island ................................................ 128
Figure 15. South Koreans as Percentage of Total Foreign Tourists to Tsushima ...................... 129
Figure 16. Japan’s MOFA Budget on Territorial Sovereignty Protection (2005-2015) ............ 133
Figure 17. South Korea’s MOFA Budget on Territorial Sovereignty Protection (2005-2015) . 134
Figure 18. Trend in Number of Visitors to Dokdo .................................................................... 137
Figure 19. ROK’s Dokdo Sustainable Use Project (DSUP) Budget Breakdown ..................... 139
Figure 20. Comparison of Sub-national Budgets on Territorial Sovereignty Protection .......... 141
Figure 21. Trend in Hometown Taxes/Dues to Shimane Prefecture ......................................... 142
Figure 22. Japan-South Korea Bilateral Tension & Applications for Trademarks ................... 144
Figure 23. Cross-Correlation Function (CCF) of Trademarks & Tensions............................... 146
Figure 24.1 Representative Snapshot of South Korea’s NIC .................................................... 148
Figure 24.2 Representative Snapshot of Japan’s NIC ............................................................... 152
Figure 25. Number of Individuals Partaking in the Japan-Russia Visa-Free Exchange ........... 155
Tables
Table 1. Representative Conflict Databases ........................................................................... 26-27
Table 2. Regional Comparison of the COW MIDs Data (1990-2010) ....................................... 29
Table 3. Regional Distribution of Conflicts during 1990-2012 .................................................. 29
Table 4. Seven Representative Typologies of Peace .............................................................. 33-36
Table 5. Representative Channels of Diplomatic Communication ........................................ 75-76
Table 6. Descriptive Statistics of Summons Data ....................................................................... 82
Table 7. Sub-Category of Summons Regarding Territory .......................................................... 86
Table 8. Summons Regarding Territory per Issue-Area ............................................................. 86
Table 9. Summons Regarding History per Issue-Area ................................................................ 88
Table 10. Results of Bilateral Summits (1998-2014) .................................................................. 95
Table 11. Correlation between Summonses and Summits .......................................................... 95
Table 12. Trend in Market Value of Dokdo .............................................................................. 106
Table 13. Channels for Commodification of Nationalism ........................................................ 107
Table 14. Registered Trademarks in Japan Using ‘Senkaku’ ................................................... 155
1
Chapter 1. Introduction
“Perhaps no single individual understood the metaphoric and commercial importance of
revolutionary recycling more than self-described “architect, entrepreneur, former master mason,
former journeyman,” Pierre-Francois Palloy (1754-1835), the building contractor engaged to
dismantle the Bastille. Starting on the evening of 14 July 1789, without authority from national
or municipal officials, Palloy mobilised a massive labour force of four-hundred building
tradesmen to dismantle the fortress while turning its debris into souvenirs. Iron shackles were
melted into medals and the stones were carved into souvenir likenesses of the fortress, and were
then sold to commemorate the cult of the Vainqueurs de la Bastille. Palloy thus contributed a
“patriotic cult of relics” to festive celebrations of the taking of the Bastille.”
1
The introductory excerpt serves to illustrate the potential for the market to converge with
vessels for ideology. Similarly, this dissertation does not tell the typical story about unruly
masses or power-hungry elites, but of nationalism in the context of a market; about how actors
facilitate nationalism to be consumed and (re-)produced
2
within what is called the Nationalist
Industrial Complex (NIC)—a holistic industry encompassing activities of official state units as
well as the commercial sphere that is sustained through nationalist rhetoric surrounding territorial
disputes. Through commodification—the dictates of a market rhetoric that attaches exchange
values (money) to social and material interactions—nationalism is no longer an either/or
narrative about nationalist mythmaking and a reactionary public. So while commodification
seemingly has the effect of unsettling some conventional wisdom about nationalism,
fundamentally, the logic here is that commodification increases our chances of getting closer to
answering the central question of this dissertation: why do inter-state tensions (particularly
surrounding territorial disputes) sometimes get ‘stuck’ without monotonically bubbling over to
militarized conflict or reaching its ultimate expression of war? To an extent, the question itself
1
Allan Potofsky, “Recycling in the City: Paris, 1760s-1800,” in The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long
Eighteenth Century, eds. Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset (New York: Routledge, 2015), 82-3.
2
This echoes Yoshino’s general approach to nationalism, that “Nationalism is a dual phenomenon consisting of the
formal, state-supervised process and the informal, market-oriented process. Nationalism also comprises a dual
process by which national identity is ‘produced’ and ‘consumed.’” See Kosaku Yoshino, “Rethinking Theories of
Nationalism: Japan’s Nationalism in a Marketplace Perspective,” in Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian
Experiences, ed. Kosaku Yoshino (University of Hawai’i Press: Honolulu, 1999), 9.
2
agitates the status quo, as tensions are often viewed as unidirectional in that it often escalates in
intensity over time. More importantly though, the inspiration here is that if the outcome of
interest is no longer kinetic conflict but sub-war level tensions, it makes sense to focus on a
causal mechanism that is not necessarily directly tied to militarization; this is where
commodification comes in.
So why the initial decision to capitalize on tensions as the dependent variable (DV)? On
the one hand, this stems from recognizing the unfortunate fate of tensions within the discipline of
International Relations (IR) and its secondary status to that of war. On the other hand, we clearly
witness empirical contexts where the explanatory power of tensions supersedes that of
militarized conflict, as that of Northeast Asia.
3
As a result, we are left with an awkward task of
‘cooking without utensils’—trying to explain regions without the adequate theoretical
frameworks in which to do so. Accordingly, the central role of Chapter 2 is to illustrate exactly
why it makes most sense to seize upon tensions in understanding Northeast Asia even despite the
anecdotal evidence that proffer analogies to war as the acceptable lens in which to describe
current conditions, i.e.) “relations between Japan and South Korea are probably at their worst
since the end of World War II…It is as if the Koreans and the Japanese are still fighting World
War II almost seven decades after it ended.”
4
In the end, for all the “whiffs of war”
5
and
3
Acknowledging the argument that the conception of regions must be problematized and that there may be nothing
‘natural’ about them, Northeast Asia typically refers to the conventional cluster of China, Taiwan, Japan, Republic of
Korea (ROK), and Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK). In this dissertation, the main focus will be on the three
larger countries of China, Japan, and South Korea.
4
Ogata Sadako, Han Sung-Joo and Ezra F. V ogel, “Japan and South Korea Can Work Together to Wash Away the
Pains of the Past,” The Washington Post, April 11, 2014, accessed September 20, 2014,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/japan-and-south-korea-can-work-together-to-wash-away-the-pains-of-the-
past/2014/04/11/634b9468-b08c-11e3-95e8-39bef8e9a48b_story.html.
5
Mark Valencia, “Asian Threats, Provocations Giving Rise to Whiffs of War,” The Japan Times, June 9, 2014,
accessed June 10, 2014, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/06/09/commentary/world-commentary/asian-
threats-provocations-giving-rise-whiffs-war/#.U5ZLIXJ_vio; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “The Dangerous Drift
Towards World War in Asia,” The Telegraph, March 24, 2013, accessed May 1, 2015,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9950791/The-dangerous-drift-towards-world-
3
apocalyptic advertising that the media has been running, we have not actually witnessed any
militarized fighting. Yet, just as Boulding has noted that being awake and being asleep are not
perfect opposites,
6
establishing that there is less conflict in Northeast Asia may not
automatically mean that we are in a period of peace. After all, the euphoria of potentially
institutionalizing the Six-Party Talks in ways of a Northeast Asia Treaty Organization (NEATO)
7
never quite got the energy it needed to metabolize into tangible peace. As a result, the messy
politics that is often translated as ‘tension’ forces one to ask what it means for the region to have
seemingly escaped war but also eluded peace. Chapter 2 then serves to introduce and
contextualize the overarching question on which the rest of the dissertation is pegged on.
The proceeding chapter is a theoretical review, but also a critical examination of the state
of the tensions discourse in IR. The underlying premise here is that it may be plausible to
disaggregate tensions from war, and subsequently, avoid the temptation to place tensions on a
linear unidirectional trajectory that eventually erupts into war (‘volcanic model’). There is no
compelling reason for tensions to be the exclusive property of incidents that only involve some
element of kinetic force, and chapter 3 shows that it was only with greater quantification and
behavioral approaches to tension studies that militarization became inseparable to its initial
construct. By synthesizing the previous discourse and acknowledging their consensus about
tensions as a dyadic-level phenomenon based on the assumption of the unitary state actor, the
research here takes the most minimalist definition of tensions as inter-state hostility. In essence,
de-coupling tensions from the use of force means that we could very well envision an under-
war-in-Asia.html; “The Drums of War,” The Economist (print), January 19, 2013.
6
Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1978), 8.
7
George O. Totten III and Young Jeh Kim, “What Kind of a Peace Regime Could Be Constructed in Northeast
Asia?” Korea Observer 36, no. 4 (2005): 687-716. Also see, Peter Van Ness, “Designing a Mechanism for
Multilateral Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia,” Asian Perspective 32, no. 4 (2008): 107-26.
4
theorized path for dyadic-level tensions (see figure 1).
Figure 1. Different Conceptions of Tension in Inter-state Relations
8
① Punctuated Equilibrium Model (PEM)
② Incremental Model (V olcanic Model)
③ Direct Escalation Model (DEM)
④ Suspended Oscillation Model (SOM)
The incremental model (‘volcanic model’) is the most readily accessible in the conflict
literature; the image is of tensions bubbling up until they explode into war. The PEM is one
espoused by Goertz and Diehl within the rivalries discourse, which speaks against the
incremental or volcanic model in that tensions do not necessarily escalate into war, but rather
tend to display homeostasis (although some sub-war level use of force is still factored into
account). The third model of direct escalation is a relatively unfamiliar framework, but an
8
The left axis is adopted from Goertz and Diehl’s spectrum of inter-state interaction, while the right axis is the 13-
point ‘hostility-friendliness scale’ used by the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB).Region I (points 1-6)
denotes low violence or the friendlier region, while region II (points 7-13) encompasses those of more high violence
or hostile region of the scale. See Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 29; Edward E. Azar, “Conflict Escalation and Conflict Reduction in an
International Crisis: Suez, 1956.”Journal of Conflict Resolution16, no. 2 (1972): 188.
5
important approach that also casts doubt on the incremental or volcanic model of tensions.
According to research by Gökçe,
9
parties to a conflict directly resort to force as one of their first
moves (i.e. without exhibiting the expected antecedent behaviors of using threats) in a significant
number of disputes. This tends to refute the linear path towards the use of force and its
fundamental assumption that disputes have only ‘escalated’ once force has been employed. The
logic here would suggest that tensions explode quite abruptly at the beginning of a dispute, rather
than build up to a climax as models 2 and to some extent, model 1 would imply. The
commonality of course, of all three models so far is that they presuppose the intensity to go
beyond mere ‘threat’ to enter into actual ‘display’ of force. In contrast, the fourth model is one
constructed by this dissertation and labeled as the Suspended Oscillation Model (SOM) to
reinforce the idea of disaggregating tensions from the use of force and militarized conflict.
Without ever reaching the two extreme points, tensions persist to oscillate in between sub-war
and supra-peace regions of state interaction. At the same time, this suggests that the focus has
now shifted from war to politico-diplomatic disputes short of war.
Chapter 4 explores this theme of politico-diplomatic disputes through operationalization
of tensions through the proxy of diplomatic summonses, also known in its more formal
lexicography of démarche or its colloquial form of ‘dressing down’ of respective envoys. The
first half of chapter 4 carefully discusses the competitive advantage of using summons over more
traditional indicators such as GDP or military spending, while the latter half presents the findings
of the resultant tensions database that this dissertation produced for the period of 1998 to 2015
(n=183) for the three dyads of Japan-People’s Republic of China (PRC), PRC-Republic of Korea
(ROK), and Japan-ROK. The diplomatic summons data reinforces familiar intuitions as well as
9
Osman ZekîGökçe, “Restless Dyads: Revisiting Onset and Escalation in Militarized Interstate Disputes,” (MA
Thesis, Sabanci University, 2012).
6
underexplored themes: territory was indeed, the most predominant instigator for a summons (and
thus, tensions) and the PRC-ROK dyad was the least ‘contentious’ of the three. With that said,
there was a curious parallel in that the Japan-ROK dyad looked a lot like the Japan-PRC
relationship on the surface, but with very different internal dynamics at work. If one were to
judge whether the incidents that prompted summons exhibited conflictual reciprocity in that
there was actually physical interaction involved, only the Japan-PRC pair would qualify (i.e.
maritime skirmishes). Much of what provoked Japan and ROK revolved around verbiage and
interpretations of the other’s actions that did not necessarily engage the two in a direct physical
manner (i.e. territorial claims in a White Paper). The same goes for symmetry or the quantitative
equivalence in the number of times one side summoned the other in the bilateral relationship.
While Japan summoned the Chinese representative stationed in Japan up to 75% as many times
that China also summoned the Japanese official in Beijing, Japan only matched the ROK’s
summoning of Japan by 13%: to rephrase, despite the high aggregate volume in summons
between Japan and the ROK, most of those were initiated by the ROK. This particular finding
triggers a significant observation that later furnishes the hypothesis regarding the homeostatic
nature of tensions—if inter-state tension is de-coupled into volume and intensity, there may be
different sources that are accountable for the two, with the possibility of their non-convergence.
The second leg of the dissertation starting with chapter 5 then, transitions the research
from examining the DV of tensions, to parsing out the argument regarding the Independent
Variable (IV) of commodification. Chapter 5 leads with an important finding from the previous
chapter about the distinction between the frequency of tensions (volume) and its militarization
thereof (intensity). A common underlying assumption behind various works in the rivalry
discourse is that tension is not only intimately tied to armed conflict, but also unidirectional so
7
that volume and intensity is coterminus. Theoretically then, this only produces one type of
tension, where volume and intensity always go hand-in-hand so that it makes little sense for the
two to be diametrically opposed; this also runs the risk of misdiagnosing the internal make-up of
relationships so that one may conclude that both the Japan-PRC and Japan-ROK exhibit high
tensions. Being mindful of how the two elements of volume and intensity might differ, we can
now appropriately detect that while both dyads are high in frequency, the Japan and PRC register
greater intensity than Japan and the ROK. In thinking about what may push or pull a state
towards or away from militarization then, chapter 5 introduces the main hypothesis concerning
the business of nationalism:
The Business of Nationalism Hypothesis: the greater the commodification of nationalism
surrounding a disputed territory, the greater the overall bilateral tension volume/frequency
between the disputants over the territory.
The focus on tensions surrounding territorial disputes is an organic extension of the findings
from the summonses database and the contentious nature of territory for inter-state relations.
Specifically, chapter 5 proceeds to outline the dynamic of commodification, how it relates to
tension, and the anatomy of the Nationalist Industrial Complex or NIC—the conceptual space in
which the commodification activities occur. Unlike the Military Industrial Complex (MIC),
which is typically circumscribed to the ‘iron triangle’ consisting of the government, the military,
and large corporations, the NIC makes room for a more diverse array of actors that get funneled
into the state’s efforts to reinforce sovereign claims over territory, including not only large
corporations but also small private businesses and entrepreneurs. At the same time, it tempers the
notion that either the military or the foreign ministry is the most influential organ in territorial
disputes, by enlarging the scope to other bureaucratic agencies.
8
The testing of the hypothesis occurs in the following section in chapter 6. The main
rationale for why commodification sustains bilateral tensions is that it encourages consumption
and reproduction of nationalism and raises the general awareness and resonance that the dispute
has on the public, thereby making a deal at the inter-governmental level difficult. So while
commodification may not entail a threat-based security approach to a territorial dispute (thereby
suppressing escalation), it does lower the prospects of any domestically-feasible resolution,
thereby prolonging bilateral tensions. The findings in Northeast Asia among the dyads of China,
Japan, and South Korea confirm this initial hypothesis regarding the business of nationalism,
with undeniably high degrees of commodification and institutionalization of the
Dokdo/Takeshima dispute in South Korea, resulting in greater tensions with Japan. This is in
stark contrast to the lack of commodification and tensions surrounding the South Korea-China
dispute over Ieodo/Suyan Jiao. The same goes for the low-key Daemado/Tsuchima dispute
between South Korea and Japan, which would be a good case of the most similar method (or
Mill’s ‘method of difference’) in comparative case study, as it involves the same pair of states as
Dokdo/Takeshima, with the only difference being the outcome of interest (tensions). Given the
relative imperceptibility of commodification when compared to its more conspicuous militarized
alternative, this dissertation seeks to follow Lijphart’s idea that “…the intensive analysis of a few
cases may be more promising than the superficial statistical analysis of many cases.”
10
The final concluding chapter not only summarizes the findings of the research, but also
speaks to the generalizability of the research, particularly for other regions. The thinking here is
that it may be useful for future iterations to expand the scope of cases, which may also temper
any uncompromising notion that the countries in question may be particularistic or sui generis in
10
Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review 65, no. 3
(1971): 685.
9
character.
11
A potential candidate is the waters adjacent to and sovereignty over the Paracel and
Spratly Islands, of which China is heavily involved in. China offers some intriguing observations
for theory, as it is far from what we would normally call a capitalist market economy; yet, a
quick glance reveals quite an active market for nationalism. The chapter also concludes with
some implications for policy and decision-making along with ways for extensions of the NIC
framework beyond that of simply the scope of territorial disputes.
Contributions
There are three large areas where this dissertation makes interesting contributions: on the
discourse on nationalism, the way that we think about territory and territorial disputes, and the
domestic sources of foreign policy.
Foremost, one of the clear strengths of this dissertation is that it provides a more tangible
alternative to the thick ideational discourse such as historical or collective memory.
12
This is not
to discredit the rich undertakings of the constructivist project, but to simply recognize the various
11
Somewhat contemporary pieces that have explored this theme in the discipline of political science and IR are the
following: Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, “Conclusion: On the possibility of a non-Western IR theory in Asia,”
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 7, no. 3 (2007): 427-38; Navnita Chadha Behera, ed., International
Relations in South Asia: Search for an Alternative Paradigm (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008); Leonardo
Morlino, Björn Dressel and Riccardo Pelizzo, “The Quality of Democracy in Asia-Pacific: Issues and Findings,”
International Political Science Review 32, no. 5 (2011): 491-511; Stefan Rother, “Wendt Meets East: ASEAN
Cultures of Conflict and Cooperation,” Cooperation and Conflict 47, no. 1 (2012): 49-67; Alastair Iain Johnston,
“What (If Anything) Does East Asia Tell Us About International Relations Theory?” Annual Review of Political
Science 15 (2012): 53-78; Benjamin E. Goldsmith, “Different in Asia? Developmental States, Trade, and
International Conflict Onset and Escalation,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 13, no. 2 (2013): 175-205;
Jeffrey S. Lantis, “Strategic Cultures and Security Policies in the Asia-Pacific,” Contemporary Security Policy 35,
no. 2 (2015): 166-86.
12
For instance, see Chung-in Moon and Chun-fu Li, “Reactive Nationalism and South Korea’s Foreign
Policy on China and Japan: A Comparative Analysis,” Pacific Focus 25, no. 3 (2010): 331-55; Gilbert Rozman,
“Narrowing the Gap between China and Japan: Three Dimensions of National Identity and the Korean Factor,”
Japanese Journal of Political Science 14, no. 1 (2013): 31-49; Ji Young Kim, “Escaping the Vicious Cycle:
Symbolic Politics and History Disputes Between South Korea and Japan,” Asian Perspective 38, no. 1 (2014): 31-60;
Karl Gustafsson, “Memory Politics and Ontological Security in Sino-Japanese Relations,” Asian Studies Review 38,
no. 1 (2014): 71-86, and; Alexander Bukh, “Shimane Prefecture, Tokyo and the Territorial Dispute over
Dokdo/Takeshima: Regional and National Identities in Japan,” The Pacific Review 28, no. 1 (2015): 47-70.
10
utilities attached to different realms of research. Perhaps the only way to justifiably escape
entrapment by the ongoing definitional debate over nationalism is to be able to identify the
empirical manifestation of nationalism and to make sure this coincides with the supposed
construct. While nationalism has already been identified as a popular mechanism that instigates
conflict, the value-added of commodification is that it unpacks nationalism by providing
observable micro-foundations in which that nationalist rhetoric becomes propagated and
consumed. This necessitate a shift from looking at the origins of nationalism to the holistic
process of how nationalism might be consumed and (re-)produced (figure 2), through goods such
as paraphernalia that reinforces territorial sovereignty and services as that of state-led
competitions that appeal to both senses of nationalism and income. To be clear, this dissertation
is not seeking to totally upset the existing theories of nationalism, but to simply incorporate the
dynamic of commodification that has escaped much of the analysis. The dashed box in figure 2
then not only represents the missing piece in the nationalist discourse, but also porous boundaries,
which in effect, indicates that commodification allows for a transition in the role of the public so
that they are no longer passive consumers of rhetoric but also producers themselves by becoming
entrepreneurs of commodification. We may never be able to observe how nationalism exactly
strikes a chord with the individual psyche, but with commodification, at least we have an
empirical manifestation of that cognitive process.
11
Figure 2. The Role of Commercial Actors in the NIC
Moreover, the value of translating nationalism into the structural edifice of the NIC is
that it clearly recognizes the potential for supposedly hard security issues to mix with
commercial interests. Unlike the Military Industrial Complex, the underlying assumption here is
that there is no particular reason for why private actors outside of the military cannot capitalize
on the nationalist rhetoric that stems from contested territory, more so when we think about just
how visceral nationalism could be. The decision to approach nationalism then as somewhat of a
marketplace is a clear departure from what is known as economic nationalism or business
nationalism that emphasize protectionism or isolationist policies. This dissertation is interested in
the business of nationalism.
The second contribution relates to the way that territorial disputes have been analyzed in
IR. This dissertation seeks to problematize two important strains of thought that have been
relatively popular in the discipline: that territory is necessarily sacred to the point of being
12
indivisible, and that this quality often pushes territorial disputes to erupt into conflicts of the
military kind. The first assumption disproportionately emphasizes demand (why states like/want
territory) over supply (the phenomenon of large-scale land sales by governments to individuals,
companies, and foreign governments). Put simply, treating all territory as an unquestionable
interest of state survival cannot explain then why states would even entertain the idea of selling
parts of its own territory to foreign actors. Those that do capitalize on what makes some territory
more important than others by discussing the mechanisms in which an emotional attachment to
territory may occur often do not go far enough: what does it mean for ‘historical animosity’ to
fuel the contention over territory? History does not escalate disputes, people do. By identifying
the mode of commodification as a tactile way in which nationalism surrounding a territorial
dispute may be consumed and reproduced, this dissertation can show how nationalism penetrates
people, that then impact tensions.
In a way, this dissertation fits into the long line of ongoing research that emphasizes the
interconnectedness between domestic politics and foreign policy (Asia being no exception
here)
13
, and this is where the research makes its third contribution. The domestic-foreign
framework also appears in the ‘elite manipulation’ strand of the nationalism discourse that views
elites as framing expressions of nationalism to persuade their domestic constituencies in
engaging in conflict abroad.
14
With that said, the focus of much of the works on East Asia that
13
For relatively newer works, see Saori N. Katada and Mireya Solís, “Domestic Sources of Japanese Foreign Policy
Activism: Loss Avoidance and Demand Coherence,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 10, no. 1 (2010):
129-57; Richard J. Samuels, “Kidnapping Politics in East Asia,” Journal of East Asian Studies 10, no. 3 (2010): 363-
95; Melissa G. Curley and Jonathan Herington, “The Securitisation of Avian Influenza: International Discourses and
Domestic Politics in Asia,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 1 (2011): 141-66; Jian Zhang, “The Domestic
Sources of China’s More Assertive Foreign Policy,” International Politics 51, no. 3 (2014): 390-97; Il Hyun Cho
and Seo-Hyun Park, “Domestic Legitimacy Politics and Varieties of Regionalism in East Asia,” Review of
International Studies 40, no. 3 (2014): 583-606; Nicolas Blarel and Hannes Ebert, “Explaining the Evolution of
Contestation in South Asia,” International Politics 52, no. 2 (2015): 223-38.
14
See Jack L. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton,
13
adopt the domestic-foreign nexus and also have implications for nationalism typically remain at
the level of either the role of ‘elites’ (the executive or legislative) or the ‘public.’
15
This
dissertation adds to the classic domestic-foreign meme then by exploring the middle space in
between these two extremes of top-tier parties and civic-level organizations occupied by the
private commercial actors that have gone largely unstudied (except private military companies,
corporations in terms of trade, or companies within the structure of
transnationalism/globalization). Maybe it is that territorial disputes are deeply embedded within
questions of sovereignty that automatically elicit state-level explanations, while nationalism—
especially popular nationalism—still evokes emotions of identity that makes it difficult to bring
up commercial interests. As the excerpt at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, it is not
inconceivable to integrate nationalism with money. The two can and often do, mix.
To some extent, the importance of the domestic realm for foreign policy is reminiscent
of Putnam’s work on multi-tier bargaining.
16
While keeping with the general spirit in which
Putnam had emphasized the need to reconcile negotiations within the domestic sphere (level 2)
with what was happening between states (level 1), there are some major differences here to his
seminal work. The first immediate divergence is the dependent variable (DV), with Putnam
aimed at explaining the outcome of bilateral negotiations and how countries strike deals, while
the research here is interested in tensions. Second, unlike Putnam’s model, the domestic cleavage
does not play as big of a role, as the perception of territorial sovereignty is typically not as
divisive domestically, when dealing with inter-state negotiations. Therefore, while Putnam does
2000); Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2001).
15
For example, see “Special Issue: Domestic Politics in Japan and Sino-Japanese Relations,” East Asia 31, no. 1
(2014): 1-91.
16
Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International
Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427-60.
14
leave open the instances of homogenous issues where constituents are pretty much all in
agreement, there is still an expectation that interests will often be pulled in different directions in
level 2. Third, for Putnam, there is a strong sense that ‘win-sets’ (or possible outcomes that are
likely to be accepted by domestic interest groups) cannot really be manipulated. This research
actually presumes the opposite, and assumes that the government can and does facilitate certain
conditions that encourage domestic commercial actors to engage in commodification, thereby
imbuing much more agency to central executive actors. Now, why commodification is not
actively suppressed by the government does track with Putnam’s own statements about how
entrenched public interests may actually work in the favor of the state as negotiator: specifically,
the (smaller) size of the win-set can often become a bargaining advantage, as one could argue
that its hands are tied because the proposal could never be accepted domestically. Putnam rightly
attributes this to Schelling, who had already explained the paradox that “the power to constrain
an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often
strength, freedom may often be freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may
suffice to undo an opponent.”
17
Given the relative agency of states in the narrative about the business of nationalism then,
this dissertation may have implications for the debates about the role and power of the state.
With the advent of discussions about the impact that globalization has on the state, there have
been predictions that the traditional boundaries of the state no longer apply or that sovereignty
will be inevitably eroded. The argument that the government can co-opt parts of the domestic
industry toward the cause of sovereignty protection suggests a reinforcement of state power
rather than its depreciation. This may be particularly salient for emerging countries that are still
17
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 22.
15
in the process of negotiating and consolidating its power, or developmental states that are known
for the close ties between government and the economic sector.
A final word must be said about the way that nationalism is treated here. This project
will opt for Barrington’s useful synthesis of the nationalism discourse and its subsequent
definition of nationalism
18
:
the pursuit—through argument or other activity—of a set of rights for the self-defined
members of the nation, including at a minimum, territorial autonomy or sovereignty. All
nationalisms, therefore, share two features: (1) they define, at least roughly, the
territorial boundaries that the nation has a right to control and (2) they define the
membership boundaries of the population that makes up the nation—the group that
deserves this territorial control and that is entitled to the supreme loyalty of other
members of the collective [emphasis in original].
The definition is admittedly minimalist, but it does illustrate the core components of nationalism.
Of course, some have proposed that nationalism and its feelings for one’s own population must
be accompanied by a corresponding hostility towards ‘the other,’ in order for nationalism to be
distinguished from patriotism.
19
Although the definition here itself does not explicitly demand
‘the other,’ by embedding the concept within the context of territorial disputes that implicates an
opposing state or disputant, the recognition of such hostility is implicitly made.
A more fundamental critique is that the dissertation may be treating the existence of
nationalism itself as given, without necessarily foregrounding the exact sources upon which that
nationalism has sprung about. It is true that since the focus here is predominantly on tracing the
empirical behavioral materialization of nationalism through the channels of commodification, the
research is admittedly less interested in how nationalism originates in the first place. As
18
Lowell W. Barrington, ““Nation” and “Nationalism”: Misuse of Key Concepts in Political Science,” PS: Political
Science and Politics 30, no. 4 (1997): 714.
19
According to Druckman, “patriotism is commitment- a readiness to sacrifice for the nation- while nationalism is
commitment plus exclusion of others, a readiness to sacrifice bolstered by hostility towards others.” Daniel,
Druckman, “Nationalism, Patriotism, and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective,” International Studies
Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1994): 47.
16
important as it is to map out where nationalism comes from, this dissertation views that to have
been covered quite extensively,
20
while the tactile and tangible products of nationalism have not.
Briefly, it needs to be made clear that the research here is not attempting to disaggregate
interests as represented by economic activity and identity as tied to nationalism. The goal is quite
the opposite. Commodification may be driven by rational calculations, but at least part of the
consumption and reproduction is motivated by some awareness for the territorial dispute and
what it means for the state. Lest the account of nationalism here might be accused of being too
instrumentalist in interpreting nationalist rhetoric as mostly a tool for some end (money, leverage,
power), an excerpt from Brubaker
21
is a good reminder about the follies of building strict
paradigmatic walls:
We should not in fact have to choose between an instrumentalist and an identitarian
approach to the study of nationalism. That this is a false opposition becomes clear when
we think about the cognitive dimension of nationalism. Considered from a cognitive point
of view, nationalism is a way of seeing the world, a way of identifying interests, or more
precisely, a way of specifying interest-bearing units, of identifying the relevant units in
terms of which interests are conceived. It furnishes a mode of vision and division of the
world, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, a mode of social counting and accounting. Thus it
inherently links identity and interest—by identifying how we are to calculate our interests.
Similarly, some may charge that the notion of commodification and the market subverts the
popular idea of ethno-nationalism that is prevalent in Asia. Again, the story about
commodification is one of individuals consuming the country, and since that nationhood is
rooted in the identity of the self and some vision of the state, commodification does not entirely
20
For instance, see Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation : Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Anthony D. Smith, Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (New
York: Routledge, 2009).
21
Rogers Brubaker, “Myths and Conceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” in The State of the Nation, ed. John Hall
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 291-92.
17
negate the role that ethnicity has in the content of that nationalism. In the end, the real advantage
of utilizing commodification here is that it elevates the importance of people, as we can now
match faces to the actions rather than talk about ‘history’ or ‘historical memory’ in the abstract.
On notation and appellations, China is used to refer to the mainland (People’s Republic
of China), while South Korea is used interchangeably with Republic of Korea (ROK). Moreover,
although the names of disputed territory will often be displayed in their dual form and separated
by a solidus (/), when in the context of a particularly country and its actions toward that territory,
it will often only be accompanied by the appellation familiar to that country in question, i.e.)
Japan and its policies toward the Senkaku Islands. To follow the general custom of the three
countries in Northeast Asia, names of indivdiuals will be displayed in the order of
surname/family name and then the first name (the exception will be for footnotes and
bibliography where the convention of the first name preceding the last will be adhered to).
Unless stated otherwise, the following currency conversation rate will be adopted throughout the
analysis: 1,100 Korean Won = 1USD and 100 Japanese Yen = 1USD.
18
Chapter 2: ‘Arrested Peace’ in Northeast Asia
Theoretically, the potential for states to get along in Northeast Asia is high. Liberal
democracies and their ensuing values is typically a strong predictor of cooperative relations
(democratic peace), as is economic development and interdependence (capitalist peace):
22
this
includes the more recent works that specify the economic norms behind the democratic peace
thesis, as that of Mousseau and his powerful variable of contract-intensive economy in
suppressing international conflict.
23
There is also a less familiar yet vibrant network analysis
literature that posits the positive effects of sharing a great power patron/ally for otherwise
distant/fractious actors,
24
which should easily apply in the case of Japan and South Korea and
their virtual alliance vis-à-vis the U.S. Amidst such expectations, some do indeed see East Asia
as a sphere of relative peace.
25
This Eastphalia order has previously donned the label of ‘Pax
22
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War Peace. (Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press, 1993); Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and
International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2001); Erik Gartzke, “The Capitalist Peace,” American Journal of
Political Science 51, no. 1 (2007): 166-91. Also see, Michael Borrus, Dieter Ernst, and Stephan Haggard, eds.,
International Production Networks in Asia: Rivalry or Riches (New York: Routledge, 2003).
23
According to Mousseau, a contract-intensive economy (c.f. contract-poor economy) is one where “most people
have the opportunity to choose, as individuals in the market, their sources of income and where to spend it. In this
economy, sometimes called “advanced capitalism,” individuals habitually trust strangers in making contracts and
depend on the state to enforce them impartially They learn to prefer free choice and the equal application of law, and
they expect their government to behave accordingly in foreign affairs. As a consequence, contract-intensive societies
tend to agree on the preservation of the Westphalian order of sovereign states and the primacy of international law
over power politics, and they are in natural alliance against any entity - state or nonstate - that seeks to challenge this
order.” See Michael Mousseau, “The Social Market Roots of Democratic Peace,” International Security 33, no. 4
(2009): 53. Also see Michael Mousseau, “The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy,” International
Studies Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2013): 186-97.
24
Duncan J. Watts, “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon,” American Journal of Sociology, 105,
no. 2 (1999): 493-527; Zeev Maoz, “Preferential Attachment, Homophily, and the Structure of International
Networks, 1816-2003,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 29, no. 3(2012): 341-69; Brandon J. Kinne,
“Network Dynamics and the Evolution of International Cooperation,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 4
(2013): 766-85.
25
See Richard Bitzinger and Barry Desker, “Why East Asian War is Unlikely,” Survival: Global Politics and
Strategy 50, no. 6 (2008): 105-28; Muthiah Alagappa, “A Changing Asia: Prospects for War, Peace, Cooperation and
Order,” Political Science 63, no. 2 (2011): 155-85; Xuetong Yan, “Decade of Peace in East Asia,” East Asia, V ol. 20,
no. 4 (2003): 29-51; Isak Svensson, “East Asian Peacemaking: Exploring the Patterns of Conflict Management and
Conflict Settlement in East Asia,” Asian Perspective 35, no. 2 (2011): 163-85. For an optimistic assessment of
stability in East Asia with a focus on China and Korea, see Jennifer Lind, “Democratization and Stability in East
Asia,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2011): 409-36.
19
Asiatica’
26
or the ‘East Asian Peace’
27
; apparently, the explanatory power of the concept only
becomes stronger if we single out Northeast Asia. While stressing that the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) + 3 (China, South Korea, and Japan) bloc is the core area of
the ‘East Asian Peace,’ Kivimäki claims that “for Korea and Japan, the first years of peace were
earlier; in 1953 and in 1945 respectively, while for the six original members of ASEAN that year
was 1967.”
28
While acknowledging the lack of major hostilities in the region since the 1979
Sino-Vietnamese war, some scholars like Goldsmith have provided partial confirmations of the
democratic thesis, by confirming the importance of intra-Asian trade for suppressing escalation
of interstate conflicts in the region,
29
but also finding a lack of support for the power of joint
democracy—going so far as to claiming that “in recent decades, it appears to be a cause of
conflict, if there is any effect at all,” [emphasis in original].
30
Any wholly romantic view of the region is of course, diluted by the consistent reporting
of various polls and surveys that describe a race-to-the-bottom in attitudinal relations of the
general populace in the respective states in Northeast Asia.
31
In fact, it has become common
place to attribute the enduring discord in the region to deep-seated historical grievances.
32
In the
26
See Etel Solingen, “Pax Asiatica versus Belle Levantina: The Foundations of War and Peace in East Asia and the
Middle East,” The American Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007): 757-80.
27
Stein, Tønnesson, “What is it that Explains the East Asian Peace Since 1979? A Call for a Research Agenda,”
Asian Perspective 33, no. 1 (2009): 111-36.
28
Timo Kivimäki, “East Asian Relative Peace- Does it Exist? What Is It?” The Pacific Review 23, no. 4 (2010): 507.
For a chart of the average annual number of conflicts and battle deaths before and after 1979, see Timo, Kivimäki,
“East Asian Relative Peace and the ASEAN Way,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 11, no. 1 (2011): 78.
29
Benjamin E. Goldsmith, “The East Asian Peace as a Second-Order Diffusion Effect,” International Studies
Review 16, no. 2 (2014): 275-89.
30
Benjamin E. Goldsmith, “A Liberal Peace in Asia?” Journal of Peace Research, V ol. 44, no. 1: 22. For a counter-
argument to the credence on economic ties, see Oriana Skylar Mastro, “The Problems of the Liberal Peace in Asia,”
Survival 56, no. 2 (2014): 129-58.
31
For instance, the spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey by the Pew Research Center found that Japan enjoys a
relatively positive image among its Asian neighbors, except for China and South Korea. See Bruce Stokes, “How
Asia-Pacific Publics See Each Other and Their National Leaders,” Pew Research Center, September 2, 2015,
accessed September 28, 2015, http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/09/02/how-asia-pacific-publics-see-each-other-and-
their-national-leaders/.
32
Gilbert Rozman, “History as an Arena of Sino-Korean Conflict and the Role of the United States,” Asian
20
end, we are left then with a debate among those that would prefer to argue that we should expect
more confrontation to come, especially regarding the various ‘flash points’ such as the Taiwan
Straits,
33
and others that caution against taking a reductionist understanding of material power to
accord equal weight to ideational factors that may not automatically portend more conflict (or at
least capitalize on the positive forces of regionalism and economic interdependence).
34
An
explanation for why there is an absence of definitive or compelling prediction for the future may
be that the region is currently experiencing somewhat of a paradox, being suspended in between
outright conflict and unadulterated peace. This intuition is echoed by findings that confirm a
decrease in armed conflict but also a corresponding increase in unarmed conflicts or ‘nonviolent
uprisings’ in East Asia:
35
The increase in unarmed uprisings implies a lack of political and institutionalized channels
through which disputes and incompatibilities can be managed and addressed in a political
system. In this sense, the few countries in East Asia that have seen neither armed conflict
nor unarmed uprisings (Japan, Brunei, Singapore, North Korea) would appear to be the
most peaceful, but then some of them owe their peace mainly to state capacity for effective
repression [emphasis added].
36
Perspective 36, no. 2 (2012): 263-85; Gilbert Rozman, ed., National Identities and Bilateral Relations: Widening
Gaps in East Asia and Chinese Demonization of the United States, (Washington, D.C. and Stanford: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2013); Brad Glosserman and Scott Snyder, The Japan-South
Korea Identity Clash: East Asian Security and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
33
See Aaron L. Friedberg. A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 2001); Hugh White, “Why War in East Asia Remains Thinkable,” Survival 50. No. 6
(Dec. 2008- Jan. 2009): 85-104. For a more mixed analysis, see Avery Goldstein, “Power Transitions, Institutions,
and China’s Rise in East Asia: Theoretical Expectations and Evidence,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 4–5
(2007): 639-82; Zhu Feng, “An Emerging Trend in East Asia: Military Budget Increases and Their Impact,” Asian
Perspective 33, no. 4 (2009): 17-45.
34
Amitav Acharya, “Power Shift or Paradigm Shift? China’s Rise and Asia’s Emerging Security Order,”
International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2014): 158-73; Steve Chan, Enduring Rivalries in the Asia-Pacific
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Iain Johnston, Social States: China
in International Institutions, 1980–2000 (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); David C. Kang, East
Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
35
Isak Svensson and Mathilda Lindgren, “From bombs to banners? The Decline of Wars and the Rise of Unarmed
Uprisings in East Asia,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 3 (2011): 219-37.
36
Ibid., 232.
21
That countries showing relative peace are predominantly ‘engineering’ or at least actively
‘suppressing’ their peace does not bode well for a whole-hearted acceptance of an Eastphalia
order. Others have also alluded to a ‘middle’ state of affairs where there is something more akin
to homeostasis in tensions. For instance, Choi offers an answer to this exact paradox of how
Northeast Asia has endured the cycle of crises and yet, avoided any escalation into war, by
making a distinction between what he calls ‘crisis stability’ that rests on the balance of military
capabilities (as per the deterrence literature) and ‘general stability’ that is founded on norms that
push states away from war (as per the security community literature); according to Choi, while
Northeast Asia itself is still seeing bouts of the former, the regional order is increasingly moving
towards that of general stability and what he labels as ‘liberal transition.’
37
The underlying premise of this dissertation is that we may be better able to adjudicate
between such discourses and gauge the state of affairs in the region by moving away from
defining conflict as involving the use of force as this operationalization does not render the most
accurate analysis. By focusing on tensions, it becomes easier to balance the notions of some
unsettled stability with that of ongoing discord (below that of armed interaction or militarization).
To argue that the spotlight needs to shift from war to tension, is to first clearly outline what is
meant by conflict. In order to not take anything for granted here, a logical departure for thinking
about the observation that Northeast Asia is embroiled in ‘arrested peace’ is to clarify the
taxonomy of conflict and peace and examine how the empirics align with concepts as they are
often employed in IR. The initial framing is particularly important as both conflict and peace
exhibit qualities of what scholars have come to describe as ‘contested concepts.’
38
Thus, this
37
Jong Kun Choi, “Crisis Stability or General Stability? Assessing Northeast Asia’s Absence of War and Prospects
for Liberal Transition,” Review of International Studies, First View Article (2015): 3-4.
38
One of the early notable efforts to elucidate this matter of conceptual confusion was Gallie. See, W. B Gallie,
22
chapter not only serves a bush-clearing role by systematically applying conflict and peace in IR
theory to Northeast Asia, but also fulfills the purpose of exposing the inadequacies of a bimodal
explanatory structure to state behavior that involves either militarization or none at all—thereby
paving the way for the next chapter and its focus on tensions as a worthwhile theoretical tool for
adjudicating what is really happening in the region.
On Conflict
In the very first volume of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1957, Jessie Bernard
made the following claim about the usage of ‘conflict’:
Scientific concepts should probably be viewed as expendable resources. They arise, serve
their purpose, decline, and pass off the stage. If they overstay their usefulness, they may
come to inhibit or impeded, rather than stimulate or facilitate, creative thinking and
research. The concept of “conflict” may fall into this category of outmoded concepts; it
may have outlived its usefulness.
39
Of course, we know that Bernard’s plea went mostly unheeded, as the concept gained much
traction thereafter and well into the 21
st
century. In fact, a predominant strain in IR has been to
frame ‘conflict’ in action-oriented terms. A popular approach has been to focus on war, with a
‘traditionalist’ framework attributable to the immensely influential Correlates of War (COW)
project, and their definition of war as sustained combat involving a minimum of 1,000 battle-
related combatant fatalities within a twelve month period. Since its initial typology, the
classification has been refined and sub-divided into roughly four groups: inter-state, extra-state,
intra-state, and non-state wars.
40
The aspect of physical fighting is a constant throughout the
“Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 56 (1955-1956): 167-98. For
more contemporary efforts, see David Collier, Fernando Daniel Hidalgo, and Andra Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially
Contested Concepts: Debates and Applications,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 3 (2006): 211-46.
39
Jessie Bernard, “Parties and Issues in Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 1, no. 2 (1957): 111.
40
See Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Whelon Wayman, Resort to war: A Data Guide to Inter-State, Extra-State,
Intra-State, and Non-State Wars, 1816-2007 (Washington D.C.: CQ Press, 2010).
23
multidimensional COW project, including its Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) data.
41
The
COW data define MIDs as “united historical cases of conflict in which the threat, display, or use
of military force short of war by one member is explicitly directed towards the government,
official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state.”
42
Despite the sub-
war component, fatalities still represent an important variable (incidentally, reinforcing the
notion of the ‘1,000 battle-related deaths’ as the threshold for war) as does the level of hostility
(HostLev) reached by a state in the dispute, which is coded into five categories: no militarized
action (1), threat to use force (2), display of force (3), use of force (4), and war (5). Similarly, the
highest action by a state in the dispute (HiAct) is divided into 21 categories, ranging from no
militarized action (0) to joint inter-state war (21).
Another treatment of conflict is to specifically select an accompanying adjective (i.e.
‘armed-’) to further reinforce the militarized nature of the dispute; a standard resource here is the
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)/Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) Armed
Conflict Dataset, which is also the main source of data on major armed conflicts for Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) Yearbook. The UCDP-PRIO project describes
the dependent variable of ‘armed conflict,’ as “a contested incompatibility that concerns
government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least
one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in one calendar
year.”
43
Perhaps due to its relatively low battle death threshold that allows for an inclusive
41
Erik Gartzke and Jo Dong-Joon, “Bargaining, Nuclear Proliferation, and Interstate Disputes,’’ Journal of Conflict
Resolution 53, no. 2 (2009): 209-33; Michael Horowitz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict:
Does Experience Matter?’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 2 (2009): 234-57; Mark S. Bell and Nicholas L.
Miller, “Questioning the Effect of Nuclear Weapons on Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, First View Article
(2013): 1-19.
42
Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer, and J. David Singer, “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1992: Rationale,
Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 15, no. 2 (1996): 163.
43
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), Glossary of Definitions, accessed May 23, 2013,
24
application of empirical cases, this database is often used in conjunction to intra-state conflict,
i.e.) how natural resources affect severity of armed conflict.
44
Additionally, the malleability that
comes with having lower level of analysis data means that some build on PRIO efforts to
customize new datasets that are tailored to a certain set of questions, such as post-conflict justice
(PCJ) and how institutions impact transitions to peace.
45
Again, the operative term here is the
‘use of armed force’ that necessitates looking at fatalities as an important criterion for conflict.
Other datasets offered by the UCDP, such as the intra-state armed conflict, non-state conflict, or
battle-related deaths dataset also reinforce this crucial element. In fact, if we look at the rough
universe of 56 or so conflict datasets available that have gained popularity,
46
there are only 21
without a requirement that the violence threshold for coding be at above zero.
Even if we expand the conceptualization to include datasets that focus on general
instability, we again, run into the action-oriented bias. The Political Instability Task Force (PITF)
dataset is aimed at constructing a comprehensive list of all ‘major political instability events’
from 1955 onward, which includes four types of such crises: revolutionary wars, ethnic wars,
adverse regime changes, and genocides and politicides.
47
Here, both revolutionary wars and
ethnic wars must satisfy the 1,000 battle-related deaths criteria, while genocides and politicides
do not have a precise threshold. Like the two previous datasets then, the PITF also seeks to adopt
http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/definitions/.
44
Paivi Lujala, “Deadly Combat over Natural Resources: Gems, Petroleum, Drugs, and the Severity of Armed Civil
Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 1 (2009): 50-71.
45
Helga Malmin Binningsbø, Cyanne E. Loyle, Scott Gates and Jon Elster, “Armed Conflict and Post-Conflict
Justice, 1946−2006: a Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 5 (2012): 731-40.
46
For a systemic organization and discussion of the available sources, see Kristine Eck, “A Beginner’s Guide to
Conflict Data: Finding and Using the Right Dataset,” UCDP Papers (Uppsala: Department of Peace and Conflict
Research, Uppsala University, 2005), accessed December 15, 2015,
http://www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/66/66310_1ucdp_paper1.pdf.
47
Jack A. Goldstone, Robert H. Bates, Ted Robert Gurr, Michael Lustik, Monty G. Marshall, Jay Ulfelder, and
Mark Woodward, “A Global Forecasting Model of Political Instability,” Paper prepared for presentation at the
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 1-4, 2005, accessed
May 23, 2013, http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/documents/PITF/PITFglobal.pdf.
25
a categorization of war that hinges on discriminating deaths and gradients of violence or a
typology that specifies the actor involved (state vs. non-state, inter- vs. intra-). The International
Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project poses an interesting corollary in that war takes up the smallest
conflict space where all types of ‘inter-state turmoil’ are subsumed under ‘international conflict.’
Below international conflict, there is what is labeled as ‘protracted conflict,’ followed by ‘crisis,’
and then ‘war’; since war is a subset of crisis, all wars must result from crises but not all crises
necessarily lead to war, which means there are crises in non-war contexts.
48
Despite the
expectation that the reliance on physical force would be dampened somewhat, the conceptual
definition of ‘crisis’ resonates a strong military-security component. Accordingly, there are two
defining conditions of an international crisis: “1) a change in type and/or an increase in intensity
of disruptive, that is, hostile verbal or physical interactions between two or more states, with a
heightened probability of military hostilities; that in turn, 2) destabilizes their relationship and
challenges the structure of an international system—global, dominant, or subsystem.”
49
There are several other datasets with slightly different setups that make them more
amenable for idiographic or policy-oriented research. For example, the International Institute for
Strategic Studies (IISS) Armed Conflict Database is a consolidated actor database that allows for
interactive generation of targeted reports on not only conflict, but also its historical background
and related statistics on refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). At a macro-level, the
IISS data classifies armed conflict along two categories of inter- or intra-state, with four levels of
48
According to Brecher and Wilkenfeld, international crisis and international conflict may be similar, but the former
typically focuses on a single issue, while the latter is more akin to a process. Protracted conflicts, on the other hand,
must involve at least three international crises between the same pair of actors over one or recurring issues over a
five-year period. Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1997), 2-7.
49
Ibid., 4-5.
26
intensity spanning active, high, medium, and low.
50
The Project Ploughshares Armed Conflict
Report also provides background information leading up to the conflict along with an
accompanying summary of pertinent economic factors such as information regarding poverty.
The Project Ploughshares reference also relies on a dichotomous distinction between inter-state
and intra-state conflict, but interestingly, the intra-state typology—state formation, state control,
and failed state—is characterized by the overarching objective behind the use of force rather than
the attributes of the actors involved.
51
The threshold for what counts as conflict is 1,000
fatalities over the course of the conflict, and conflict is deemed to have ended after two years of
dormancy in which fewer than 25 combat-related deaths per year have occurred. Insensitive or
not, the essence of systematically tracking conflict relies much on the number of recorded
fatalities.
Table 1. Representative Conflict Databases
Dataset Correlates of War
(COW)
Armed Conflict
Database
International Crisis
Behavior (ICB)
Project
IISS Armed Conflict
Database
Organization Pennsylvania State
University
Uppsala Conflict Data
Program (UCDP) at
Uppsala University &
the Centre for the
Study of Civil War
(CSCW) at PRIO
Center for
International
Development and
Conflict Management
(CIDCM) at
University of
Maryland
International Institute
for Strategic Studies
(IISS)
Head
researcher(s)
Maoz Zeev & Scott
Bennett
Peter Wallensteen &
Lotta Harbom
Kyle Beardsley,
Patrick James
Hanna Ucko Neill
Main focus War Conflict Crisis (Major armed)
Conflict
Typology Inter-state, extra-state,
intra-state, and non-
state
Minor armed conflict,
intermediate armed
conflict, and war
(in order of magnitude
of conflict space)
international conflict,
Inter-state, intra-state;
insurgency
50
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Armed Conflict Database, “Definitions,” accessed February 26,
2014, https://acd.iiss.org/en/about/definitions.
51
“Types of Armed Conflict,” Project Ploughshares, accessed December 15, 2015,
http://ploughshares.ca/programs/armed-conflict/types-of-armed-conflict/.
27
protracted conflict,
crisis, and war
Key definition Sustained combat
involving a minimum
of 1,000 battle-related
combatant fatalities
within a twelve month
period.
Contested
incompatibility that
concerns government
and/or territory where
the use of armed force
between two parties,
of which at least one
is the government of a
state, results in at least
25 battle-related
deaths in one calendar
year.
Change in type and/or
an increase in
intensity of disruptive
interactions between
two or more states,
with a heightened
probability of military
hostilities, which
destabilizes their
relationship and
challenges the
structure of an
international system
Inter-state conflict
may involve
governments in armed
conflict over
sovereignty while
internal conflict takes
place between
government forces
and organized groups
(which control
sufficient territory to
maintain concerted
military operations).
The violence
threshold is zero.
So does the data substantiate the observation that Northeast Asia has seemingly escaped
‘conflict’ in the contemporary era? If we extract the most straight-forward data available from
the COW MID (1990-2010) dataset for the region
52
, we get the following visual representation
(figure 3).
52
Here, Taiwan and North Korea were added to conform to the conventional definition of the term.
28
Figure 3. COW Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) Data on Northeast Asia
(n= 140; 1990-2010)
The red dashed line indicates the highest hostility level (0-5) while the blue solid line tracks the
number count of individual disputes per year. From the dataset, it is clear that militarized
interstate disputes for the region are much more prone to display of force rather than actual use
of force, with war (level 5) not making an appearance anywhere in the dataset. If we were to take
a more macro-level comparative perspective by also systematizing the data for Latin America
53
,
the Middle East
54
, Southeast Asia
55
, and we get the following result:
53
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela
54
Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Northern Cyprus, Oman, Palestine, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Yemen
55
Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
year 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009
Hostility Level
Number of Disputes
# MIDs HostLev
29
Table 2. Regional Comparison of the COW MIDs Data (1990-2010)
Region # of Disputes Highest
Hostility Level
Median
Hostility Level
Latin America 200 4 2.5
Middle East 1,765 4 3
Southeast Asia 265 4 3
TOTAL 2,230
Although the three regions in table 2 also do not indicate escalation to war, the number of total
disputes is quite notable, especially in the overwhelmingly dominant case of the Middle East.
Since one could make the case that the sheer number of actors subsumed under each region may
correlate with the total number of disputes, we could take the UCDP armed conflict database for
a further comparative assessment (table 3).
Table 3. Regional Distribution of Conflicts during 1990-2012
Region # of Disputes
Europe 62
Middle East 111
Asia
(Central and Southern Asia)
56
(Eastern Asia)
57
(Oceania)
58
354
(219)
(75*)
(60)
Africa 298
Americas 64
TOTAL 890
*Cambodia= 10; China= 1; Laos= 1; Myanmar/Burma= 53; Thailand= 10
The initial UCDP dataset codes each dispute as belonging to one of the five regions: Europe (1),
Middle East (2), Asia (3), Africa (4), and the Americas (5). At this level, Asia sticks out as having
the most number of disputes. By disaggregating the region into sub-regions and thereby parsing
56
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.
57
Cambodia, China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
(North), South Vietnam.
58
Australia, Brunei, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands,
Vanuatu, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, East Timor.
30
out the monolithic region of ‘Asia,’ we see just how misleading the initial statistic could be
59
: in
‘East Asia,’ Myanmar (Burma) alone is responsible for 53 disputes (from the pool of 75), and
there is only one dispute in what would be considered to be Northeast Asia—the conflict
spanning 1990 to 2008 between China and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a
Muslim separatist group funded by militant Uighurs. This reinforces the hunch that there is no
‘conflict’ in Northeast Asia, at least in the way that conflict is framed in conventional IR theory.
Things get even murkier if we were to heed Boulding’s contention that there is a
category of peaceful conflicts: “all war involves conflict, some conflict involves peace, and all
nonconflict involves peace.”
60
Apparently, conflict could be peaceful if there is a sharp
demarcation of how much damage is allowed to the respective participants, which is rooted in
the nature of the taboos involved. In a way, this complexity speaks to the methodological mote
between how conflict is conceived of by scholars that work mainly with large-n datasets and
those with a stronger qualitative bent. Nevertheless, without denying ongoing efforts that aim to
disaggregate mere force and fatalities from the overarching concept of conflict, such as datasets
that account for the humanitarian aspect of war,
61
or the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset
(UCDP GED),
62
the predominant orientation in IR is to treat conflict as war or an instance that
involves the use of force; under this paradigm, Northeast Asia has not seen much conflict.
59
For critique on the dataset and its (mis)fit with Asia, see Johnston, “What (If Anything) Does East Asia Tell Us
About International Relations Theory?” 53-78.
60
Boulding, Stable Peace, 10-11.
61
See Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New
Dataset of Battle Deaths,” European Journal of Population 21, no. 2 (2005): 145-66.
62
The UCDP GED spatially and temporally codes each event, framed as an instance of organized violence that
involves at least one fatality. Ralph Sundberg and Erik Melander, “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event
Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 4 (2013): 523-32.
31
On Peace
There is a simple reason for looking at the theoretical discourse on peace alongside the
empirical data on war, aside from its intuitive appeal: due to differing conceptualizations, less
conflict may not necessarily indicate more peace. A predominant number of large-n datasets
implicitly assume that cessation in armed combat equates to a sort of peace, or leave peace
undefined in its entirety. Therefore, it is easy to mistakenly equate less conflict to more peace,
not realizing that it makes sense that the two may only go hand-in-hand if conflict is conceived
of in its militarized form while peace is packaged in the most minimalist sense as the absence of
war (often called ‘negative peace’). This tendency toward either symmetric or asymmetric
relationships has been cited as a core difference between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ cultures
in the political sciences—where asymmetric causal models and explanations mean that a
particular occurrence is not simply the mirror image of the nonoccurrence, while causal
symmetry would imply that the same model can be applied to both the negated concept and its
opposite (the exact inverse).
63
For operationalization purposes, negative peace is indeed a
convenient convention that may explain why there may be whole datasets committed to
pinpointing the termination of conflict, as does the UCDP Termination Dataset. Moreover, the
fact that one could establish the success or failure of peace dependent on the presence or absence
of warfare, once again, places a premium on the existence of casualties.
64
Just as Boulding had
asserted that being awake and being asleep are not perfect opposites,
65
establishing that there is
less conflict in Northeast Asia may not automatically mean that we are in a period of peace.
63
The asymmetry is called the ‘principle of conceptual opposites’ in the qualitative tradition. See Gary Goertz and
James Mahoney, A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences (Princeton
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 64-65; 161-173.
64
Caroline Hartzell, Matthew Hoddie, and Donald Rothchild, “Stabilizing the Peace After Civil War,” International
Organization 55, no. 1 (2001): 183-208.
65
Boulding, Stable Peace, 8.
32
The confusion is magnified by the various empirical contexts in which the term was
employed, such as when Nikita Khrushchev popularized ‘peaceful coexistence’: a state of affairs
where resorting to war is ruled out as a mechanism of conflict resolution, each party treats others
as an equal, and are obligated to the rules of absolute sovereignty and non-intervention.
66
Given
the backdrop of the Cold War, the phrase became tainted to be interpreted as merely the
continuation of conflict by other means. Of course, a more contemporary torchbearer of the
phrase is China, which is irrefutably clear about peaceful coexistence as a critical principal of
conduct in its constitution. What intentions lie behind certain word choices and whether they are
comparable is up for debate, but it is true that ‘peace’ is not as intuitive as a term as people give
it credit. Moreover, it does not help that within the discipline, there has been relatively more
theorizing and efforts at systematic quantifying instances of conflict than peace.
In following, if the conflict discourse emits a centrifugal force in creating a rough
consensus on the need for incorporating the use of force or violence, there is perhaps more of a
centripetal dynamic in how we should category ‘peace.’ There is a sliver of common
understanding by most of the scholars studying peace that the matter should not merely be a
residual category when focusing on war and that the minimalist definition of peace is inadequate.
Regarding everything else, it is difficult to extract a tight consensus on what peace really
means—except that it often enjoys the company of adjectives. This may also explain why
scholars have tended to focus on ‘cooperation’ (i.e. shared affiliations in international
organizations, participation in multilateral regimes, etc) that suggests less permanency rather
than peace, or opted to use the term ‘peacefulness,’ which gives a greater sense of gradients as
opposed to a singular static state as may be suggested by ‘peace.’ As an illustration, there are
66
Nikita Khrushchev, “On Peaceful Coexistence,” Foreign Affairs 38, no. 1 (1959): 1-18.
33
seven representative conceptions of peace in the political science and IR literature (see Table 4).
Table 4. Seven Representative Typologies of Peace
Author Definition Categorization
Boulding
(1978)
67
“On the positive side, peace
signifies a condition of good
management, orderly resolution
of conflict, harmony associated
with mature relationships,
gentleness, and love. On the
negative side, it is conceived as
the absence of something—the
absence of turmoil, tension,
conflict, and war.”
68
Stable war: war is virtually incessant
Unstable war: war is regarded as the
norm but is interrupted by periods of
relative peace
Unstable peace: peace is regarded as
the norm and war is regarded as the
breakdown of peace, which will be
restored when the war is over
Stable peace: probability of war is so
small that it does not really enter into
the calculation of any of the people
involved
George
(1992)
69
Stable peace “is a relationship
between two states in which
neither side considers employing
force, or even making a threat of
force, in any dispute, even
serious disputes, between them.
Deterrence and compellence
backed by threats of military
force are simply excluded as
instruments of policy. Two states
that enjoy stable peace may
continue to have serious
disputes, but they share a firm
understanding that such disputes
must be dealt with by
nonmilitary means.”
70
Precarious peace: often requires the
use of active/immediate deterrence to
prevent outbreak of war
Conditional peace: more general use
of deterrence, often remains in the
background
Stable peace: relationship between
two nations in which not only the idea
of going to war but also the threat of
using military force is unthinkable
Kacowicz
(2000)
71
Stable peace is an ongoing
dynamic process rather than a
Zone of negative peace (mere absence
of war): peace is maintained only on
67
See Boulding, Stable Peace.
68
Boulding, Stable Peace, 3.
69
Alexander George, “From Conflict to Peace: Stages Along the Road,” United States Institute of Peace Journal 5,
no. 6 (1992): 9.
70
Alexander George, “Foreword,” in Stable Peace Among Nations, eds., Arie M. Kacowicz, Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov,
Ole Elgström, and Magnus Jerneck (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), xiii.
71
.Arie M. Kacowicz, Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, Ole Elgström, and Magnus Jerneck, eds., Stable Peace Among Nations
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 11 & 21-22. The concept of stable peace can be traced back to
Deutsch and his propositions regarding security communities: the logic goes, that when states can become integrated
to the point of representing a community where disputes may be resolved through mechanisms short of war, we may
also claim the existence of a stable peace that transcends simply that of stable order. See, Karl W. Deutsch, Sidney A.
34
single condition, which lies on a
continuum with absence of war
due to balance of power or
deterrence on one end, and
maintenance of a pluralistic
security community on the other
end; represents a community of
society of nation-states satisfied
with the status quo, in which
domestic and international
conflicts might occur, though
they are strictly kept within
nonviolent limits.
an unstable basis and/or by negative
means such as threats, deterrence, lack
of will or capabilities to engage in
violent conflict at a certain time. The
possibility of war remains tangible and
real.
Zone of stable peace (no expectation
of violence): peace is maintained on a
reciprocal and consensual basis. The
probability of war is so small that it
does not really enter into the
calculations of any of the parties
involved. Unlike negative peace,
stable peace requires peaceful
relations both within and among
states.
Pluralistic security community
(advanced form of stable peace):
stable expectation of peaceful change,
where member-states share common
norms, values, and political
institutions; sustain a common
identity, and are deeply
interdependent. The shared
expectation of peaceful change is a
function of common values, mutual
responsiveness and trust, and the
abandonment of war as a policy option
to resolve conflicts.
Miller
(2007)
72
Warm peace and reconciliation
signifies that states renounce the
use of force even as a means of
last resort in settling disputes.
This entails a clear departure
from traditional power-
balancing, competition, and self-
help behavior under anarchy.
Hot war: two sides actually employ
force in order to resolve conflict
Cold war: no ongoing violence
between two sides, but war may erupt
at any moment
Cold peace: conflict is reduced but not
resolved and although the danger of
war declines, its very possibility
shapes the strategic landscape and the
parties take the chance of war erupting
into account into their behavior
Burrell, Robert A. Kann, Maurice Lee Jr., Martin Lichterman, Raymond E. Lindgren, Francis L. Loewenheim, and
Richard W. Van Wagenen, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957).
72
Benjamin Miller, States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12-14.
35
Warm peace: highly unlikely that the
parties will use force regardless of the
intensity of their differences.
Oelsner
(2007)
73
Similar to Kacowicz, peace is a
dynamic process rather than a
condition, which tends to be
self-reinforcing but never
irreversible. Moreover, there is
no precondition on the type of
regime that brings about peace.
Largely, negative peace
represents a lingering
expectation that parties may
resort to the use of force, while
positive peace requires a sense
of community forged by ideals
rather than might.
Negative peace: threat or use of force
is not entirely ruled out; language of
security permeates relationships. This
has three subcategories of fragile,
unstable, and cold or conditional
peace in the order of the frequency
and the distance in time the most
recent violent clash occurred.
Positive peace: defined by confidence
and trust, war has been ruled out as a
possibility. This is subdivided into
stable peace and pluralistic security
community, with the latter exhibiting a
more participatory type wherein links
and common identities bind the
members together into a community.
Stable peace is a necessary condition
for pluralistic security community, but
not vice versa.
Klein,
Goertz &
Diehl
(2008)
74
Foremost, peace is not merely
the absence of war; it signifies
that there are institutional means
available for the non-violent
management of conflict. The
focus is on long-term
relationships rather than one-off
or isolated incidents of
cooperation or conflict. There
are three components for
assessing the state of peace or
rivalry, each with two sub-
components: conflict (presence
of war plans, conflict such as
MIDs), communication & issues
(main issues in conflict, level of
communication), and
agreements, institutions, and
diplomacy (state of diplomatic
Rivalry (1.0): as the extreme
conflictual end of the peace scale
continuum, this relies on the
Goertz/Diehl rivalry concept
Negative peace zones (low level
conflict 0.75~negative peace 0.5): the
absence of war may be generated by
deterrence; most importantly, the use
of force still enters the calculus for
states in resolving conflicts and there
is at least one party that is not satisfied
with the status quo. The level of
diplomatic engagement and formal
agreements further distinguishes
different scores within the zone.
Positive peace zones (positive peace
0.25~ pluralistic security community
0.0): war becomes ‘unthinkable,’ thus,
the use of force is ruled out as a
73
Andrea Oelsner, “Friendship, Mutual Trust and the Evolution of Regional Peace in the International System,”
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2007): 257-79.
74
James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul Diehl, “The Peace Scale: Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Non-
Rivalry and Peace,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 25, no. 1 (2008): 68 & 70.
36
relations, area/level/number of
agreements).
conflict management mechanism;
there is a lack of disputes such as
territorial claims that can escalate into
war; and there is a strong web of
functional interdependence and
institutions binding the parties. Dyads
at the 0.25 mark show lower levels of
integration than those closer to the 0.0
point.
Kupchan
(2010)
75
“A zone of stable peace is a
grouping of strategically
proximate states among which
war has become unthinkable.
The members of a zone of stable
peace succeed in demilitarizing
their relationship, thereby
eliminating the use of armed
force as a legitimate tool of
statecraft. The indicators of such
demilitarization include:
undefended borders and/or the
redeployment of forces from
contested areas; the absence of
war plans against one another; a
neutral or positive reaction to
mutual increases in defense
spending; the establishment of
joint political institutions; and
evidence that elites, and
ultimately publics, have come to
see war among the parties in
question as extremely remote, if
not outside the realm of the
possible.”
76
Rapprochement: as the most
rudimentary form of peace, the actors
involved move away from armed
rivalry to sharing mutual expectations
of peaceful coexistence (short of
developing a set of rules/norms
governing behavior or constructing a
shared identity)
Security community: as the more
evolved form of peace than
rapprochement, there are rules and
institutions for managing relations and
dispute resolution. Despite the sense
of ‘we-ness,’ there is still an element
of preserving sovereignty.
Union: as the highest expression of
stable peace, this signifies states
coming together into one polity,
thereby embracing supra-nationality.
States typically cede to a central
authority and interests are framed in a
unitary sense, rather than in conjoint
terms. There is a transition from what
was a ‘shared identity’ to that of a
‘common identity.’
75
Charles A. Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2010).
76
Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends, 29-30.
37
Keeping in mind those even nominal scales can play pivotal foundational roles in getting
us to higher levels of measurement (as advocated by Collier et al),
77
with the exception of Klein
et al and perhaps Kupchan, the categories of peace seem highly conceptual and descriptive.
Moreover, secondary efforts to truly disaggregate the gray area and propose a higher level of
measurement have not been achieved. Of course, it is also plausible that these typologies—like
many other cases in political science and IR—serve merely as ‘ideal types’ that resemble rough
signposts to indicate where we are headed rather than an actual empirical destination. Regardless,
we need explicit and analytically useful dimensions of what constitutes each category of peace
that can work as clear signposts in leading us out of the thick haze resulting from such an
expansive and confusing gray zone in between the two ends of the war-peace continuum.
Acknowledging that it is antiquated to rationalize the lack of quantification of peace by stating
that the subject is the domain of humanities departments or advocacy groups, it is curious as to
why we face a dearth of efforts to quantify peace in the IR discipline. Despite its name, the Peace
Science Society and its accompanying journal of Conflict Management and Peace Science
(CMPS), shows a greater penchant for studying conflict than capturing peace. A popular track in
the media has been to reference peace indices produced by various think tanks, such as the
Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) and its ‘global peace index.’
78
There is an interesting
project by the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, which has formalized what they call ‘Minimum
Acceptable Peaceful Interactions (MAPIs)’ to basically reflect the level of overall peace.
79
The
77
David Collier, Jody LaPorte, and Jason Seawright, “Putting Typologies to Work: Concept Formation,
Measurement, and Analytic Rigor,” Political Research Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2012): 217-32.
78
Institute for Economics and Peace, accessed December 15, 2015, http://economicsandpeace.org/research/iep-
indices-data/global-peace-index.
79
Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford, accessed December 15, 2015,
https://peaceinnovation.stanford.edu/category/peace-metrics/.
38
only issue here seems to be that since these data traces are at the level of the individual,
aggregation to that of the inter-state may need much fine-tuning and interpretation.
In synthesizing the seven typologies of peace, we see that the highest expression of
peace—stable peace, pluralistic security community, positive peace, warm peace, and union—is
based on a shared mentality that the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy has been
ruled out and subsequently, war is an ‘unthinkable’ prospect. In other words, war as well as any
anticipation for violence or preparations to that effect is out. Particularly in the case of the
‘pluralistic security community’ or ‘union’ that may realistically have limited generalizability to
models outside of the European Union (EU), the language of security is superseded by common
identity and shared norms. It has become common to place East Asia side-by-side with Europe,
as a practice in comparing and contrasting purportedly vastly different representations of
regional identity.
80
If we also consider that the traditional realist prescriptions of deterrence or
balance of power (or threat) must no longer exist, it is difficult to conclude that Northeast Asia
has reached the point of such peaceful zenith. Thus, we are in a limbo, where we have already
long arrived at war termination, but we do not necessarily have more positive peace.
81
Reconciling Conflict & Peace
The previous overview of the existing literature on conflict and peace was deliberately
general, as this chapter plays the role of a large brush stroke rather than a pincet that attempts to
80
For a good overview, see Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium
(Ithaca, N.Y .: Cornell University Press, 2005) and T.J. Pempel, ed., Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a
Region (Ithaca, N.Y .: Cornell University Press, 2005). For an interesting argument that views the centrality of EU in
analysis of regional integration as amounting to a form of ‘de facto snobbery’ and thus, the comparison between the
EU and East Asia as unproductive, see Philomena Murray, “Comparative Regional Integration in the EU and East
Asia: Moving Beyond Integration Snobbery,” International Politics 47, no. 3-4 (2010): 308-23.
81
For more on this balanced assessment of the state of affairs in Northeast Asia, see Steve Chan, Enduring Rivalries
in the Asia-Pacific (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
39
nitpick on the current debate of the subject; hence, there was no particular distinction made
between types of war (i.e. ethnic, religious, civil etc), its phases (i.e. onset, escalation etc), or the
actors involved (inter-, intra-, and non-state). Even at the surface though, there are some
immediate concerns regarding the lack of dialogue between what constitutes conflict and peace
even if we were to admit that the two are not necessarily two sides of the same coin. For instance,
much of the conflict literature focuses on dyads, while the unit of analysis for the peace camp is
less definitive—if anything, the references to ‘communities’ or ‘zones’ in the typologies of peace
implicitly leverage the regional over the bilateral. There is an additional unit of analysis problem
in that there is no clear way of knowing how to distinguish conflict and peace from aggressive
foreign policy and its pacific variant, respectively (dyadic vs. monadic attributes). One of the
main assumptions of Oelsner in theorizing about peace is that peace at the international level
intuits a type of relationship sustained by two or more states, and therefore, very much a
‘relational’ concept. Accordingly, “it is necessary that two or more states conduct some sort of
relationship or interaction to be able to assert that it is peaceful,” and that the absence of war
might just indicate a lack of relationship rather than any meaningful peace (although, Oelsner
adds that it is rare to come across neighboring states devoid of relationships).
82
So while it seems
that conflict can occur between two states, peace requires more than simply two actors. The
colloquial analogy of needing the whole block to be on neighborhood watch to ensure safety and
‘peace’ than simply maintaining a jovial relationship with one’s immediate neighbors resonates
with this point. Having said that, the logic behind why this has to be the case is unclear.
Moreover, this leads to a string of fascinating questions that have not deserved much attention: if
one contends that peace does make sense at the bilateral level, could regional peace and dyadic
82
Oelsner, “Friendship, Mutual Trust and the Evolution of Regional Peace in the International System,” 263.
40
peace have criss-crossing effects? Is the consolidation of dyadic peace a necessary condition in
facilitating regional peace (what is the logical sequence here)? Further compounding the problem
is that there seems to almost be an epistemological divide between those that are more interested
in explaining regional conflict or peace (‘generalists’) and those that prefer to hone in on
empirical sets of cases at the dyadic level (‘specialists’).
Of course, the main take-away here is that despite the undeniable progress that has been
made within Northeast Asia, there is yet to be peace that is of a durable nature akin to positive
peace. Although more work can be done on clarifying the discourse, using the existing
frameworks to analyze the region of Northeast Asia produces little analytic leverage, as we face
something that falls neither into conflict nor peace; thus, the rationale for studying tensions. In
the next chapter, we look to the ‘tensions studies’ that reached its apex in the 1970s in order to
construct our own measurement.
41
Chapter 3: Problematizing the Volcanic Model of Tensions
The previous chapter has outlined why the existing analytic tools pegged on war and
peace are inadequate for accurately capturing the state of affairs in Northeast Asia. The shift
away from force tracks well with the recent arguments on the declining utility of (inter-state)
war,
83
along with findings showing that only a minority of inter-state disputes actually escalate
to war
84
and efforts to move away from privileging the use of physical force to capture the
concept.
85
A good case could be made that if the likelihood for escalation into general or total
war is rather low, the focus should correspondingly be on developing fine-grained measures for
the large gray zone that exists in between the two polar types of conflict and peace; the same
necessity applies even if one were to replace the conflict-peace continuum with a conflict-
cooperation scale. Additionally, given the fuzzy borders of what constitutes the two tail-ends, it
may help to study what lies in between to better delineate the overall boundaries of each concept.
Unfortunately, The Economist summed it up nicely when they said that “quantifying peace is a
bit like trying to describe how happiness smells: people generally recognize it when they come
across it, which rules out the need for further examination.”
86
A similar visceral understanding
pervades the concept of ‘tensions’; in fact, the word ‘tension’ has so much intuitive appeal that it
has become a descriptive catch-all for describing general hostility and animosity among states, as
83
For an overview of the debate, see Azar Gat, “Is War Declining- and Why?” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 2
(2012): 149-57.
84
For instance, see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, “Reason and War.” American Political Science
Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1113-29; Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer, and J. David Singer, “Militarized Interstate
Disputes, 1816-1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns,” Conflict Management and Peace Science
15, no. 2 (1996): 163-213; A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980). This has motivated some to capitalize on the distinctions among different ‘peaceful’ international
dispute outcomes, rather than study the probability of war. See Patricia Lynne Sullivan, “Disaggregating Peace:
Domestic Politics and Dispute Outcomes,” International Interactions 32, no. 1 (2006): 1-25.
85
For a good critique of the conventional discourse that treats the phenomenon of war as involving power that is
synonymous to violence, see Carsten F. Roennfeldt, “Productive War: A Re-Conceptualisation of War,” Journal of
Strategic Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 39-62.
86
“Give Peace a Score,” The Economist Online, June 12, 2012, accessed October 2, 2015,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/daily-chart-6.
42
well as a theoretical shorthand for prelude to war.
As an attempt to get closer to formulating an analytic term for tension, this chapter will
be as expansive as possible about prior attempts in order to capture the concept and build on
those efforts. It is easy to forget in the contemporary IR discipline that the appeal of what could
be called ‘tension studies’ were once attractive enough to warrant its own project at the United
Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
87
Since the inception of
the UNESCO project, one can detect a clear evolutionary shift in the way that tensions are
conceptualized, beginning with sociological and psychological theories and then inching closer
to quantifiable dimensions that resemble more rationalist accounts. Unfortunately, works that
deal specifically (and wholly) with the concept of tensions are few and far between. With that
said, five bodies of work have been selected as representative markers here to examine this
evolutionary arc in tension studies, in ascending order of time: Quincy Wright, Ole Holsti,
Newcombe and Wert, Kjell Goldmann, and Snyder and Diesing. Representative, as they are most
cited and at the same time, exhibit different tendencies in methodologies. Hence, they serve as
valuable guideposts for categorizing different ‘waves’ in tension studies, from the foundational
perceptional accounts, to the more behavioral discourse on quantification, to the contemporary
debates that tightly couple tensions to war (including the rivalry literature and their volcanic
model of tensions).
To be clear, this chapter is not a vindication of having buckled under the normative
pressures of inserting a literature review for the sake of having one. The main takeaway here is
that with time, attempts at capturing tensions have focused predominantly on coupling the notion
87
Otto Klineberg, “The UNESCO Project on International Tensions: A Challenge to the Sciences of Man,”
International Social Science Bulletin 1, no. 1-2 (1949): 11-21. The report defines tensions as “states of strain,
leading to action, frequently of an aggressive or hostile character.”
43
to the likelihood of war, i.e.) basing the measurement of tensions on material indices of power,
and hence, on figures such as military spending, or directly incorporating expectations for war as
part of the equation for arriving at the level of tensions. The objective of this chapter then is to
not only trace the evolutionary arc in tensions studies, but also reinforce the rationale for re-
conceptualizing tensions by de-coupling the notion from war, which serves as the main topic for
the succeeding chapter.
The Evolutionary Arc in Tension Studies
The First Wave: The Foundational Perceptional Accounts
One would be remiss to by-pass one of the first scholars to tackle the idea of tension:
Quincy Wright and his magnum opus, A Study of War, of which the first edition in 1942 led to an
additional second edition for release in 1965. A starting point for Wright was to designate three
essential ingredients that hold a society together: structure, energy, and tension.
88
Structure
denotes the level of flexibility or rigidity of a society, as when governed by totalitarianism for
instance, while energy is captured by the average quantity of ‘mechanical energy’ available for
every person in the population, which increases with surplus of capital as it allows for leisure and
activity that transcends the mere earthly necessities demanded by labor and sustenance. Tension
then, “may be regarded in the broadest sense as the condition arising from inconsistencies among
initiatives in the structure of the society.”
89
This means that the three elements are highly
interconnected, with tension at any given time dependent on the rate of change in the degree of
rigidity of the societal structure along with the amount of energy. Since the analogy is that of an
88
Quincy Wright, Problems of Stability and Progress in International Relations (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1954), 160.
89
Wright, Problems of Stability and Progress in International Relations, 160.
44
electrical system wherein tension or electromotive force fluctuates based on the resistance and
current strength, an underlying assumption is that there needs to be a minimal amount of tension
to get things working, and hence, there are actually desirable qualities to tensions: “tension
contribute to the causation of war, but they also contribute to the causation of progress.”
90
In
other words, it is possible to ‘manipulate’ tension and achieve the right equilibrium through the
adjustment of social energy.
This logic leads to what Wright proposes as constituting a ‘general tension level,’ or “the
quantity of social energy available to the leaders of a group” that “varies proportionately to the
intensity and homogeneity of opinion.”
91
Therefore, extreme intensity and homogeneity
indicates a high positive tension level, while extreme intensity and heterogeneity suggests a high
negative tension level. Similarly, conditions that are most favorable to violence or high tension
levels are extremes, of either general security or general insecurity: the former typically
generates a dissatisfied minority against a hardening of society along certain ‘grooves,’ while the
latter may indicate that the majority is discontent and apprehensive about the future of the
various institutions and practices. At a more dyadic level, inter-group tensions may be gauged by
tracing indices that reflect ‘friendliness’ or ‘unfriendliness’ between the groups. Such tensions
usually arise due to the differential rate of the integrative or divergent forces of material-based or
economic processes on the one hand, to that of the cultural and political dynamics on the other.
In this scenario, inter-group tensions tend to arise when the bilateral material connection
increases without an accompanying integration of the cultural and political aspects, or if the
institutions deviate without a corresponding drop in contacts.
So why is all this seemingly sociological analysis relevant? The picture laid out by
90
Wright, Problems of Stability and Progress in International Relations, 160.
91
Quincy Wright, A Study of War 2
nd
edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1104.
45
Wright is essentially a ground-up ascending process of tensions, which is summed up in his
belief that incidents of violence or threats thereof rarely have isolated impacts for the rest of the
world.
92
For the most part, Wright’s proclivity to focus on the individuals or the societies of
which they are a part also stems from his emphasis on the importance of psychology, attitudes,
and apprehensions. For instance, his conviction that tensions can ultimately be regressed down to
the level of the individual mind enables him to posit that (inter-state) rivalries follow a similar
logic where states are driven to find an external ‘other’ to enhance its own internal solidarity—
which sounds very much like Social Identity Theory (SIT)
93
and the diversionary war theory
94
of the modern day period. The focus on psychological processes also explains Wright’s treatment
of subjects like myths, symbols, and ideologies, as what matters in the end are opinions rather
than actual conditions. Although brief, he also categorizes inter-state tension along five different
states based on intensity of attitudes, ranging from ‘symbolic attack,’ ‘threats of violence,’
‘discrimination,’ ‘disapproval,’ and ‘normal relations.’
95
His general approach to war also
applies to his analysis of tensions:
Cultures are but abstractions of common psychological elements in aggregates of human
beings. Wars are ultimately clashes not of armies, laws, or even cultures but of masses of
individuals, each of whom is a distinct personality whose behavior, while affected by the
92
Specifically, he states that “threats of, or resort to, violence, in any corner of the world, under modern conditions
of communication, whether in support of established ideologies or of revolutionary utopias, induce a general rise in
tension level.” Wright, A Study of War, 1110.
93
See Henri Tajfel, ed., Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
Henri Tajfel, “Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations,” Annual Review of Psychology 33 (February 1982): 1-39.
For applications in IR, see, Tyler M. Curley, “Social Identity Theory and EU Expansion,” International Studies
Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2009): 649-68; Frank Mols and Martin Weber, “Laying Sound Foundations for Social Identity
Theory‐ Inspired European Union Attitude Research: Beyond Attachment and Deeply Rooted Identities,” Journal of
Common Market Studies 51, no. 3 (2013): 505-21; Esra Cuhadar and Bruce Dayton, “The Social Psychology of
Identity and Inter‐ group Conflict: From Theory to Practice,” International Studies Perspectives 12, no. 3 (2011):
273-93.
94
Andrew J. Enterline, “Introduction to CMPS Special Issue: Diversionary Theory,” Conflict Management and
Peace Science 27, no. 5 (2010): 411-16; Ahmer Tarar, “Diversionary Incentives and the Bargaining Approach to
War,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2006): 169-88; Sung Chul Jung, “Foreign Targets and Diversionary
Conflict,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2014): 566-78.
95
Wright, A Study of War, 692.
46
command of a superior officer, by laws, and by significant symbols, is affected also by
individual heredity and individual experience. Upon these individual elements rests the
power of social, legal, and political superstructures.
96
To some extent, Quincy Wright might be cast as a product of his times, as work on
psychological theories were undoubtedly gaining steam at around the time that he was analyzing
war and tensions. Frank Klingberg had come up with psychometric methods to measure the level
of friendliness and hostility among nations
97
, while Maurice Farber—as a social and clinical
psychologist—also looked into the correlation between the human mind and conflict.
98
Roughly
a decade after the first edition of Wright’s study on war and its associated phenomena, there was
a continuation of interest in this approach to tensions. Ole Holsti had espoused the idea of
‘tension scales’ that would be based on the three following dichotomized variables that he saw as
mostly universal tendencies upon which to base judgments on: attitude (positive affect- negative
affect), capabilities (strength or potency- weakness or impotency), and behavior (activity-
passivity).
99
The logic was that through techniques such as content-analysis of verbal behavior,
one would code the text along a sixty-four cell matrix for every pair of states, where perceptions
of ‘self’ and of the ‘other’ would be arranged according to different combinations of the three
variables. Essentially, one could then cross-reference empirical results with the theoretical pairs
that should generate the greatest instability as well as stability—i.e. when both states A and B
perceive itself and the other with negative affect (instability), and when both states view itself
and the other with positive affect (stability). At its core, the analysis was geared towards
96
Wright, A Study of War, 1233.
97
Frank L. Klingberg, “Studies in Measurement of the Relations Among Sovereign States,” Psychometrika 6, no. 6
(1941): 335-52.
98
Farber talks about what he dubs the ‘Armageddon Complex,’ which describes frustrations emanating from the
individual’s future outlook that pushes one to regard war as necessary or inevitable. Maurice L. Farber,
“Psychoanalytic Hypotheses in the Study of War,” Journal of Social Issues 11, no. 1 (1955): 29-35.
99
Ole R. Holsti, “The Value of International Tension Measurement,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 7, no. 3 (1963):
613. Also, see Ole R. Holsti, “East-West Conflict and Sino-Soviet Relations,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
1, no. 2 (1965): 115-30.
47
capturing the manner in which states perceived its relationships with other states.
Among others, Holsti envisioned two particularly useful roles that tension scales could
play, based on a barometric-like analysis.
100
First, like a thermometer, it could locate hotspots in
the international system, without necessarily diagnosing the nature of that danger. Second, a
‘tension thermometer’ can have predictive value, much like that of the Dow-Jones and other
market averages. Just as the shape of the pattern by the Dow Jones average is utilized as a
forecast of market trends, tracing the movement of attitudinal variables in the tension scale could
potentially perform a parallel function. On an extremely practical and empirical basis, Holsti also
noted that decision-makers could use tension scales to evaluate the outcome of their potential
policies, especially for those interested in actuating policies without increasing tensions.
Hypothetically, a leader could take a series of tension measurement, announce a decision to
implement a particular course of action, and then observe the movement on the tension scale.
As gleaned by his general methodology for constructing a measurement of tensions
based on a quantification of attitudinal variables, Holsti’s focus is on perceptions rather than
objects of perceptions. The very first sentence of this 1963 article encapsulates his overall
approach to tensions: “If we are to render intelligible the crucial problems of international
relations, it is essential not only to understand what exists but also to understand what men
perceive to exist and the resulting attitudes they hold.”
101
Thus, the perceptual and attitudinal
component echoes the instinctive view of tension as sentiments of hostility or emotions, which
resonates with the more colloquial usage in mediums such as newspapers and magazines. In a
different article where he makes the case that belief systems inform the images that decision-
makers refer to in making decisions (rather than some accurate representation of reality), Holsti
100
Holsti, The Value of International Tension Measurement, 615-16.
101
Holsti, The Value of International Tension Measurement, 608.
48
directly cites Wright, who claimed that “It may often be the case that an international conflict is
not in reality between states, but between distorted images of states.”
102
In this context, it is
possible for tensions to be driven by images, caricatures, and stereotypes rather than the
prevailing ‘objective’ conditions of threat. In fact, this sounds a lot like phenomenological
research, which seeks to attach interpretations to certain actions as captured by expressed
perceptions—in this case, those of decision-makers as reflected in key statements.
In a way, a good portion of the contemporary media portrayal of inter-state tensions
conforms to such psychological perceptional accounts of tensions, as evidenced by the heavy
reliance on attitudinal surveys to gauge the general public perception regarding another state’s
populace. For example, the depiction of Northeast Asia as being fraught with tensions is often
pegged to the results of polls that show particularly low public regard for another.
103
Often then,
tensions are fashioned as a whole-of-society phenomenon, although the media does also pick up
on more elite-level tensions as that of suspension of meetings or cooperative interaction. Again,
the emphasis here is still on underscoring the general mood of a country that emanates from
certain sentiments and perceptions based on psychological hostility.
The Second Wave: The Behavioral Turn
A tectonic shift, if there ever was one for tension studies, probably occurred with the
contribution of Newcombe and Wert and their efforts at statistical analysis of tensions. Assuming
that the overall structure of one’s publication is a reasonable indication of the author’s priority in
102
Ole R. Holsti, “The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 6, no.
3 (1962): 244. Original citation from Quincy Wright, “Design for a Research Project on International Conflict and
the Factors Causing Their Aggravation or Amelioration,” Western Political Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1957): 266.
103
The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation keeps a systematic and updated database for most opinion polls
regarding East Asia. See The Mansfield Opinion Poll Database, accessed October 2, 2015,
http://mansfieldfdn.org/program/research-education-and-communication/asian-opinion-poll-database/.
49
emphasis, Newcombe and Wert’s piece of 1972 contains roughly 30 pages of text, with well over
100 pages of various tables and figures. An overarching aim behind the 1972 publication was to
employ what they called the ‘tensiometer’ or ‘tension ratio’ (TR) and examine which states are
most likely to be involved in armed conflict by calculating their military expenditures in relation
to their gross national product (GNP).
104
The authors were essentially using their tension ratio to
capture what Singer called ‘estimated capability’—an element that together with ‘estimated
intent’ generates threat perception, which exacerbates the vicious cycle of armaments and
tensions.
105
For Singer, when either of the two (capability and intent) approached zero, the threat
perception also decreased, which should alleviate what has basically become known as the ‘arms
race.’
The method involved in deriving the ‘tensiometer’ started out with a comparative rank-
ordering of nations based on their GNP and their Military Expenditures (ME) to distinguish the
‘over-spenders’ from the ‘under-spenders.’ While an ‘over-spender’ would qualify a nation
whose ME rank is above that of its GNP rank (i.e. Israel in 1966), an ‘under-spender’ would
reflect one whose ME rank is below that of its GNP rank (i.e. Mexico in 1966). With this data,
they plotted the actual values for each state by designating one particular symbol for over-
spenders and another for under-spenders, and then proceeded to find a straight line that would
separate the two sets of symbols. Lines were assembled based on an examination of a total of 50
countries for a16-year period from 1950 to 1966. For each country, they calculated what its ME
104
Alan Newcombe and James Wert, An Inter-Nation Tensiometer For The Prediction Of War (Oakville, Ontario:
Canadian Peace Research Institute, 1972), 1. Upon later revisions, the authors decided that military expenditures per
capita and GNP per capita figures were to be preferred. See Alan Newcombe, John D. Barber, James Wert, Mark
Haven, and Kathy Hiebert, “An Improved Inter-Nation Tensiometer for the Prediction of War,” Peace Research
Reviews 5, no. 4 (1974): 1-52. Also, see Alan Newcombe and Hanna Newcombe, “The Fuse: A Chain of Nations in
Tension,” Security Dialogue 11, no. 2 (1980): 124-30.
105
Unfortunately, it is unclear as to how Singer is defining ‘tensions’ here. J. David Singer, “Threat Perception and
Armament-Tension Dilemma,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 2, no. 1 (1958): 90-105.
50
would be if it was determined solely by their GNP, which they called ME
Th
—the ‘Th’ subscript
representing ‘theoretical,’ given that the value was generated from the equation for the straight
line. By dividing the ME
Actual
by the ME
Th
(and multiplying by 100), they produced the TR.
The expressed intent of the authors was to someday, create a plot in three dimensions of the TRs
they had gathered for pairs of nations and transpose this with ideological distances between those
pairs of states (possibly from UN voting similarity data) to construct a diagram of peace and war.
On the whole, the incorporation of tensions was supplementary to the larger interest in
war. The first chapter, titled, ‘conclusion,’ outlines that the main finding of their work was that
the countries which set aside more than 4.63% of their GNP towards military uses were 6.61
times more likely to engage in war within the next five years than those that spent less than
4.63%.
106
There is not much theoretical expansion of the findings except for a few sentences on
the authors’ inductive belief that if one prepares for war, it will only beckon it as peaceful
alternatives become overlooked. In keeping the focus on tensions, the underlying assumption is
that tensions are a precursor to militarized conflict, which means that adopting tangible proxies
that are usually linked to war mobilization is a ‘logical’ choice. It is probably fair to say that for
Newcombe and Wert, the operationalization aspect was a more critical element than
conceptualization, which tended to drive the efforts by Wright and Holsti. The attention to
measurement can be seen in their statement that “only when we can begin to measure what we
think is tension can we adequately begin to conceptualize the word tension…Perhaps the only
virtue which our procedure has is that it will annoy others enough that they will actually begin to
106
Incidentally, the authors were also not shy about pointing out this finding, adding that “this is the conclusion
which we arrived at after studying the analysis, and we do not want anyone to miss it because they were confused by
how we did the work or by statistical analysis.” Newcombe and Wert, An Inter-Nation Tensiometer For The
Prediction Of War, 1.
51
measure tension properly [emphasis added].”
107
Despite the strong push towards measurement and quantification, the pendulum had
inched back a tiny bit by Kjell Goldmann and his central belief that “a fairly detailed conceptual
analysis is a prerequisite for meaningful tension measurement. We have to know what we want
to measure before we begin to measure it [emphasis added].”
108
Goldmann’s 1974 publication
was actually the final report of a research project, ‘Tension in Europe (1940-70),’that was
conducted along with Lars Häll, G. Roger Wall, and Milton Leitenbergat the Swedish Institute of
International Affairs in 1971.
109
The empirical backbone of the research was to measure how
East-West ‘tension’ in Europe had varied since 1946 and to see how the degree of bipolarization
(as an independent variable) had an impact.
110
So how did Goldmann generate his ‘tensiometer’?
At the outset, Goldmann associated tension with ‘perceptions of threat,’ which he
asserted was not equivalent to ‘threat perception’ that would imply that only the victim perceives
the threat. He argued that tension is a function of mutual expectations and not the sole property
of one actor alone; thus, “tension exists between two actors, or coalitions of actors, to the extent
that they expect conflict behavior to occur between them.”
111
The variation in tension was
dependent on three factors: the scope, likelihood, and immediacy in time of the expected conflict
behavior. For instance, tensions would be higher if the parties expect war as opposed to sanctions,
or if they see war as inevitable, and if they also foresee this happening in the near future. As an
107
Newcombe and Wert, An Inter-Nation Tensiometer For The Prediction Of War, 17-8.
108
Kjell Goldmann, Tension and Détente in Bipolar Europe (Stockholm, Sweden: Esselte Studium, 1974), 13.
109
Also see Kjell Goldmann, “East-West Tension in Europe, 1946-70: A Conceptual Analysis and a Quantitative
Description,” World Politics 26, no. 1 (1973): 106-25, and; Kjell Goldmann and Johan Lagerkranz, “Neither Tension
nor Détente: East-West Relations in Europe, 1971-1975,” Cooperation and Conflict 12, no. 4 (1977): 251-64.
110
Goldmann distinguished polarity (power structure or power distribution) from polarization, which he defined in
the following way: “polarization is a process characterized by an increase in (positive) interaction between certain
members of the system and a decrease in (positive) interaction between them and other members of the system.
Polarization thus implies that the members of the system group themselves into subsystems which are characterized
internally by increased interaction and externally by decreased interaction.”Kjell Goldmann, “Bipolarization and
Tension in International Systems: A Theoretical Discussion,” Conflict and Cooperation 7, no. 1 (1972): 40-1.
111
Goldmann, Tension and Détente in Bipolar Europe, 19.
52
equation, the conflict expectations of actors A and B are denoted as E
A
and E
B
respectively,
and are constituted in the following manner:
E
A
= S
A
x P
A
x I
A
E
B
= S
B
x P
B
x I
B
Here, S represents the scope of future conflict behavior as perceived by A (or B), P the
probability of that conflict as viewed by A (or B), and I the immediacy in time of future conflict
behavior between the two parties as recognized by A (or B).
He lays out several assumptions prior to the content analysis stage and the
operationalization of tensions. The first reflects a common thread in the literature, that while it
may be difficult to measure absolute levels of tension, one can still extract useful insights by
examining the relative variations in tension. The second is that the conflict expectations are those
of individuals, specifically those decision-makers rather than the general public. On a related
note, given the complexity of having to deal with the notion (however realistic) that the decision-
makers are not a monolithic whole, the analysis treats those perceptions as representative and
unitary. The third assumption is that it is less important that decision-makers may not mean what
they say. Goldmann argues that the content of their statements are still apt to influence the other
parties’ expectations of conflict. In actually conducting the content analysis, Goldmann relies on
a method developed by Janis and Fadner, called the ‘Coefficient of the Imbalance
(COI)’technique. The underlying logic behind this approach is to disaggregate your ‘total content’
(total number of units in the text to be analyzed) into several groups
112
: ‘relevant content’ that
112
Goldmann used statements that contained a reference to present or future relations (among his set cluster of
countries) made by heads of state, government officials and representatives (i.e. ambassadors) that were also
reproduced in Keesing’s Contemporary Archives. Then, each sentence was coded as favorable, neutral, unfavorable,
or non-relevant, which resulted in a total of roughly 27,000 units. For specific coding rules, see Goldmann, Tension
and Détente in Bipolar Europe, 40-1.
53
contains units which include characteristics of interest for the study, ‘favorable content’ that
incorporates favorable occurrences of those characteristics up for study, ‘unfavorable content’
that encompasses those unfavorable occurrences, and ‘neutral content’ that is relevant but falls
neither into the favorable nor unfavorable category. With these groups in hand, one can go about
measuring the degree of imbalance between the favorable and unfavorable units in a particular
text, with favorable units pushing the COI towards the maximum threshold of +1 and
unfavorable in the direction of -1. Neutral and non-relevant units will push the coefficient toward
zero. Transposing this to tensions, if favorable units reflect low or decreasing tension, while
unfavorable units represent high or increasing tension, the COI becomes a valuable tension
coefficient with -1 basically showing maximum tension.
113
Goldmann’s ultimate aim behind conceptualizing tensions as conflict expectations and
operationalizing tensions as the variation in verbal behavior of decision-makers was to extract
information about changes in the probability of war occurrence. In this sense, tension was a
proxy measure for likelihood of war, which echoes the sentiment of Newcombe and Wert.
However, unlike Newcombe and Wert’s tensiometer that was grounded on capability,
Goldmann’s focus on expectations as perceived by certain actors echoes Holsti’s emphasis on
perceptions. One could argue that Goldmann’s treatment of tensions as perception of threat may
have been informed by what was at that time, a popular method of utilizing content analysis to
track the intensity of inter-state attitudes and behavior within the framework of conflict.
114
113
In another piece, Goldmann uses a trichotomized variable of tension, ranging from low, medium, to high, along
with a fourth category of ‘ambiguous’ tension. See Kjell Goldmann, “Cooperation and Tension Among Great Powers:
A Research Note,” Cooperation and Conflict 15, no. 1 (1980): 31-45.
114
For example, see Robert C. North, Ole R. Holsti, M. George Zaninovich, Dina A. Zines, Content Analysis: A
Handbook with Applications for the Study of International Crisis (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
1963); Dina A. Zines, “A Comparison of Hostile Behavior of Decision-Makers in Simulate and Historical Data,”
World Politics 18, no. 3 (1966): 474-502.
54
The Third Wave: Coupling Tensions to War
The link between tension and conflict—specifically, war—becomes almost inseparable
as works on international crises gain steam. One example of this trend was Snyder and Diesing’s
1977 book on international crisis, defined as “a sequence of interactions between the
governments of two or more sovereign states in severe conflict, short of actual war, but involving
the perception of a dangerously high probability of war.”
115
The notion of tension becomes
important as it essentially comes to represent the varying levels of intensity during the different
stages of a crisis (see figure 4).
Figure 4. Crisis Phases
116
In figure 1, the solid lines signify the degree of ‘tension’ or intensity of conflict behavior as one
moves through the different phases of a typical model of a crisis. The beginning of a crisis is
attributed to some conflict of interest that is not necessarily the cause per se, but a series of
developments which finally push conflict to boil over into a crisis. Tension remains low and mild
115
Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System
Structure in International Crises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 6.
116
Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, 15.
55
up to the challenge-resistance point, at which it may surpass the crisis-threshold and give way to
varying fluctuations in intensity during the confrontation phase. The several peaks of tension
here may emanate from a particular issue or an especially provocative act, but at each peak, the
likelihood of war also rises as does the “feelings of anxiety associated with tension.”
117
Thereafter, tensions may either sharply increase with initiation of war, or go the other direction
following the resolution phase to resemble something at the pre-crisis level.
Coupling tension and crisis has actually become a mainstay for the International Crisis
Behavior (ICB) project, which began in 1975. Within the variable of crisis ‘outcome’ that
represents one of eight dimensions of a crisis at the system (macro-) level, is the ‘tension level’
that denotes whether the result of the crisis led to more or less tension between the
adversaries.
118
If a crisis reoccurs among the main actors during the subsequent five-year period
(i.e. The Gaza Raid-Czech Arms Crisis of 1955-56 and Suez-Sinai Crisis of 1956 between Israel
and Egypt) tension is deemed to have escalated, while reduction would suggest an absence of
reoccurrence during the five-year frame following the initial incident.
119
The ICB project tends
to relegate the visceral understanding of tension to what they label as ‘stress,’ which refers to “a
state of mind among decision makers brought on by an environmental challenge requiring a
response within a limited time…a psychological condition usually associated with anxiety and/or
frustration produced by crisis and threat.”
120
The project employs an index of the decision-
117
Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, 14.
118
Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld. A Study of Crisis. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
1997), 19-20.
119
There are of course, differences between the Snyder and Diesing logic of a crisis to that of the ICB project. See
Michael Brecher, “State Behavior in International Crisis: A Model,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 23, no. 3 (1979):
450-51. Also see, “Codebook for ICB2 - International Crisis Behavior Project,” ICB Project, 2010, accessed October
1, 2014, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/icb/data/ICB2-2010-final.pdf.
120
Brecher and Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, 839. For a good overview of the psychological impact of stress on
crises, see Margaret G. Hermann, “Indicators of Stress in Policymakers during Foreign Policy Crises,” Political
Psychology 1, no. 1 (1979): 27-46.
56
makers’ stress as a dimension of the context of crisis onset, and while this pertains to the
individual level, stress for the international crisis as a whole is computed by taking the highest
stress level of any of those individual crisis actors involved.
The boundaries between the cognitive and the emotive in the case of the ICB project is
relatively clearer than in Snyder and Diesing’s exposition of tension as conflict behavior. The
authors at one point state that the main feature of their definition of tension is “the perception of
a dangerously high probability of war” by the parties involved, and that “the perceived
probability must at least be high enough to evoke feelings of fear and tension to an
uncomfortable degree.”
121
In another section, they argue that
the feeling of tension that always accompanies a crisis is subjectively felt within states,
although it is a consequence of the objective tension between the interests of the states
involved…that is, a crisis not only is a severe conflict of interests between states but also
sets up a sharp conflict of values within the states. [emphasis added].
122
This distinction between supposedly ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ tension is an interesting idea,
but one which needs to be fleshed out further especially in light of the possibility for tensions to
take the form of feelings and emotions. Nevertheless, any effort in getting closer to teasing out
what may actually constitute ‘subjective tension’ was quashed by the formal modelers; in the
words of Barry O’Neill, “they [formal modelers] looked at individual choices, and the notion of
tension “in the atmosphere” was unappealing. The concept also seemed bound up with emotions,
like anxiety and fear, which were not congenial to their method.”
123
With the advantage of
greater abilities for forecasting, there was probably a compromise to be made in simplification
for the sake of analysis. O’Neill’s treatment of tension in part, reflects this trend by embedding
the concept in game theory—particularly in models that mirror the process in which states find
121
Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, 7.
122
Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, 9.
123
Barry O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) 66.
57
themselves facing war.
In this context, the definition of international tension for O’Neill “is a shared worry
about an imminent conflict.”
124
There are some assumptions that are nestled into the way that
the notion is framed: first, the shared worry by adversaries is about an impending war; second,
that worry could generate the seeds for a war; and third, tension is an individual attribute of the
current situation, which is to say, that it does not vary among countries to the extent that we
could speak of “Russian tension” or “Chinese tension.” In line with this third kind of reasoning,
tension is a property of the whole system. As the conditional probability of war, although
different adversaries or actors may have their own individual assessments of war, “tension is
used for the probability held by an outside observer.”
125
Moreover, O’Neill separates what he
sees as prospective tension, or the “the probability at a certain time that the crisis will eventually
end in war,” from instantaneous tension, or the “relative likelihood of an immediate war at a
certain time.”
126
He then goes on to calculate prospective and instantaneous tension in the
framework of game theory, in chicken-based crisis models (where tension tends to induce states
to back down, thereby supporting peace) and stag hunt-based crisis models (where tension tends
to sow the seeds for war, as states are faced with a different calculus of whether or not to start
war rather than back down).
The author’s word choice for describing tensions (‘shared worry’) is quite interesting
given that his overall evaluation of tension is built on a thickly-strategic base with a heavy focus
on its cognitive aspects. At one point, he suggests that the inverse of crisis tension is ‘trust’
124
O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, 63.
125
O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, 66 & 68.
126
O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, 68.
58
captured by “the belief that the other side will be patient.”
127
It is unclear as to how expectation
of patience is consistent with the prism of rational choice that has been employed for most of the
argument; it may have been more consistent to either define trust in terms of the willingness to
take risks, or to apply a more social psychology approach to explaining what these terms like
‘worry,’ ‘trust,’ and ‘patience’ mean. Of course, this would mean coming full circle and
addressing corresponding issues such as ‘feelings’ of tension, but if tension is conceptualized as
merely ‘probabilities,’ it denies the notion of any of its messy but meaty metaphors to the
emotive or affective state.
The immanency of conflict as expressed in war, finds it most definitive form through the
rivalry literature and its volcanic model of tensions. Diehl and Goertz have outlined three
implications of the metaphor behind the ‘volcano model,’ where the imagery is one of pressure
building until the system explodes (typified by war outbreak):
First is that conflict interactions always involve an escalatory pattern; each successive
interaction between the same states is more hostile. Second is the expectation that the
process culminates in war; in effect, war is the end product, and there is little concern
with subsequent events. Third is that the mechanism driving the process may be
endogenous or exogenous to the rivalry relationship.
128
A key literature that adopts this running theme of using tensions as a step towards war is the
rivalry discourse, of which some sects draw a direct causal path from rivalries to war onset.
129
For instance, a lot of ink has been spilled on testing whether rivals have a greater propensity to
engage in war or at least the probability of escalation to war (with the answer in the affirmative),
and examining the separate and independent effect that rivalry has on conflict escalation apart
127
O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, 80.
128
Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “The “V olcano Model” and Other Patterns in the Evolution of Enduring
Rivalries,” in The Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries, ed. Paul F. Diehl (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1998), 102-03.
129
John A. V asquez, ed., What Do We Know About War? Second edition (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2012), 311-19.
59
from other typical ingredients of war such as alliances or territorial disputes.
130
Another
example is Paul Hensel, who after conducting research on recurrent militarized disputes
concluded that future confrontations become more likely when the ongoing dispute ends in either
stalemate (as opposed to compromise or resolution) or territorial issues are at stake.
131
He has
also put forth what he calls the ‘evolutionary approach’ to international rivalry, by outlining
phases of the rivalry relationship that has a ‘lock-in’ effect over time, thereby making it ever
more difficult to avoid future conflict.
132
Hensel concludes, that “the evolutionary approach
suggests that (ceteris paribus) adversaries with a longer history of conflict will be more likely to
engage in renewed conflict in the near future, because of their accumulation of hostility and
grievances through their past history of conflict.”
133
Moreover, the fundamental definition of
what counts as rivals for the ‘enduring rivalries’ camp relies on specifying the number of
militarized interstate disputes within a specific period of time,
134
which again, echoes the logic
of coupling tensions to war.
Conversely, while the ‘strategic rivalries’ literature does not presuppose any history of
militarized disputes, the common denominators of what constitutes a strategic rivalry is still
based on the notion that a “stream of conflict” and “intensity of competition over time” increases
the escalatory potential for even those events that are seemingly harmless.
135
Along a similar
130
See Paul Diehl and Gary Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2000); Paul D. Senese and John A. Vasquez, The Steps-to-War: An Empirical Study (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
131
Paul R. Hensel, “One Thing Leads to Another: Recurrent Militarized Disputes in Latin America, 1816-1986,”
Journal of Peace Research 31, no. 3 (1994): 281-98; Paul R. Hensel, “Charting a Course to Conflict: Territorial
Issues and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 15, no. 1 (1996): 43-73.
132
Paul R. Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach to the Study of International Rivalry,” Conflict Management and
Peace Science 17, no. 2 (1999): 175-206.
133
Ibid., 196.
134
Enduring rivalries are those rivalries that experience six disputes or more and last for at least 20 years. See Diehl
and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry; Zeev Maoz and Ben D. Mor, Bound by Struggle: The Strategic
Evolution of Enduring International Rivalries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
135
See Michael P. Colaresi, Karen Rasler, and William R. Thompson, Strategic Rivalries in World Politics: Position,
60
vein, Dreyer looks at how the accumulation of issue conflicts among rivals tend to increase the
stakes involved, which also leads to higher chances of militarized disputes and war.
136
Therefore,
a common underlying assumption behind various works in the rivalry discourse is that tension is
not only intimately tied to armed conflict, but also unidirectional—accumulation through
intractability or recurrence leads to militarized outbreak.
Scholars, however, have already theorized on the possibility that war may not be the
predestined end point for all interstate disputes. Take Azar and his notion of a Normal Relations
Range (NRR)—the average level of hostile or cooperative interaction between states.
137
Over
time, an interaction range becomes bound by a lower and upper threshold, which eventually
contains fluctuations in relations within what is perceived to be the ‘normal’ range governing the
relationship. An implication of the NRR is what Azar calls the “notion of relativity,”
138
wherein
what may be considered to be a ‘crisis’ for one dyad may be construed to be completely ‘normal’
for another dyad. If different dyadic relations all have varying ‘bandwidths’ or its own ‘natural
pulse’ with some reaching the maximum of war and others with much lower upper thresholds, it
would be difficult to assume a singular universal spectrum of inter-state relations. The idea that
there may be a hypothetical optimal level of tension is also hinted at by Goldmann, when he
distinguishes ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ tensions: the former representing the minor deviations
from the overall trend and the latter indicating the exceptionally large deviations.
139
In a
similarly fashion, there is the notion of a Basic Rivalry Level (BRL) that seeks to capture the
Space and Conflict Escalation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
136
David R. Dreyer, “Issue Conflict Accumulation and the Dynamics of Inter-State Rivalry,” International Studies
Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2010): 779-95.
137
Edward E. Azar, “Conflict Escalation and Conflict Reduction in an International Crisis: Suez, 1956,” Journal of
Conflict Resolution 16, no. 2, Research Perspectives on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Symposium (1972): 183-201.
138
Ibid., 200.
139
Goldmann, Tension and Détente in Bipolar Europe, 66. Unfortunately, Goldmann also adds that “The decision
about the minimum size of a ‘large’ deviation is essentially arbitrary.”
61
level of hostility between states that are considered to be rivals and thereby discern why some
rivalries are more severe (as measured through severity of disputes) than others.
140
The BRL
suggests that whether a dispute actually ends up in war or not is dependent on the BRL
governing relations. Once again, with varying BRLs dictating inter-state action (at least between
rivals), it is more logical to assume diverging thresholds in interaction rather than the linear
unidirectional model of tensions and war.
Moreover, Diehl and Goertz have discovered an important counter to the volcano model
in ways of a punctuated equilibrium model of enduring rivalries, which stresses stability or
continuity of conflicts rather than an incrementally escalating pattern of interaction (figure 5).
Figure 5. Punctuated Equilibrium and Incrementalist Models (of Rivalries)
141
According to the Punctuated Equilibrium Model (PEM), instability via political shocks such as
war typically occurs at the initiation and termination phase of rivalries. Subsequently, we witness
long periods of stasis in rivalries until they are dislodged by some environmental shocks (and
hence the reference to a punctuated equilibrium). Empirically, they find that for the set of 45
140
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, 165-67.
141
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, 138. For more on their model, see Goertz and Diehl,
The “Volcano Model” and Other Patterns in the Evolution of Enduring Rivalries, 98-125.
62
cases of enduring rivalries during 1816-1976, their null hypothesis of ‘no secular trend’
(homeostatic situation) was the primary pattern with roughly two-thirds of the cases falling into
this category. Another important implication of their finding is that the dynamic surrounding
rivalries may be “much about the states dealing with the sequels to war as they are attempts to
prevent the next one.”
142
Applying this to tensions, one could make the argument that tensions
may be closer to being a residual of war rather than a precursor to war. Not only does this further
de-couple tensions from the general notion of militarized force, but also raises an interesting
point about the time-order in the causal processes of tensions. For instance, could tensions as
residuals of armed conflict carry less ‘bite’ (in intensity) compared to those that occur as
precursors to war?
Synthesizing the Debate on Tensions
Given the differences in general orientations in method and conceptualization, it is
possible to roughly plot the three waves in the evolutionary arc of tension studies along with its
associated authors (figure 6).
142
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, 198.
63
Figure 6. Representational Typology of Tension Studies
The labels for the axis are more operational than definitive (and admittedly squishy), but a few
words should better clarify what they mean. The ‘x’ axis contains the degree to which tension is
either described in a perceptional sense in that attitude and perceptions of actors are more
important than objects or conditions, or in a more behavioral manner that echoes some
characteristics that are often associated with behavioralism in IR: quantification, focus on
(individual) psychological variables, and generalized theories with predictive value. The ‘y’ axis
is a spectrum that shows whether the author leans toward a more affective understanding of inter-
state tension that would treat tension in the way that one could feel tense or experience emotions
such as hostility, anxiety, and frustration, or a more cognitive way by capturing tension through
64
inferential statistics as that of a state’s military capability or defense spending. Acknowledging a
level of arbitrariness in plotting the authors along both axes, there is an interesting trend over
time towards greater cognitive and behavioral approaches to studying tensions. Similarly, there is
a tighter coupling of tensions to war, so that tensions become a clear indicator of armed conflict.
When an undercurrent of realist thinking gets thrown into the mix, as when Newcombe and Wert
assert that “in a world in which intent is usually assumed to be hostile, unless proven otherwise
over a period of years, one should be able to measure threat perception by measuring
capability,”
143
tension truly serves the function of foreshadowing war. As a direct implication,
there is not much room to discuss the possibility of positive externalities of tension or if tension
is indeed linear and unidirectional.
Amidst such trends, there are some common threads running through the authors, the
first of which concerns the number of actors involved in tensions. There is a tendency to use
dyadic language when describing the logic behind tension. Theoretically, most of the authors
leave open the idea that tension could involve multiple countries, but there is a stronger implicit
reference to the bilateral inter-state level. Wright dedicates space to explaining how the
probability of general war and hence the rise and fall in general tension level depends on the
charting of relations between pairs of states that indicate either a more intense friendship or
animosity,
144
as does Holsti in focusing on pairs of states and how perceptions of the ‘self’ and
of the ‘other’ feed into perceptions that constitute tension. Although Snyder and Diesing
specifically state that tension could occur between the governments of two or more sovereign
states, their crisis bargaining models are based on two-player games, which is a similar case to
that of O’Neill’s application of tension to formal models that include two actors. Goldmann is the
143
Newcombe and Wert, An Inter-Nation Tensiometer For The Prediction Of War, 16.
144
Wright, Problems of Stability and Progress in International Relations, 1280.
65
most explicit in his judgment not to generalize beyond two actors, as he specifies that
expressions like ‘tension in Europe’ will simply be a linguistic convention to signify tension in
the “most important” or “dominating” pair in the system.
145
An advantage of a bilateral
framework could be that this would address the confusion that may arise from having to
distinguish increasing tensions (dyadic) from a more aggressive foreign policy behavior (a
monadic phenomenon).
At the same time, this dyadic language also lays to rest the need to sort out whether it
matters who is doing the assessing: is there a difference between a third person omniscient point
of view that we could call ‘objective’ tension, and a first person perspective that would fall under
‘subjective’ tension? Although most of the authors described here lean toward the latter by
capitalizing on perceptions of those involved in the conflictual relationship, O’Neill cites that
tension denotes the probability (of war) held by an outside observer. Without an extended
explanation to describe what that would exactly entail, perhaps there is an underlying belief here
that tension should be evaluated from a detached ‘rational’ manner. In a way, this potential
bifurcation of objective and subjective tension runs parallel to the familiar analogy of tensions to
temperature—the reported temperature may not necessarily be the same as the ‘sensible
temperature’ or how warm one feels. However, capturing such a nuanced understanding would
also generate potentially insurmountable complications at the operationalization stage, which
may be why most discussions have settled on tensions based on only those actors directly
involved.
Another point of convergence is the general consensus that one could track tensions by
looking at its variations over time rather than its absolute amounts, which is one of the explicit
145
Goldmann, Tension and Détente in Bipolar Europe, 22.
66
assumptions made by Goldmann for his tensiometer. We could also deduce from Snyder and
Diesing’s close coupling of tensions to the lifecycle of a crisis that the varying intensity during
the different phases is what matters, and thus, descriptions like ‘low’ and ‘high’ are embedded
within the context of time. This is to say, that it would be very difficult to get at some ‘normal’
absolute amount of tension using their method. The tendency toward longitudinal analysis is
greater if the critical question is also why tension fluctuates (which would at the same time,
enable forecasting). The argument by Wright is slightly different, as he specifies a ‘general
tension level,’ which is a product of the social energy available and the intensity and
homogeneity of (domestic) opinion, but it is not clear how one could compute a similar range at
the level of the international system without a specific rule for aggregation.
The third common denominator may be the strongest one yet, with all the authors with
the exception of Wright, selecting decision-makers and leaders as representative of the sovereign
state. Seeing as Wright talks about tension at the societal level and how cleavages within society
and heterogeneity of attitudes could foster tension, his singular focus is not on simply the
authorities of the particular country.
146
Conversely, Holsti and his content analysis is aimed at
capturing the perceptions and images of the decision-makers, Snyder and Diesing work to model
their crisis decision-making on the behavior of officials, while the same could be said for
Newcombe and Wert as they employ descriptive figures like GNP and military expenditure that
are the product of the functions of government. Goldmann explicitly recognizes that the state
146
In regards to domestic tension, Wright makes an interesting proposition that tension may actually not be that
linear, with what are often posed as extremes (high and low tension) being closer than one thinks: “negative tension
levels reach a maximum under conditions of complete anarchy and panic, where each individual is intensely
interested only in his own self-preservation…in a such a condition of high tensions the adroit leader may direct
loyalties arising from self-interest to a single symbol offering security to all. All may regress and, in the Hobbesian
social contract, sacrifice their liberties in exchange for the security with a dictator will give them…this condition of
complete anarchy or an extreme negative tension level can therefore rapidly merge into a condition of complete
organization and an extreme positive tension level.” Wright, Problems of Stability and Progress in International
Relations, 1105-06.
67
actor may not be a neat monolithic whole, but opts to deal with states as unitary actors given the
advantage of relative simplicity in measurement. Therefore, public opinion does not particularly
factor into the consideration of conceptualizing inter-state tension.
The Need for Re-conceptualization
This dissertation accepts these commonalities of all three waves in tension studies and
their rough consensus regarding the dyadic language, the focus on longitudinal variations over
static absolute amounts, and measurement at the elite/governmental level. Nevertheless, there are
two points that need to be addressed, which potentially warrants the necessity for constructing a
slightly different approach to getting at tensions. The first is the most major concern with how
tensions (particularly the behavioral accounts) are so tightly coupled to war. If the focus is indeed,
on privileging war as the main variable to be explained, and tensions simply serve as the half-
way house or the subordinate process to the features of war, one must also be able to answer
some of the lingering questions: for instance, how would one distinguish the tension that
represents a precursor to a crisis outbreak, from tension that flows as a result of an ongoing crisis?
For Snyder and Diesing, the definition of tension relies heavily on the mutual perception of a
high probability of war, which means that those that do not meet this threshold are relegated to
low-intensity behavior that may be referred to as “disputes,” “disagreements,” “press wars,” or
“bad relations.”
147
Then what is the threshold and how do we go about establishing the right
estimations for each? What is the value-added of drawing clear boundaries around what counts
as tension, from those with lower levels of conflict likelihood, such as ‘bad relations’?
Another issue concerns the rather hegemonic treatment of the elites. Despite the rough
147
Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, 7.
68
consensus on the adequacy of viewing the state as the government in power when framing inter-
state tensions, there is no thorough discussion of what is truly lost by side-lining public opinion
in constituting tension, especially since the media often resorts to such nation-wide public
opinion surveys. In order to make a solid case for generalizing the actions of the government to
those of the state, one has to assume that the government cannot be disentangled from the
populace wherein only one or the other experiences tension, and the tension as viewed by the
government would be roughly comparable to that degree which is felt by the society at large (or
that they do not run in different directions). This is admittedly a tall order, and so in the very least,
an ideal measure would be able to argue for representativeness, cohesion/alignment, or
generalizability through some input or interaction between the government and its populace.
The next chapter addresses these issues by suggesting a new proxy for measuring
tensions as through diplomatic summonses, which not only captures much of the commonalities
as derived from the tensions discourse, but also solves the issue of thresholds and the
government-public cohesiveness by decoupling tensions from war. To be clear, this dissertation
is not seeking to repudiate the findings of war or the disciplinary conflict studies literature. It is
simply making the claim that although war and conflict are useful concepts, it may be time to
also given tensions its own space, so that we may not continually treat tensions as simply a
precarious or fleeting state or condition; rather, tensions could in effect, resemble a stable
homeostatic situation (in the words of Diehl and Goertz) with a bit more permanency and
sustainability than is given credit for. This should not only allow us to measure tension on its
own terms (as through diplomatic summonses) rather than utilize capabilities for war
mobilization and such, but also make it possible for us to think about why states may be
experiencing tensions without necessarily sliding/inching towards war.
69
Chapter 4: Measuring the Dependent Variable (DV) of Tensions
In synthesizing the previous chapters, we have so far established that 1) Northeast Asia
is neither witnessing militarized conflict nor positive peace, so that it may make most sense to
move away from a binary dependent variable of war or no war and heed the prior calls for
heterogeneity of disputes, and
148
; 2) that this heterogeneity warrants a second look at the tension
studies literature that may inform our own measure of tensions. This brings us to the third step of
actually conceptualizing and operationalizing the DV. Conceptualization is always a tricky
business especially when it is easier to just take the apophatic approach of loading-up the
concept of tensions with everything that fits neither war nor peace and defining it in the negative.
As intuitive as this may be, the lack of analytic purchase behind tensions makes it less useful for
interesting scholarly research. The objective of this particular chapter then is to align theory and
empirics at almost every stage of the research and arrive at a solid theoretical explication of
tensions and a plausible operationalization to match. In fact, the utility of crafting tensions
through the proposed measurement of diplomatic summonses or démarche will become even
more obvious in the next chapter where the hypothesis for why we are seeing tensions suspended
in Northeast Asia is grounded on a non-militarized dynamic of commodification.
Conceptualization
So what are tensions? This dissertation sees no compelling reason to disavow the
commonalities running through the previous works on tensions, the first of which concerns the
number of actors involved in tensions. Unless stated otherwise, tensions will typically apply to
dyadic relations. It is definitely plausible to have multiple actors in an equation for tension, but
148
For a great example, see Kevin J. Sweeney, “The Severity of Interstate Disputes: Are Dyadic Capability
Preponderances Really More Pacific?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 6 (2003): 728-50.
70
the thinking here is that leaving the concept too open-ended so as to invite expressions such as
‘regional tension’ will only add to the confusion and challenge behind operationalization.
Likewise, those dyadic relations will assume unitary state actors, which place the focus on inter-
governmental tension rather than some discontent between the populace of each state. Unless
there is strong evidence for governmental and societal sentiments to flow in opposite directions,
it does not seem like a stretch to keep to the general consensus that governments are
representative of the sovereign state. As elaborated further in the operationalization section, the
way that tensions will be measured also ensures some level of domestic feedback on elite actions,
thereby guarding against claims of any disconnect between the public and its leaders. Finally, as
reinforced in the previous chapter, one should be able to track tensions by looking at its
variations over time rather than its absolute amounts. So long as there are multiple reference
points from which to make judgments about the relative level of tension at one point in time, one
should not necessarily obsess over being able to determine absolute levels.
With that said, tensions do not automatically foreshadow war—a clear departure of this
dissertation from previous works on the subject. Tension also need not be grounded on a shared
expectation of future conflict held by the disputants involved (which somewhat echoes Quincy
Wright’s view that tension should not be branded as categorically ‘bad’)
149
. Instead, this
dissertation will ascribe to the notion of relativity in that different dyads exhibit diverging
ceilings that circumscribe the threshold of intensity governing overall interaction; hence, the task
of this dissertation in getting at what is behind those that fall short of war or militarized conflict.
Given the deliberate emphasis on politico-diplomatic disputes then, premising tensions on the
use of force is incompatible. Accordingly, this dissertation has decided to capitalize on what has
149
Wright, Problems of Stability and Progress in International Relations, 160.
71
been explicitly incorporated (or at least implicitly hinted at) into some of the definitions of the
term—this notion of ‘hostility.’ Wright had based his definition of tension on the overall
‘friendliness’ and ‘unfriendliness’ between groups and intensity of ‘attitudes,’ while Holsti
correspondingly took advantage of attitudes (positive and negative).
150
There are several immediate advantages of pinning tensions on hostility. The most
immediate one is how it performs at face validity. Not only does this resonate on an intuitive
level to how the term is currently being employed by the media, but we also find that the two
make for plausible substitutes in the way that they are used in scholarly discourse. The manner in
which Benson codes ‘dyadic hostility’ on a five-point scale ranging from no MIDs (0) to war (4)
using the COW MID data is reminiscent of the barometric approach to coding tensions.
151
The
fact that both tension and hostility typically involve two (or more) referents also attests to the
attributional character of both terms (and the existence of agency). Some scholars have
operationalized hostility as a function of arms accumulation versus bilateral trade,
152
which
closely mirrors Newcombe and Wert’s tensiometer and their reliance on military expenditures.
Davis and Meunier have actually examined the link between trade and conflict by looking solely
at sub-war level ‘political tensions’ that refer to “disagreement over policy issues, hostility
between leaders, and negative public sentiment.”
153
The father of Graduated Reduction in
Tension (GRIT), Charles Osgood, also imbued tensions with human agency, by tightly coupling
tension with trust that makes tension based more on psychological rather than structural elements.
At times, it seemed that Osgood used tension synonymously with stress, by making a reference
150
Holsti, The Value of International Tension Measurement; East-West Conflict and Sino-Soviet Relations.
151
Michelle A. Benson, “Dyadic Hostility and the Ties That Bind: State-to-State versus State-to-System Security
and Economic Relationships,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 6 (2004): 659-76.
152
Süheyla Özyildirim and Nur Bilge Criss, “Survival of Rationalism Between Hostility and Economic Growth,”
Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 4 (2001): 515-35.
153
Christina L. Davis and Sophie Meunier, “Business as Usual? Economic Responses to Political Tensions,”
American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (2011): 628.
72
to a desirable or ideal level of stress: “there is some optimal level of tension…at which a person
displays the greatest range of available alternatives and little likelihood of acting irrationally.”
154
Similarly, the previous chapter has already outlined the emphasis by many scholars on
the importance of the perception of tension rather than the actual object. Purportedly, this
formulation leaves open the possibility that while a situational assessment may call for tension,
the sensory actors themselves may not perceive the same degree of tension. Likewise, one could
disaggregate a hostile situation from the level of hostility felt by the actors or participants. A
good chunk of the literature has often interpreted inter-state hostility as conflict, as judged by the
number of inter-state disputes or the annual hostility levels (1-5) of the COW dataset.
155
It also
helps that hostility has been gaining more analytic purchase through the rise of the emotions
discourse (or the ‘affective boom’) in IR.
156
Taking all this into account, the notion of tension
for the purposes of the research question posed here will be the following:
Inter-state hostility—either latent or manifest—that may or may not escalate into militarized
conflict.
By including the reference to ‘latent’ hostility, the focus shifts from maximum behavioral
expressions of hostility as war, to feelings of hostility that may lie beneath the surface of
militarized use of force.
Before moving onto operationalization, a qualification needs to be made about the issue
of complex dependency. Unlike simple random survey sampling where the respondents typically
would have no particular relationship, dyadic data especially for international conflict capture
154
Charles E. Osgood, An Alternative to War or Surrender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 59.
155
(1= No militarized action; 2= Threat to use force; 3= Display of force; 4= Use of force; 5= War) For example,
see Syed Mansoob Murshed and Dawood Mamoon, “Not Loving Thy Neighbour as Thyself: Trade, Democracy and
Military Expenditure Explanations Underlying India—Pakistan Rivalry,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 4
(2010): 463-76.
156
For a good review, see Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,”
International Theory 6, no. 03 (2014): 491-514.
73
relations that are linked both spatially and temporally. As a result, scholars have already
discussed the perils of using dyadic data and assuming independence for inter-state interactions,
particularly for large-n quantitative analysis.
157
The next section introduces the
operationalization of tensions through diplomatic summonses, which is dyadic
158
(pairs of
countries), so the perils may just as well apply here. Thus, one could potentially question
whether tensions between one particular dyad also impact the likelihood of tensions in another
(especially if they are tied to the first dyad in some way or another); also, if tensions are captured
in k-adic events, could we assume that these individual events are independent of one another?
The pushback against the unit of pairwise interactions is perhaps best summed up by James:
“Can the reality of international politics be represented properly through an accumulation
of dyads? Any system of N will have N(N-1)/2 dyads but will also feature N(N-1)(N-2)/6
triads and many other subsets that just as easily could be aggregated and subsequently
granted centrality in the creation of meaning shared by a given set of actors. The reason
that the dyad continues to provide the focus for research on conflict, crisis, and war is not
that it is such an obvious organizing principle for reality. Instead, its simplicity as a unit of
analysis and the sustained ability of several variables (contiguity and political regime
being two prominent examples) to produce significant coefficients combine to guarantee
that virtually any dyadic model will explain enough variance in one or more forms of
interstate behavior to get published.”
159
For one, the dissertation here is not trying to extract power from certain dyadic level
information through statistical analysis, which could pose problems of inflating standard errors
or leading to over-confidence in results. The focus is actually on discerning patterns, and mainly
examining the qualitative substance of such patterns through relatively fine-grained data on
interaction between envoys. It is relatively easy to guard against charges of intra-class correlation,
157
Robert S. Erikson, Pablo M. Pinto, Kelly T. Rader, “Dyadic Analysis in International Relations: A Cautionary
Tale,” Political Analysis 22, no. 4 (2014): 457-63; Eric Neumayer and Thomas Plümper, “Spatial Effects in Dyadic
Data,” International Organization 64, no. 1 (2010): 145-66.
158
To be exact, information about directed dyads (c.f. undirected) as the data contains information about the source
and the target (i.e. who is the summoner and the summonee).
159
Patrick James, International Relations and Scientific Progress: Structural Realism Reconsidered (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2002), 22.
74
as the measurement of summons is extremely targeted and relatively impervious to multilateral
or other dyadic dynamics, which also helps us to discern whether we are indeed capturing a
dyadic event (tensions) as opposed to a k-adic event.
Operationalization: Why Summonses?
So far, the main sources adopted for tracking tensions have been events data, descriptive
statistics such as military expenditure and GDP, and content analysis (of governmental
documents and speeches). Each reference would offer its own merits depending on the research
question, but in keeping with the way that tension had been conceptualized above, this project
decided to use another proxy for inter-state hostility—a summons, also known as the ‘dressing
down’ of respective envoys. (It is also synonymous with a démarche, but given the popularity of
summons over the traditional French term, this dissertation will stick with its more colloquial
form.) A summons has come to suggest the act of a government calling in an official envoy of
another state (typically the ambassador) to express displeasure/discontent over a certain incident
that involves the two countries. It may help to embed a summons within the larger context of
diplomatic communication, so as to highlight its unique attributes (table 5).
75
Table 5. Representative Channels of Diplomatic Communication
Action (In-Person or Otherwise)
Recall Withdrawal of one’s ambassador stationed in a foreign country, either
as a show of protest to the host country or because the official in
question is being replaced
Summons/
Démarche
A formal diplomatic representation in person (typically by the
receiving country’s ambassador) at the request of the host country
(typically the foreign ministry); the nature of the request has the aim to
persuade, inform, or gather information but is also often used as a
channel of protest; may have two components- the oral presentation
and the supporting document (i.e. Aide-Mémoire)
Telephone call Could be ceremonial (i.e. congratulatory messages) but also in protest
Written (Formal & Informal)
Note The most general form of written communication between the head of
a diplomatic mission and the foreign affairs minister, of which the most
common exchange is Note Verbale
Note Verbale As a third-person note (no ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘your’…), originated from the
idea of capturing the basic substance of oral communication or
conversation in formal record; may be sent to a foreign ambassador or
ministry, and used for routine matters, for diplomatic business, or for
conveying information
Memorandum A written statement or detailed statement of facts, typically of a routine
nature, from a Department or post
Aide-Mémoire
(also known as
Pro Memoria)
Overview/summary of the points made by a diplomat during an official
conversation or interview; typically handed over in person to the other
party at the end of the conversation and generally only serves as ‘an aid
to memory’
Note Diplomatique Formal note between governments; diplomatic courtesy phrase or
complimentary closing statement is not used
Also includes ‘letters of protest’: written, formal notes to show
displeasure and/or condemn another government’s actions
Note Collective/
Collective Note
Note addressed by head of diplomatic corps on behalf of all accredited
missions, or single note jointly represented by two or more
governments to one or more governments (not as common given sense
of ‘ganging up’ on a particular state
Identic Note Similar to the note collective in content, but addressed separately
(presented almost simultaneously) to a government by diplomatic
parties of two or more; the appearance of bullying may be mediated
Circular Diplomatic
Notice
A note that may be sent to a selective list of missions or the entire list
of missions
Bout de Papier/
Piece of Paper/
Speaking Notes
Personal adjunct to oral communication (the written note may be left
with the other party of the conversation); may be anonymous,
reinforcing its unofficial and informal nature- more so than an Aide
Memoire
76
Non-Paper Even less informal than Bout de Papier, an off-the-record or unofficial
representation of a government’s thoughts on a policy (typically used
to test out how an idea may be received)
Some basic properties of the table need to be clarified up front. The table is split into two
macro categories—action or written—depending on whether there is face-to-face interaction
(action) or not (written). Within each of the two categories, there is a descending order of
formality, so that a recall is seen to be more formal than a telephone call, while a note verbale
represents greater formality than an aide-mémoire.
160
Moreover, one needs to keep in mind that
the channels described here mainly apply to inter-governmental communication. Some
mechanisms are indeed, employed by international organizations, such as the UN and its use of
note verbales,
161
but even then, these are not for use with other organizations in the UN system
or for communications with non-governmental organizations or the public-at-large. The table
attempts to be as exhaustive as it can, but it is best to treat it as a general guideline or ideal type,
rather than a straight-jacket for all diplomatic communication among countries in the
international system.
162
The main take-away from embedding summonses within the universe of
160
Although some treat the written forms of diplomatic communication to be the most formal, then succeeded by
the oral or those in person [i.e. Sir Ivor Roberts, “The Language, Forms, and Means of Diplomatic Intercourse,” in
Guide to Diplomatic Practice, Sixth Edition, ed. Ernest Mason Satow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 45-
60], the fact that face-to-face interactions also often accompany written notes (and that the element of physical
presence itself involves greater resources) suggests that the order herein seems logical.
161
A note verbale may be addressed to a minister for foreign affairs or the ministry of foreign affairs, or a
permanent representative, observer, or permanent mission. “Typical uses of notes verbales include: (a) The exchange
of information between the United Nations and Governments or permanent missions; (b) The transmission of
decisions or recommendations of United Nations organs; (c) Requests for and acknowledgements of information and
documents; (d) The transmission of information regarding the time and place of meetings; (e) The acknowledgement
of changes in the membership of permanent missions or delegations; (f) Other requests or acknowledgements to
Governments relating to the substantive work of the United Nations.” See United Nations Department of General
Assembly Affairs and Conference Services, United Nations Correspondence Manual: A Guide to the Drafting,
Processing and Dispatch of Official United Nations Communications, (United Nations: New York, 2000), 20,
accessed October 13 ,2015, http://archive.unu.edu/hq/library/resource/UN-correspondence-manual.pdf.
162
I consulted the glossaries of diplomatic terms as outlined by various foreign ministries as well as the Palgrave
MacMillan Dictionary of Diplomacy. A special thanks to Geoffrey Wiseman for his insights into the terms. See G.R.
Berridge and Lorna Lloyd, The Palgrave MacMillan Dictionary of Diplomacy, Third Edition, (Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
77
diplomatic communication, is to demonstrate three particular elements: its public nature, its
component of in-person representation, and its interpretation to convey/signal an intent or feeling
rather than information. Therefore, while notes may still contain substance of the protest nature,
the note itself is rarely construed to be an act of complaining. It seems most accurate to describe
such channels as different types of correspondence, while summonses carry (implicitly or
explicitly) an additional meaning.
The immediate benefit of summonses when compared to descriptive statistics like GDP
or military spending is that there is little to no lag time, which means that they are better
snapshots of the state of the bilateral relations in real-time. It is rarely the case that one could
attribute as short of a reaction time in configuring tensions as reflected through military posture
or spending. The leverage that summonses have over large-n events data is that they not only
already encompass issues/disputes (as summons typically occur in response to an event), but they
also surpass mere events as they capture how states actually feel about the dispute
163
and thus, is
more relational and not merely situational. By this, states may choose to either summon or not
summon another country’s envoy, but it is fair to assume that states will go ahead and summon
on issues they care about most. This reinforces the value of being able to separate the signal (the
importance countries attach to certain issues as gleaned by summons) from the noise (the
universe of descriptive events). Although it is a stretch to claim full knowledge of the intent
behind states, the importance of getting at their prioritization and discerning which issues they
care about most is particularly significant when we think about the potential issues of definitional
operationalism: that we define tension through what we are measuring. The danger behind the
163
By this, states may choose to either summon or not summon another country’s envoy, but it is fair to assume that
states will go ahead and summon on issues they care about to some extent. This should tell us how a particular state
feels about a certain issue.
78
media’s tendency to attribute tensions to the occurrence of individual disputes speaks exactly to
this potential. By measuring tensions through summonses, we are better prepared to make the
defense that what we are indeed capturing is not simply a controversial issue but the behavioral
responses to that issue.
There are additional critical justifications for why a summons reflects inter-state hostility
and would thereby make a reasonable proxy for tensions measurement. For one, there are less
intervening variables to account for, meaning there is a more direct one-to-one relationship
between motives and action. Unlike say, UN votes that can be manipulated through external
pressure by third parties, or any other index that could be susceptible to the whims of power
politics, the act of summoning is practiced by small and larger states alike with little room for
power i.e.) smaller states do actually summon more powerful states. (At the same time then,
summonses are also egalitarian
164
, given the cheap costs associated with resorting to the tool in
the first place.) The universality of this diplomatic tool also means that there is consistency in the
way that summons are practiced, and thus, comparability is relatively high; the act of summoning
cannot be easily misinterpreted or construed to be something else.
A more practical point that relates to universality of practice is that one is able to gather
relatively systematic data on summonses by countries. Summonses occur enough to generate—
depending on the number of referents—a large dataset, but they are not so rampant that they
undermine the initial intent behind a summons—to show protest and denounce a certain act or
event (rarely would summons degenerate into a ‘boy cries wolf’ scenario). On another
operational level, there is the added benefit of data accessibility and collection. It is reasonable to
164
This is, of course, in contrast to how diplomatic protocol was practiced in the past: “In the diplomacy of the
Roman Empire, protocol seems to have developed only among equals or near equals.” See Christer Jönsson and
Martin Hall, “Communication: An Essential Aspect of Diplomacy,” International Studies Perspective 4, no. 2 (2003):
204.
79
assume that there is a close match between what gets reported in the media about summons, and
governmental records on their occurrence. Although there are (and have been) such mechanisms
as confidential or behind-the-door summonses, most of the time, states are wont to publicize the
act of dressing down another country’s envoy so as to drive home the point of a summon and its
nature of protest and reprimand. A signal would lose much meaning if it were not for an audience.
This component of needing an audience also becomes relevant for making the argument
that a summons better encapsulates some feedback by the public on elite actions. A key issue
with previous measurements of tensions was its sole focus on the actions of the government,
which made it seemed detached (or immune) from those of the public. In contrast, one could
think about how a summons may be used domestically, so as to assuage the concerns of a public
and to highlight the competencies of a government to its constituents. So although the act of a
summons may only directly involve official state actors, the action overall may have easily been
a result informed by public opinion, or at least with an eye to the domestic public and its
reception. Therefore, it becomes easier to make the dual claim that chances of the government
being at odds with the mainstream public opinion are low, and that a summons in effect, may
encompass a more general attitude or feeling toward an issue that does not simply emanate from
a narrow faction of society.
Finally, summonses as an indicator of inter-state tensions represent an innovative way to
get at the heart of politico-diplomatic disputes, which is a key objective behind this research.
Summonses have been a fixture of diplomatic practice and could be charged to be mundane, but
there is something to be said about incorporating the ‘everyday’ to extract valuable information
for IR research.
165
If one felt so inclined, there are also other ways to look for patterns in the
165
For more on how such everyday (diplomatic) practices are used, see Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot,
80
data aside from raw frequency. In fact, one could theoretically pick up on intensity by examining
the gradients or the different levels of meaning attached to the subject being summoned—
ranging from ambassadors, ministers, consulate generals, and heads of the political desk at the
embassy. Another gauge of intensity would be whether there was a ‘recall,’ which would be
interpreted as surpassing those of summonses to mark the highest point in tensions. One could
also inquire about the other side of the coin by investigating the lack of summoning between
pairs of countries (i.e. the U.S. rarely ever summons an envoy from Switzerland), which may
also give additional insights as to the level of tension present
Before revealing what the data looks like for the countries of China, Japan, and South
Korea, a brief word is in order about why this project did not consciously choose public opinion
surveys (another favorite tool for scholars wanting to get at hostility) to gauge tensions. There
are challenging internal validity issues to surveys and polls, in terms of the phrasing of certain
questions (and its consistency in future iterations), or the timing of when the public is polled,
which may have added confounding impacts on the results. In following, a weakness of
questionnaire-based surveys is that they are too close to being snapshots that cannot individually
capture long periods of time, which becomes a problem if the poll in question is only conducted
annually or in six-month intervals. However, they may certainly provide a complement for cross-
referencing purposes.
166
“International Practices,” International Theory 3, no. 1 (2011): 1-36; Vincent Pouliot, “Diplomats as Permanent
Representatives: The Practical Logics of the Multilateral Pecking Order,” International Journal 66, no. 3 (2011):
543-61; Vincent Pouliot, “The Materials of Practice: Nuclear Warheads, Rhetorical Commonplaces and Committee
Meetings in Russian-Atlantic Relations,” Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 3 (2010): 294-311.
166
For an extensive list of opinion surveys, see Mansfield Asian Opinion Poll Database (only till 2011), The
Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, accessed July 11, 2014,
http://www.mansfieldfdn.org/backup/polls/polls_listing.htm.
81
General Method
The overall aim was to collect summons data regarding the three dyads of China (PRC)-
Japan, Japan-South Korea (ROK), and China-South Korea. Since it makes sense to be able to
discern which country is summoning which, rather than get a total aggregate number for the dyad,
there were in effect, a total of six different configurations to consider: PRC-Japan, PRC-ROK,
Japan-PRC, Japan-ROK, ROK-Japan, and ROK-PRC. Here, the period in question is from 1998
to 2014 (17 years). The rationale behind the starting point is due to a couple factors, among
which the strongest argument is that this was around the time that we pick up hints at a real
transition in Japanese foreign policy. Although it was not long after the 1991 Gulf War that the
discourse about a ‘normal Japan’ (a term popularized by Ichirō Ozawa) gained steam, it was the
beginning of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s reign in 2001 that hailed a break from the
Yoshida Doctrine—so named, after former PM Shigeru Yoshida, which emphasized economic
growth and minimal defense for Japan. The succeeding Koizumi doctrine was much less insular
in orientation, and reinforced the importance of cultivating relations with its neighbors on a
regional as well as a global scale. The year 1998 not only foreshadows the Koizumi doctrine, but
also signifies key developments in the context of both the PRC and ROK. Former PRC President
Jiang Zemin made a state visit to Japan in November of 1998, and while this did leave a sense of
bitterness regarding the irresolution of past history between the two states, it did mark the first
state visit by a Chinese head of state. Moreover, the meeting between former ROK president Kim
Dae-jung and Japanese PM Keizō Obuchi occurred in October 1998, culminating in a joint
declaration
167
that became significant due to its inclusion of a written apology by PM Obuchi on
167
“Japan-Republic of Korea Joint Declaration: A New Japan-Republic of Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-
first Century” (provisional translation by the Japanese government), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed
September 1, 2014, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/korea/joint9810.html.
82
Japan’s colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula. Conveniently, 1998 is also the starting year
for ROK President Kim Dae-jung’s administration.
Actual data collection revolved around utilizing newspaper articles, governmental press
releases, and other online search tools such as lexis nexis and factiva to locate incidents of
summonses. There was a conscious effort to diversify the language sources among English,
Korean, Japanese, and Chinese so as to prevent bias. There was also an element of coding,
whereupon each recorded summon would specify the rank of the official who was summoned
and the issue area they were called in for—territory (air, land, maritime), history (general,
Yasukuni shrine, comfort women/sex slaves, textbooks), and an ‘other’ category for none of the
above. This process produced a total of 175 data points for the six dyadic configurations during
the period of 1998 to 2014.
Table 6. Descriptive Statistics of Summons Data
Host Summoned # of Summons
PRC Japan 43
PRC ROK 3
Japan PRC 33
Japan ROK 10
ROK Japan 68
ROK PRC 18
TOTAL 175
As we had initially operationalized summons as the proxy for tensions—which are
conceptualized as a mainly dyadic phenomenon—a longitudinal plotting of summons for the
three dyads would produce something that resembles a rough barometric analysis that traces the
ups and downs in tension for each bilateral relationship (figure 7).
Figure 7. Longitudinal Analysis of Tensions in Three Dyads (1998-2014)
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014
Japan & PRC Japan & ROK PRC & ROK
84
Analysis of Findings
1. General Upward Trend in Tensions
If we divide the period into two blocs—pre-and post-2005—one may observe that the
latter term contains greater incidents of summonses. In fact, the peaks in all three dyads occur in
the second term—2013 for both the Japan-PRC and Japan-ROK dyad, and 2012 for the PRC-
ROK dyad. This reinforces a key theme of media reporting on the region of an extant downward
spiral in bilateral relations in recent years.
168
The difference is that while reports have tended to
seed a false sense of linearity in thinking about the way that tensions have risen, tracking
tensions through summons show that there are clear fluctuations—with the PRC-ROK relations
most closely resembling a regular sine wave. Moreover, this dyad shows the lowest accumulative
incidents of summons, with the least dramatic peaks in tensions. The same cannot be said about
the PRC-Japan and Japan-ROK bilateral relations. With the exception of a brief period of relative
calm in between 2007 and 2009, there is a constant pool of summons or baseline tensions.
Recognizing that this is merely a rough eyeball approach, several more rigorous methods
were attempted so as to analyze the data and account for the impact of time. Specifically, an
AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model was used to fit the data utilizing
the method popularized by Box and Jenkins for time-series modeling,
169
which involves the
steps of identification (checking for data stationarity and unit roots), estimation (finding
parameters for the actual model), and diagnostic checking (examining autocorrelation and
168
A quick look at the polling data also confirms this. For instance, the joint opinion polls by Genron NPO and East
Asia Institute (EAI) on general attitudes between Japan and South Korea for 2014 showed that most viewed each
other as ‘unfavorable’ (Japan with 54.4% and South Korea with 70.95%). See “The 2
nd
Joint Japan-South Korea
Public Opinion Poll: Analysis Report on Comparative Data,” The Genron NPO and the East Asia Institute, July
2014, accessed October 14, 2015, http://www.genron-npo.net/pdf/forum_1407_en.pdf.
169
See George E.P. Box and Gwilym M. Jenkins, Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control, Revised Edition
(San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1976).
85
residuals, confirming white noise, and coefficient significance).
170
Following this general
approach, each of the datasets for the three dyads from 1998 to 2014 were parsed out into
monthly data and declared a time-series, which then made it possible to test various
combinations of parameters for the model. Unfortunately, it was difficult to generate a
combination that seemed to fit all three dyads, which reinforced the initial concern that there
were not enough data points in order to conduct a rather intricate statistical analysis. This
limitation in temporal and spatial scope is certainly one consideration that will be fortified in
future iterations of this kind of research.
2. The Salience of Territorial Disputes
There is yet another finding from the results that substantiates a familiar argument
concerning the region: the power of territorial disputes. If we thematically break-down the
incidents of summons, those arising out of territorial issues overwhelm the rest (see figure 8). A
first cut at the category of territory shows that ‘land’-related disputes are the most contentious
(see table 7).
171
Another way to slice the data down to a more specific level is to group the
number of summons along each recurring issue-area (see table 8).
170
Forecasting has been omitted here as the core objective does not lie so much in this area for the time being.
171
The coding of what counts as ‘land’ and ‘maritime’ are similar to those of the Issues Correlates of War (ICOW)
project, which categorizes territorial as contentions over specific territory and maritime as contentions over specific
maritime zones. The only difference here is that maritime also includes skirmishes at sea that may not be directly
related to maritime zones, and that there is a spatial difference between maritime and air. See “Project Description,”
The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project, last updated September 5, 2015, accessed December 10, 2015,
http://www.paulhensel.org/icow.html#desc.
86
Figure 8. Thematic Break-down of Summons
Table 7. Sub-Category of Summons Regarding Territory
Sub-Category # of Occurrences
Air 8
Land 64
Maritime 31
Total 103
Table 8. Summons Regarding Territory per Issue-Area
Issue Area # of Occurrences
Dokdo/Takeshima 48
Diaoyu/Senkaku 30
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 10
Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) 7
Taiwan 1
Ieodo/Suyan/Socotra Rock 1
Ulleungdo 1
General sovereignty issues 5
Total 103
The most contentious issues here may be of no surprise to those that keep up with either the
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
territory history other DPRK-related
87
academic discourse on territorial disputes in general,
172
or the empirical developments in the
region, specifically.
173
There is actually an interesting report
174
that has tracked the number of
times that ‘Senkaku,’ ‘Takeshima,’ and ‘Northern Territories’ have come up during debates
within the House of Representatives of the Japanese National Diet—2010 seems to be a turning
point where the frequency jumps exponentially. The Dokdo/Takeshima alongside the
Diaoyu/Senkaku disputes seem to be an indicator of downward descent in relations and what
people generally have in mind when they talk about instigators of bilateral tensions. In that sense,
it is useful to see that a longitudinal analysis substantiates this broad intuition. At the same time,
it does not quite resolve the question of why some issues get more traction than others, only that
some are better correlated with tensions than others. For instance, Ieodo or Suyan rock is a
contested island between China and the ROK, which is claimed by both countries as part of its
respective ADIZ and EEZ. One could level a similar charge against Ulleungdo, a Korean-
administered island between Japan and the ROK located in the East Sea/Sea of Japan, since
Ulleungdo serves as Korea’s administrative and military defense base for Dokdo/Takeshima.
The other favorite gauge for seemingly worsening relations is the controversies
surrounding ‘history.’ Typically, this is shorthand for anything ranging from one government’s
approval of school textbooks with contents that supposedly ‘whitewash’ or ‘distort’ events in
172
For a good overview, see John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 341-71.
173
For some relatively contemporary analysis, see Mark J. Valencia, “The East China Sea Disputes: History, Status,
and Ways Forward,” Asian Perspective 38, no. 2 (2014): 183-218; Chang-wee Lee, “Legal and Political Aspects of
the Dokdo Issue: Interrelationship between International Law and International Relations,” Korean Journal of
Defense Analysis 25, no. 2 (2013): 227-43; Kazuhiko Togo, “Japan-China-US Relations and the Senkaku/Diaoyu
Islands Dispute: Perspectives from International Relations Theory,” Asian Perspective 38, no. 2 (2014): 241-61;
Glenn D. Hook, “Japan’s Risky Frontiers: Territorial Sovereignty and Governance of the Senkaku Islands,”
Japanese Studies 34, no. 1 (2014): 1-23.
174
Yasuo Nakauchi, “Disputes Over Territory and Japanese Foreign Policy: Post-2010 and Debates within the
Japanese Diet,” [Japanese], Research Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense, House of Councillors, The
National Diet of Japan, July 2013, accessed October 14, 2015,
http://www.sangiin.go.jp/japanese/annai/chousa/rippou_chousa/backnumber/2013pdf/20130701003.pdf.
88
history, the Japanese Prime Minister’s tribute to the Yasukuni shrine that commemorates Japan’s
war dead (including those convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal), unresolved matters
of women that were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during
World War II, to discord over claims to ancient kingdoms such as the PRC-ROK controversy
over Goguryeo (37 BC- 668 AD) (lumped under the ‘general’ category).
Table 9. Summons Regarding History per Issue-Area
Issue Area # of Occurrences
Yasukuni Shrine 19
Comfort Women/Sex Slaves 3
Textbooks 9
General 5
Total 36
The Japanese officials’ planned or actual visits to the Yasukuni shrine were the most frequent
triggers of tensions. For the most part, it was typical for the PRC and ROK to lodge systematic
protests every time they were aware of Yasukuni shrine visits. Conversely, there was also an
incident in March 2006 where the Japanese government had summoned the Chinese ambassador
in Tokyo in response to the Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing apparently using a German
official’s words in describing Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi’s visit as “stupid” and “amoral.”
What made this stand out even more was that when Tokyo had summoned ambassador Wang Yi
the very next day, ambassador Wang refused to go to the Japanese foreign ministry for the
‘dressing down.’ The incident generated greater tension given the rarity in which officials ignore
such diplomatic summons.
Aside from territory and history, the ‘other’ category captured a diverse range of
concerns that raised bilateral tensions, of which the most recurrent theme was protecting the
safety of one’s own nationals. For example, in July 2012, the ROK summoned the Chinese
89
ambassador to protest against the holding of South Korean activists for democracy in North
Korea by the Chinese Ministry of State Security in northeastern China; in April 2010, Japan
summoned the Chinese ambassador to express concerns over China’s plans to execute a Japanese
citizen who was arrested for drug smuggling. Other items falling under this category included
objections at granting visas to ‘controversial’ figures, as did China back in July 2009 when the
Tokyo government announced that it was going to grant a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled
Uighur leader accused of instigating anti-separatist activities in China, to visit Japan.
3. Qualitatively Different Dynamics Based on Reciprocity & Symmetry
Up till now, allowing the data to speak for itself has tended to reinforce familiar motifs
driving tensions between countries in Northeast Asia. There is, however, something that the data
reveals that has rarely ever been discussed: the qualitatively different nature of interaction among
the three dyads. During the data collection stage, there was a distinction made as to whether a
summons occurred as a result of an actual skirmish of a directed and physical nature, or a mere
displeasure at a certain action of a government that was neither particularly targeted nor kinetic.
An example of the former would include capturing and arresting vessels and personnel on board
for alleged trespassing in one’s waters, while the latter could be a response to one’s claims to
disputed territory in its official defense White Paper. The point is that not only does a White
Paper involve no physical interaction, but it also makes little sense to argue that the main target
audience for the White Paper is the disgruntled country with which the originator of the
document is engaged in a territorial dispute with, or to think that the purpose of the White Paper
is to simply stake one’s claims to the territory in question. There is less room for interpretation
when it comes to incidents involving physical clashes and ‘reciprocity’ in the sense that an
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action-reaction element was at play. So what is meant by ‘reciprocity’ in the discipline?
Reciprocity has been a staple in IR. When one thinks about the fundamentals of physics
and Newton’s law of motion, it seems intuitive to think that countries could also be ruled by a
similar momentum. In the field of conflict, a good part of the arms race literature that dominated
the early years of security studies, starting with Richardson’s Arms and Insecurity in the ‘60s,
175
posited a dynamic action-reaction model governing relations between two parties; in the case of
Richardson, the rate of change in arms build-up (military spending and arms acquisition).
𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑 𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑 = 𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎 − 𝑚𝑚𝑑𝑑 + 𝑟𝑟
𝑑𝑑𝑎𝑎 𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑 = 𝑏𝑏𝑑𝑑 − 𝑛𝑛𝑎𝑎 + 𝑠𝑠
In the above equation, the accumulation of arms for parties x and y is the result of coefficients a
and b, designated as the ‘fear’ or ‘reaction’ components, which essentially pushes a country to
possess arms as a response to its rival party. Meanwhile, m and n are ‘restraint’ or ‘fatigue’
factors that represent the internal tendencies of a country that tend it towards reducing arms
stockpiles. Finally, constants r and s are labeled as ‘grievance’ factors that include predominantly
psychological elements such as ambition and past grievances a country holds against a rival. This
fundamental idea that states would ‘respond in kind’ led to works that elevated this Richardson
model as the norm for inter-state interaction.
176
The explicit assumption here is that states in the
international system can function under an overarching force of action-reaction, and this edifice
175
Lewis Fry Richardson, Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War (Pittsburgh:
Boxwood Press, 1960).
176
For a summary of some of these action-reaction models in foreign policy, see Matthew J. Lebo and Will H.
Moore, “Dynamic Foreign Policy Behavior,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 1, (2003): 13-32. Also see Jan F.
Triska and David D. Finley, “Soviet-American Relations: A Multiple Symmetry Model,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 9, no. 1 (1965): 37-53; William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, Untangling the Cold War: A Strategy
for Testing Rival Theories (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Michael Don Ward, “Cooperation and Conflict in Foreign
Policy Behavior: Reaction and Memory,” International Studies Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1982): 87-126.
91
tends to push for more conflict, not less. Also, reactivity is the backbone of strategic interaction
that is such a heavy part of game theoretic models such as the prisoner’s dilemma. The accordant
flip side of this logic is that interaction of the cooperative sort would also beget more cooperation.
Hence, strategy is mostly incompatible as conditions that encourage (discourage) one will
discourage (encourage) the other. In the cooperation literature particularly beginning in the ‘80s,
there was a lot of interest in the idea of tit-for-tat and reciprocity
177
and ways to achieve inter-
state cooperation.
178
Once we stack up the data based on whether the initial incident that instigated the
summons involved any element of conflictual reciprocity in the Richardson sense, we get the
following result (figure 9).
177
See Robert O. Keohane, “Reciprocity in International Relations,” International Organization 40, no. 1 (1986): 1-
27. For a useful chart on past empirical studies of reciprocity, see Table 1.2. in Joshua S. Goldstein and John R.
Freeman, eds., Three-Way Street: Strategic Reciprocity in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 27.
178
As a representative example, see Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
92
Figure 9. Summonses Based on Reciprocity
What stands out at first glance is the disproportionate ratio between reciprocal and non-
reciprocal cases of summons for the Japan-ROK dyad, which mostly revolved around South
Korea lodging protests against Japan for written references or remarks related to
Dokdo/Takeshima, comfort women/sex slaves, or alleged historical distortions in Japanese
school textbooks. In short, verbiage is predominantly responsible for tension. In contrast, a fair
amount of incidents between Japan-PRC relations implicates maritime skirmishes, fishing
vessels trespassing into one’s sovereign waters, or near-misses of aircrafts above disputed
territory. Hence, we see more kinetic and targeted interaction behind tensions. Although the
PRC-ROK dyad also exhibits similar qualities of relative symmetry in ratio of reciprocal to non-
reciprocal interaction, the absolute number of incidents remain fairly small and they fall under
the category of ‘other,’ which concerns citizen safety (arrests, detainment, repatriation of North
Korean defectors etc).
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Japan-PRC Japan-ROK PRC-ROK
Reciprocal Non-reciprocal
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Along with reciprocity, symmetry has been a familiar dyadic relational variable for
assessing foreign policy outcomes or behavior of states. More formally, symmetry refers to the
“quantitative equivalence in the volume of actions initiated by each dyadic partner and targeted
toward the other.”
179
Scholars have found that while symmetry is more closely correlated with
conflictive dyads, asymmetry is more conducive to friendly exchanges.
180
This tends to be
corroborated if we take a look at the summons data based on symmetry. For China, its main
‘adversary’ in this sense was Japan. For Japan, its main target was also China, summoning the
Chinese ambassador or other high ranking official up to 77% as many times that China did a
Japanese official. We see a stark departure in the Japan-ROK case, with Japan only summoning
ROK 15% as much as the ROK did Japan. In other words, despite the high aggregate volume in
summons between Japan and the ROK, most of those were initiated by the ROK. Curiously, we
see a similar divergence in qualitative patterns when we look at the rank of the officials being
summoned: the percentage of non-ambassadorial summons was highest in the case of the Japan-
ROK dyad at 54%, relative to the PRC-ROK (41%) and the Japan-PRC (17%) dyads. As was
hinted before, if we believe that the ranks signal the increasing intensity of tensions as you move
from lower to higher ranks (with ambassador being the apex), we see that the intensity is greatest
for the Japan-PRC relationship. One could deduce then, that not only was South Korea
summoning Japan more than vice versa, but Japan was (for whatever reason) not responding as
often to Korea at the ambassadorial level.
179
Neil R. Richardson, Charles W. Kegley Jr., and Ann C. Agnew, “Symmetry and Reciprocity as Characteristics of
Dyadic Foreign Policy Behavior,” Social Science Quarterly 62, no. 1 (1981): 129.
180
Richardson, Kegley Jr., and Agnew, Symmetry and Reciprocity as Characteristics of Dyadic Foreign Policy
Behavior. Also see Koos van Wyk and Sarah Radloff, “Symmetry and Reciprocity in South Africa's Foreign Policy,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 37, no. 2 (1993): 382-96.
94
Summonses vs. Summits
At this point, it may be useful to juxtapose the summonses data with the summits data—
official meetings (usually of the cooperative nature) at the inter-state level. The main motive
behind cross-referencing the two sets of data is to preempt the charge that perhaps summons are
the result of greater intimacy between states, and not less. Supposedly, states might resort to
using summons more as a diplomatic device the more the state feels comfortable with its
counterpart.
181
If it turns out that the data on summons and summits show criss-crossing trends,
we can be safe in assuming that summonses are indeed a good indicator of tensions rather than
some kind of inter-state affinity or intimacy; the findings should also further reinforce the
suitability of summonses as an indicator for tensions.
The data on summits were limited to those that occurred between foreign affairs officials
(ministerial level) as well as meetings between heads-of-state, which produced a total of 249
meetings for the three dyads from 1998 to 2014.
182
Each meeting was catalogued according to
date, place, names of representatives, the level (ministerial vs. presidential), and the context (i.e.
sidelines of ASEAN or UN meeting). The context allowed one to see compare much of those
meetings were held at home versus abroad (see table 10). Fortunately, we see that there have
been more summits than summonses (by 41%), which has to be a welcome finding particularly
to those that treat meetings as evidence of some level of underlying cooperation.
181
I thank Iseki Yoshiyasu for pointing this out.
182
The data relied on information provided by each of the foreign ministries, which were then cross-referenced with
media reports.
95
Table 10. Results of Bilateral Summits (1998-2014)
Dyad Raw Count Proportion of Summits by
Heads of State (c.f. Ministerial)
Proportion of Summits
Held in a Third Country
Japan-PRC 98 49% (48/98) 53% (52/98)
Japan-ROK 80 49% (39/80) 33% (26/80)
PRC-ROK 71 54% (38/71) 49% (35/71)
As stated earlier, the goal of gathering data on summits was to simply check the
correlation between summits to summonses, in hopes that they would run in opposite directions
so as to reinforce the intuition that the two capture different tail-ends of inter-state behavior. To
that effect, the data was reshaped into panel data suitable for correlation analysis using Stata and
incidents of summonses and summits were also divided into quarterly data (rather than annually),
which produced a total of 169 observations containing 65 time periods. The correlation results
indeed, showed a negative relationship (-0.2833) indicating that the two run in opposite
directions, thereby guarding against any idea of summonses exhibiting ‘good’ relations rather
than ‘bad.’
Table 11. Correlation between Summonses and Summits
One may question the fact that the summits data only took into account those meetings at the
highest levels (ministerial and heads-of-state) and those that were official, but given that the
summonses also only involve diplomats (typically at the highest level) and the foreign ministry,
the comparable level of analysis seemed justified.
Summits -0.2833 1.0000
Summonses 1.0000
Summon~s Summits
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Basis for Hypothesis Generation
The summonses database has been useful for not only providing a visual representation
of our DV of tensions over time involving the three states of Japan, PRC, and the ROK, but also
in specifying what issues tend to drive those tensions—in this case, territorial sovereignty. An
important observation is that if one were to only consider the typical volcanic model of tensions,
it would be difficult to diagnose those relations where volume and intensity do not escalate in
tandem, as that of the Japan-Korea dyad. Going further, assuming that tensions are always
premised on foreshadowing war would run the risk of completely misdiagnosing such dyads as
being more explosive then they really are. It is as if there are ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ versions of
tensions, wherein volume and intensity may escalate side-by-side (‘thick’) or become decoupled
(‘thin’). The next chapter takes this observation along with the issue salience of territory to
generate a hypothesis regarding the business of nationalism and get closer to answering the
question of why we see sub-war level tensions being suspended in Northeast Asia.
97
Chapter 5: The Business of Nationalism Hypothesis
Chapter 5 marks the transition from looking at the DV of tensions to constructing the
hypothesis regarding the IV of commodification and how it plays a role in sustaining tensions in
Northeast Asia. Recall that the previous chapter both reinforced prior intuitions and introduced
less familiar observations: there is an overall increase in summonses (or tensions) over the past
17 years, the theme of territory is the predominant instigator for those summons (tensions), and
the Japan-ROK dyad looks a lot like the Japan-PRC relationship on the surface, but there are
qualitatively different dynamics of symmetry and reciprocity at work. To extrapolate, although
Japan’s relations with the PRC and ROK respectively, are both high in aggregate volume, one
could posit that the former tends toward greater likelihood of escalation given that the proportion
of kinetic force or conflictual reciprocity outweighs that of verbiage, which is the main source of
tensions in the latter. This leads to the third important permutation of tensions (the first two being
that tensions do not automatically subsume tendencies for militarization, which leads to the
second innovation that they can be measured through proxies of diplomatic summons): the
frequency of tensions (volume) is not the same as its militarization thereof (intensity). In fact, the
two may work at cross-purposes so that what seemingly determines volume is not necessarily
what determines intensity.
Figure 10. The Standard One-Dimensional Conceptualization of Tensions
A common underlying assumption behind various works in the rivalry discourse is that tension is
not only intimately tied to armed conflict, but also unidirectional—accumulation through
98
intractability or recurrence leads to militarized outbreak (figure 10).
183
Theoretically then, this
only produces one type of tension, where the volume and intensity are always coterminus so that
it makes little sense for the two to be diametrically opposed. This model would then either
wrongly assume that the Japan-ROK dyad is escalating towards war, or completely miss
diagnosing the dyad altogether as it does not neatly fit the traditional model of tension where
volume signals intensity.
The concept of de-coupling volume and intensity is not entirely new. In one of the early
works to do so, Richardson examined the frequency of ‘fatal quarrels’
184
(number) against its
corresponding magnitude (based on number of deaths), reaching a conclusion of ‘the larger the
fewer,’ in that quarrels resulted in more deaths as the number of instances/frequency was lower
(hence, the number diminished as magnitude increased).
185
Clauset, Young, and Gleditsch have
also looked at the distributional nature of the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks
worldwide since 1968,
186
while Levy and Morgan have also empirically tested the proposition
that the frequency of wars in a given period is inversely related to their ‘seriousness’
187
using
183
For a good summary, see Goertz and Diehl, “The “V olcano Model” and Other Patterns in the Evolution of
Enduring Rivalries,” 102-103. For the coupling of tensions to war, see Senese and Vasquez, The Steps-to-War: An
Empirical Study; Hensel, “One Thing Leads to Another”; Hensel, “Charting a Course to Conflict”; Dreyer, “Issue
Conflict Accumulation and the Dynamics of Inter-State Rivalry.” A counter to the volcanic model is the ‘punctuated
equilibrium model’ of enduring rivalries, which stresses stability or continuity of conflicts rather than an
incrementally escalating pattern of interaction. See Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry.
184
Richardson defined these as including “murders, banditries, mutinies, insurrections, and wars small and large,”
but excluding “accidents, and calamities such as earthquakes and tornadoes,” Lewis Fry Richardson, “Variation of
the Frequency of Fatal Quarrels with Magnitude,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 43, no. 244
(1948): 523.
185
His pioneering work provided the foundation for future applications of power-laws in conflict distribution- in
this context, referring to the special probability distribution characterizing a relationship between the frequency and
severity of conflict, mainly that the size of the conflict is inversely proportional to its frequency. See for instance,
Lars-Erik Cederman, “Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sandpiles,” American Political Science
Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 135-50.
186
Aaron Clauset, Maxwell Young, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “On the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Events,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 1 (2007): 58-87.
187
They rely on four measures for gauging ‘seriousness’: “1) total number of battle deaths; 2) average number of
battle deaths per-war; 3) number of great power wars exceeding 50,000 fatalities, and; 4) number of general wars.”
See Jack S. Levy and T. Clifton Morgan, “The Frequency and Seriousness of War: An Inverse Relationship?”
99
data on wars from 1500 to 1974 (in 25-year periods). Having said, that I am not yet aware of any
works that have directly applied this disaggregation to the notion of tensions, particularly for
sub-war level disputes of the politico-diplomatic nature.
Disaggregating tension volume from intensity is important as the main hypothesis here
concerns the drivers behind volume. Specifically, this dissertation makes the following argument
regarding the business of nationalism:
The Business of Nationalism Hypothesis: the greater the commodification of nationalism
surrounding a disputed territory, the greater the overall bilateral tension volume/frequency
between the disputants over the territory
The dependent variable of tension volume surrounding territorial disputes is directly shaped by
the findings of the tensions data. Instead of militarization—which may be a plausible instigator
of tension intensity—the independent variable here is commodification: greater infrastructural
development and entrepreneurs selling products related to the contentious territory. The rationale
for capitalizing on commodification is a result of moving away from heavily securitized
frameworks for explaining territorial disputes and simultaneously recognizing the existence of a
different set of literature that highlights the potential for territory to become commodified, to
which we will now turn.
Bringing the Territory into Territoriality
As the name suggests, territorial disputes (should) involve contestation over territory.
Nevertheless, one quickly realizes that for security and conflict studies, the predominant focus
has not been with the land itself, but rather the territoriality—the behavior surrounding the
Journal of Conflict Resolution 28, no. 4 (1984): 741.
100
attachment (be it material or ideational) to the land. For instance, we have come to treat rivalries
and territorial disputes as a dangerous combination that fosters greater militarization and inter-
state war.
188
Ironically, for those that do acknowledge the importance of the territory in
territoriality, many disputes over land that lack substantive monetary value seem almost
irrational and unnecessary, like “two bald men fighting over a comb.”
189
But for a while now,
there has been a growing body of discourse dedicated to territorial disputes that get at this land
component, and yet, is almost entirely disconnected from the conflict studies literature despite its
implications for security.
‘Land grabbing’ or large-scale land acquisitions by individuals, companies, and
governments, has been a persistent concern with the turn of the century. Although the idea of
states and their evolutionary thirst for territory
190
is intuitive and may well explain those that are
doing the ‘grabbing’, it does not quite explain the psychology of those that are ‘selling.’ So while
we are primed to think about Argentina and its relentless claims to the Islas Malvinas/Falkland
Islands, we are less familiar about its role as a provider of land for not only investment, lease, or
concessions, but actual purchase. Given the occurrence of such land grabs with a strong aim of
greater food production,
191
one could argue that land grabbing gets at food security, while the
orthodox territorial disputes are about national security, but not only is it increasingly untenable
188
Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, “Contested Territory, Strategic Rivalries, and Conflict Escalation,”
International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2006): 145-68. Also, John A. V asquez, “Distinguishing Rivals That Go to
War from Those That Do Not: A Quantitative Comparative Case Study of the Two Paths to War,” International
Studies Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1996): 531-58.
189
The phrase is from the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, and his opinion of the Falklands Islands Dispute
between the United Kingdom (U.K.) and Argentina. See John Carlin, “Windswept, Remote…Who Would Want to
Live in the Falkland Islands?” Independent, April 20, 2013, accessed October 7, 2015,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/windswept-remotewho-would-want-to-live-in-the-falkland-
islands-8577203.html.
190
See Dominic D. P. Johnson and Monica Duffy Toft, “Grounds for War: The Evolution of Territorial Conflict,”
International Security 38, no. 3 (2013/14): 7-38.
191
Michael Kugelman and Susan Levenstein, eds., The Global Farms Race: Land grabs, Agricultural Investment,
and the Scramble for Food Security (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2013).
101
to place a strict hierarchy on traditional and non-traditional issues of security, but also, the
elements of the standard accounts of territorial disputes are all there: territory, state actors, and
foreign threat (in the case of host countries that seek to regulate land acquisitions). To some
extent then, the discussion about territorial disputes within the conflict literature is incomplete
and rather disconnected from that of the territorial disputes involving the land market discourse,
which is perhaps more thickly situated within the actual discourse about territory itself rather
than territoriality. This has led to an outcome wherein South Korea is more known for its
ongoing feuding with Japan over the islands known as Dokdo or Takeshima—which some may
liken to another situation of two bald men fighting over a comb—rather than its interesting
situation of having bought land in Chile in the 1980s and leasing that back to the Chileans for
roughly USD30,000 annually.
192
But why does it matter that we continue to frame territorial disputes in a hard security
lens? The first reason is that it ignores this empirical behavior in which states demand
(sometimes faraway) territory but also supply (typically homeland) territory. Subsequently, our
task becomes not one of explaining why states may have some inherent proclivity to territory in
general, but what is unique about some of that territory and why or how that becomes imbued
with meaning, so as to distinguish it from the rest. On the one hand, there is already much work
on what makes territorial disputes so prone to war,
193
but the implicit premise here is that
192
Teno farm (185 hectares), south of San Tiago in Chile, has been at the center of much debate internally within
South Korea, particularly amidst other lands purchased by the government in Argentina and Paraguay, which have
not fared as well given their lack of general arability for farming and agriculture. See “The National Assembly Audit
and Inspection of Korea Rural Community Corporation,” Document Requested by Parliamentary Representative,
Shin Seong-bum (October 21, 2008) [Korean]; “The National Assembly Audit: Questions for Committee on Foreign
Affairs, Trade, and Unification,” Submitted by Representative Lee Mee-kyung (October 22, 2008) [Korean]. Also
see Sun-cheol, Kwon, “Government-owned Farmland in South America, Neglected and Barren,” [Korean] Weekly
Kyunghyang 810, February 3, 2009.
193
For a comprehensive review, see Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited, 341-76; Paul K. Huth, “Why Are Territorial
Disputes Between States A Central Cause of International Conflict?” in What Do We Know About War? ed., John A.
102
territory as a whole is generally always considered to be a core national interest as it pertains to
sovereignty that is synonymous with survival, which fails to explain then why states would even
entertain the idea of selling parts of its own territory to foreign actors. On the other hand, those
that do discuss the territoriality by specifying the mechanism in which an emotional attachment
to territory may occur often do not go far enough: what does it mean for ‘history’ or ‘historical
animosity’ to fuel the contention over territory?
194
Just as one cannot wage war against terror or
terrorism, history cannot escalate disputes. History needs a face, and it is not entirely clear how
history or the sentiments flowing from history come to penetrate certain actors (whether
government or public) and by what specific modes/channels that diffusion occurs.
195
A second reason is that if the ‘land grabbing’ discourse has demonstrated anything, it is
that at the heart of a territorial dispute lies palpable territory, and that it can be treated just as
much as a simple commodity as it can be imbued with larger meaning that transcends
materialism. In fact, a good portion of the scholarly narrative about territorial disputes is
bifurcated in that it is either relegated to states (as unpacked unitary entities) or the elites such as
mobilizing the populace toward the state cause,
196
or the general public and their preferences or
Vasquez (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 85-110.
194
Chinsoo Bae, “Territorial Issue in the Context of Colonial History and International Politics: The Dokdo Issue
Between Korea and Japan,” Journal of East Asian Affairs 26, no. 1 (2012): 19-51. Some have identified state
propaganda and the role of media as exacerbating the history issue, but this places premium on the producers of the
rhetoric, without an equal account of how this is effective and to what extent. See Yinan He, “History, Chinese
Nationalism and the Emerging Sino–Japanese Conflict,” Journal of Contemporary China 16 no. 50 (2007): 1-24.
195
An exception may be more utilitarian strands that identify key actors such as elites that use the territorial issue as
a bargaining tool (i.e. leverage on other unresolved issues). For instance, Krista Eileen Wiegand, Enduring
Territorial Disputes: Strategies of Bargaining, Coercive Diplomacy, and Settlement (Athens and London: University
of Georgia Press, 2011). With that said, a systematic rationale for why territorial threats may exhibit greater
domestic salience compared to other issues is relatively sparse. Tir has argued that territorial disputes may be able to
generate public support as they “elicit greater emotional investment, mobilization, and societal bonding.” See
Jaroslav Tir, “Territorial Diversion: Diversionary Theory of War and Territorial Conflict,” Journal of Politics 72, no.
2 (2010): 1. Also see, Marc L. Hutchison and Douglas M. Gibler, “Political Tolerance and Territorial Threat: A
Cross-National Study,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 1 (2007): 128-42.
196
Todd L. Allee and Paul K. Huth, “Legitimizing Dispute Settlement: International Legal Rulings as Domestic
Political Cover,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 2 (2006): 219-34; Douglas M. Gibler, “Outside-In: The
Effects of External Threat on State Centralization,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54 no. 4 (2010): 519-42;
103
the identity formation that occurs as a result of a dispute.
197
In the process, we have under-
appreciated the presence of commercial activity surrounding territorial disputes. The talk about
prospects of lucrative natural resources on or near a disputed territory has tended to include a
limited discussion about commercial actors,
198
but these mostly remain at the level of large
transnational corporations such as petrobusiness.
The business of nationalism hypothesis then, satisfies these two queries stemming from
a strictly security approach to territorial disputes. At the outset, by identifying the mode of
commodification as a tactile channel in which nationalism becomes consumed and reproduced,
we can better adjudicate why certain territory becomes contentious rather than all territory. At the
same time, by acknowledging the territory in territoriality and the prospects of territory being
treated like a commodity, we can also inspect the commercial activity that surrounds a territorial
dispute and how this may impact bilateral tensions.
The Dynamic of Commodification
Definition
There are several ways to define commodification, with the most loosely weaved
meaning to purport some impact by the market, so that we talk in the language of commodities or
products with exchange value as expressed in money. Among many configurations, I find the
Giacomo Chiozza and Ajin Choi, “Guess Who Did What: Political Leaders and the Management of Territorial
Disputes, 1950-1990,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 3 (2003): 251-78.
197
Seiki Tanaka, “The Microfoundations of Territorial Disputes: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Japan,”
Conflict Management and Peace Science, online first, July 21, 2015: 1-23; Douglas M. Gibler, Marc L. Hutchison,
and Steven V . Miller, “Individual Identity Attachments and International Conflict: The Importance of Territorial
Threat,” Comparative Political Studies 45, no. 12 (2012): 1655-83.
198
Leszek Buszynski, “Oil and Territory in Putin's Relations with China and Japan,” Pacific Review 19, no. 3
(2006): 287-303. Also see, Daniel Baart, “The Role of Fishing Fleets in Maritime Boundary Disputes,” Canadian
Naval Review 8, no. 4 (2013): 36-7. In this regard, the arctic has been a more familiar realm wherein commercial
interests have appeared in light of territorial boundaries.
104
definition by Radin to be the most comprehensive yet clear:
The term “commodification” can be construed narrowly or broadly. Narrowly construed,
commodification describes actual buying and selling (or legally permitted buying and
selling) of something…Broadly construed, commodification includes not only actual
buying and selling, but also market rhetoric, the practice of thinking about interactions as
if they were sale transactions, and market methodology, the use of monetary cost-benefit
analysis to judge these interactions.
199
As a full-blown caricature—and for merely, illustrative purposes—the extreme version of
commodification would then entail that everything in society can become a sales transaction,
including even human interactions. The reason though for the preference of using
commodification over monetization despite the intuitive similarities is that the latter has a strong
connotation of the ability to generate revenue. Since the subject here is less about tracing the
fruits of nationalism and whether it can be profitable (results) but rather the ways in which it
becomes consumed and (re-)produced within a marketplace (process), commodification seemed
like the more appropriate term.
At first glance, it may be an odd thing to say that a government may treat a territorial
issue as a business, but as alluded to before, territory is very tangible; land is a great mechanism
for construction and development—not to mention a commodity—which suggests that it can act
as the container or vessel for something as non-tangible as that of nationalism. It might be
bewildering to think about placing a price tag on something as sacrosanct as territorial
sovereignty, but if we go back to 2012 and how the Japanese government had nationalized three
of the five islets referred to as the Senkakus (Diaoyu/Diaoyutai in Chinese) for purportedly
USD25.5 million,
200
it suddenly seems less preposterous to be placing a monetary value on
199
Margaret Jane Radin, “Market-Inalienability,” Harvard Law Review 100, no. 8 (1987): 1859.
200
A Reuters article on the matter quotes Kameda Akihisa, the official responsible for negotiations of the deal, as
stating that the final price reflected assessments of how much it would cost to “replace” the islands. This, of course,
is extremely vague and open to interpretation at best. Antoni Slodkowski, “How Debts and Double-dealing Sparked
105
territorial sovereignty. In fact, the fascinating story behind the purchase from the private
ownership of Kurihara Kunioki as reported by Reuters has many of the familiar elements of a
marketplace: outbidding (the Noda administration’s USD25 million against Tokyo governor
Ishihara Shintaro’s roughly USD16 million in donations) and rational calculations of the market
variety—Santo Akiko, a lawmaker from the Liberal Democratic Party is quoted as framing
Kurihara’s acceptance of the highest offer in the following way: “For him, business
considerations were the most important. After all, he is a real-estate broker.”
201
The authenticity
of the claims is secondary here: it is that market rhetoric can co-exist with nationalist sentiment.
A similar logic could be applied to South Korea’s claims on Dokdo. There is no doubt
that it represents irrefutable nationalism, but it is also tangible space that can be targeted for
commodification. Although it is rare to think of Dokdo in any other terms than territorial
sovereignty, it has already been treated as property that is weighed in dollars and cents. In fact,
the assessed valuation of Dokdo, totaling an area of 187,554m
2
has increased a whopping 1197 %
in a 10-year period from 2005 to 2014 (see table 12).
Japan-China Islets Row,” Reuters, November 11, 2012, accessed February 20, 2015,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/11/us-china-japan-family-idUSBRE8AA0EY20121111.
201
Ibid.
106
Table 12. Trend in Market Value of Dokdo
202
Year Value
2005 $245,756
2006 $664,270
2007 $699,897
2008 $763,713
2009 $851,199
2010 $981,190
2011 $967,289
2012 $1,127,648
2013 $2,146,365
2014 $3,187,977
(exchange rate: 1,100 won= USD1)
While it is true that we cannot place a monetary price on nationalism or assess the value of
territorial sovereignty, we already have (to some extent). The ‘price tag’ on Dokdo/Senkakus was
not obviously calculated with some future transaction in mind, but it does clearly highlight the
possibility for the ‘market rhetoric’ in nationalism.
Channels: Consumables/Private Goods & Non-Consumables/Club Goods
Accordingly, we can examine the various channels that nationalism is actually consumed
and (re-)produced through commodification of territorial disputes. We often think of typical top-
down/vertical methods of propagating nationalism as through state education, public diplomacy,
or PR campaigns. The various flyers, pamphlets, and audio-visual material that these efforts
produce do not typically demand an (monetary) exchange value. In contrast, there are other more
horizontal channels in which nationalism becomes married to consumerism. Using the familiar
distinction of goods/services in economics based on the yardsticks of ‘rivalry’ (whether
202
“2014 Annual Report on Sustainable Use of Dokdo,” [Korean], ROK Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries,
requested through Open Information Portal for ROK Government’s Information Disclosure System
(www.open.go.kr). Documents received on January 14, 2015 via email.
107
consumption by one reduces the availability to another, as in potential for depletion) and
‘excludability’ (whether one can be prevented from access), we get the following channels in
which nationalism may become commodified and their representative examples (table 13).
Table 13. Channels for Commodification of Nationalism
Excludability (high) Representative Examples
Rivalry
(high)
Private
Goods/Services
Consumables/tangibles:
Food, beverages, clothing,
accessories
Rivalry
(low)
Club
Goods/Services
Non-consumables/intangibles:
tourism, museums, nation-wide
competitions (essays, logos, songs)
For the average citizen, consumables are an easy way to become a consumer of nationalism,
while for the owner of the establishment, an opportunity to couple nationalism with the profit-
motive. There are relatively recent examples in China, with ‘patriotic fish’—8,300 pounds of fish
from Mischief Reef/Meiji Reef located in the disputed South China Sea—purportedly selling out
in just two hours at a market in Fuzhou, Fujian province,
203
and Beijing’s Diaoyu Islands
Malatang Noodle Shop that serves up such dishes as “Diaoyu hand grenades” (banana fritters)
and “Diaoyu heavy artillery” (sweet potato balls).
204
The non-consumables are a more interesting case, given the absence of a palpable
materialist component to the exchange. On the one hand, the representative example that
involves a transaction of money for experience is tourism. Some view tourism as transcending
203
Bree Feng, “’Patriotic Fish’ Sell Out in Southern China,” New York Times [Sinosphere Blog], February 11, 2015,
accessed February 25, 2015, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/patriotic-fish-sell-out-in-southern-
china/?_r=0.
204
“Beijing Cafe Serves Up Jingoism Over Senkakus Dispute,” Japan Times, January 28, 2015, accessed February
25, 2015, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/01/28/national/beijing-cafe-serves-jingoism-senkakus-
dispute/#.VMjmm2jF-KI. Incidentally, DeSoucey talks about ‘gastronationalism’ and the example of how national
sentiments have shaped production and marketing of food in the European Union (EU). See Michaela DeSoucey,
“Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union,” American Sociological
Review 75, no. 3 (2010): 432-55.
108
mere recreational benefits to that of fostering the social construction of national community,
205
which is also echoed in studies on heritage tourism that also treats tourism as a symbolic
mechanism through which national solidarity is maintained,
206
and thus, an emotional
experience that requires people to ‘feel’ rather than simply ‘gaze.’
207
At the more extreme,
tourism has been framed as an exploitative tool that creates and exports certain images that
advance a particular national narrative.
208
Museums (related to peace, war, or history) and
memorials have also been cited as key sites for struggles over collective identity and
nationalism.
209
The idea that museums could potentially serve as “pliable tools of cultural policy”
and as instruments for a state’s vision would apply most closely to those publicly-funded yet
directly state-administered museums such as those in Taiwan.
210
On the other hand, the representative case that involves a transaction of money for ideas
is contest and competitions dedicated to increasing overall visibility/awareness and loyalty to the
cause of territorial sovereignty; not to mention, an alternative way for the government to easily
de-securitize a territorial dispute aside from committing large resources into constructing
physical infrastructure surrounding the island. Curiously, the money actually flows in an
unexpected direction: while tourism usually demands the participant to incur costs in order to
205
See Michael Pretes, “Tourism and Nationalism,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 1 (2003): 125-42.
206
Hyung yu Park, “Heritage Tourism: Emotional Journeys into Nationhood,” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 1
(2010): 116-35.
207
Yaniv Poria, Richard Butler, and David Airey, “The Core of Heritage Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 30,
no. 1 (2003): 238-54.
208
Kobi Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Propaganda Tool,”
Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 61-85.
209
Edward Vickers, “Museums and Nationalism in Contemporary China,” Compare 37, no. 3 (2007): 365-82;
Christopher B. Steiner, “Museums and the Politics of Nationalism,” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 3-6;
Enid Schildkrout, “Museums and Nationalism in Namibia,” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 65-77; Akiko
Takenaka, “Reactionary Nationalism and Museum Controversies: The Case of ‘Peace Osaka,’” The Public Historian
36, no. 2 (2014): 75-98; Rana Mitter, “[Research Note] Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and
Memory in the Beijing War of History Museum, 1987-1997,” China Quarterly 161 (2000): 279-93.
210
See Edward Vickers, “History, Identity, and the Politics of Taiwan’s Museums: Reflections on the DPP-KMT
Transition,” China Perspectives, no. 3 (2010): 92.
109
engage in the activity, the participant is now in the running to win awards in exchange for
subjective machinations of the mind. In some ways, hosting nation-wide prize-awarding
competitions for the best logo design to advertise the contested territory is an ingenious way to
woo the public, as it taps into two visceral elements of nationalism and income (and possibly
even a third, of status and recognition).
211
The same applies to the logic of holding a naming
contest wherein the public may get a chance to name the new ferry that would shuttle passengers
in between Ulleung island and Dokdo and be in the running for a monetary award of 2 million
won (or roughly USD1,800).
212
Japan is no exception—with speech competitions for high
school students on the issue of territorial sovereignty over the Northern territories
213
, which
Japan is currently contesting with Russia.
Unlike government-run public diplomacy campaigns, this particular strain of
commodified non-consumable nationalism does not require large infrastructural support; all the
while, offering the citizenry to create a direct stake in shaping the direction of nationalism and
reinforcing ownership. According to the business marketing literature, this process is called value
co-creation: while the traditional view of customers view them as passive buyers with
predetermined role of consumption, the co-creation approach engages consumers in active
dialogue through multiple points of exchange and treats them as co-creators and consumers of
value, which from the business perspective means replacing the management of general
211
There is, of course, the possibility of backlash due to the questioning of the utility of such competitions for
increasing actual claims to the territory, as was the case for Taiwan in 2012. See “Diaoyutai Essay Competition
Planned,” Taipei Times, August 16, 2012, accessed February 21, 2015,
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/print/2012/08/16/2003540404.
212
“Daezer Shipping Co. Runs Contest for Naming of New Dokdo Ferry,” [Korean] Gyeongsang Maeil Shinmun,
March 16, 2015.
213
“Northern Territories High School Speech Contest Held,” Northern Alliance, [Japanese] accessed December 10,
2015, http://www.hoppou-d.or.jp/cms/cgi-
bin/index.pl?page=contents&view_category_lang=1&view_category=1045.
110
efficiencies with personalized experiences.
214
Another interesting dynamic of non-consumables
is its democratic nature: while consumables assume some minimum purchasing power on the
part of consumers, one can now partake in any nation-wide competition at no cost. The potential
reward that is attached to the labor though clearly makes this an instance of commodification of
nationalism, which can easily resemble a sales transaction.
Space: Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC)
By embedding nationalism within a marketplace,
215
it is possible to imagine an enlarged
space that goes beyond merely the executive or the public; this conceptual space is called the
Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC). As gleaned by the similarity in nomenclature, the NIC is a
close but more comprehensive cousin of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), which is
typically circumscribed to the ‘iron triangle’ consisting of the government, the military, and large
corporations. The NIC, however, makes room for not only a more diverse array of actors that get
funneled into the state’s efforts to reinforce sovereign claims over territory, but also for bodies
regardless of size that make any kind of monetary profit by tapping into that nationalist rhetoric
(see figure 11). At the same time, it tempers the notion that either the military or the foreign
ministry is the most influential organ in territorial disputes, by enlarging the scope to other
bureaucratic agencies, including subnational governmental bodies. In fact, the business of
nationalism argument assumes a greater role for organs in the bureaucracy that are more
involved in ‘corporatizing’ (for lack of a better word) a territorial issue, i.e.) those in charge of
214
See C.K Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy, “Co-opting Customer Competence,” Harvard Business Review
78, no. 1 (2000): 78-87; “The Cocreation Connection,” Strategy and Business 27, no. 2 (2002): 51-60; “Co-creation
Experiences: The Next Practice in Value Creation,” Journal of Interactive Marketing 18, no. 3 (2004): 5-14.
215
For an interesting read on the productive association between nationalism and neoliberalism, see Martin Müller,
“Market Meets Nationalism: Making Entrepreneurial State Subjects in
Post-Soviet Russia,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (2011): 393-408.
111
physical infrastructure and development.
Figure 11. Anatomy of a Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC)
Kania-Lundholm does an excellent job of summarizing two complementary yet distinct
trends that couch nationalism in the language of consumerism and the market: ‘nationalizing the
commercial,’ where commercial actors resort to nationalist appeals to gain the edge in selling
their product, and ‘commercializing the national,’ whereby nation states utilize advertising
agencies to engage in nation-branding.
216
The latter has already attracted much attention
particularly within the field of communications and media,
217
but the former less so. Nation-
branding places heavy emphasis on how foreigners perceive of the nation and how that
216
Magdalena Kania-Lundholm, “Nation in Market Times: Connecting the National and the Commercial. A
Research Overview,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 6 (2014): 603-13.
217
For instance, Melissa Aronczyk, ““Living the Brand”: Nationality, Globality and the Identity Strategies of
Nation Branding Consultants,” International Journal of Communication, no.2 (2008): 322-46; “Research in Brief.
How to do Things with Brands: Uses of National Identity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34, no. 2 (2009):
291-96.
112
nationality is embedded within the global sphere, which then stresses consumption abroad,
218
i.e.) ‘Cool Britannia’ of the Blair years or the ‘Cool Japan’ that launched at the turn of the 21
st
century. Another example that has more closely capitalized consumerism with nation branding is
what Carstairs dubs, ‘Roots Nationalism,’ after the success of the company ‘Roots’ and its
marriage of Canadian symbols (beavers, maple leaves etc.) with its various products.
219
In
contrast, the NIC and commodification of nationalism at its core, is about reproduction and
internal consumption. This also explains how ‘commercializing the national’ and especially
something like nation-branding can be outsourced—‘Brand Estonia’ was contracted to the British
firm, Interbrand (division of Omnicom Group), and designed in New York.
220
The NIC
meanwhile, nests the actor behind the commodification within domestic boundaries. The NIC is
an empirical illustration of what Kania-Lundholm calls “nationalizing the commercial,” but an
attempt to transport the idea to a theoretical field that has yet to thoroughly combine the national
with the commercial, and to add a specific context as that of territorial disputes.
A point to keep in mind is that the predominant focus for this dissertation is on small
private businesses and entrepreneurs within the NIC (that may represent another distinction from
the MIC and its emphasis on big business). The implication being that micro-level efforts at
commodification could just as well turn yesterday’s consumer (public) into tomorrow’s producer
(entrepreneur) thereby reducing the gap between what is construed as a purely profit-driven
218
Granted, some scholars have pointed out how the ability to present one’s nation in the international sphere does
require great introspection, and hence, a national/domestic component. For instance, Potter has stated that
“Explaining Canada to others forces us to explain Canada to ourselves. It helps us understand who we are as a
nation…public diplomacy is not a foreign policy challenge—it is a national challenge.” See Evan H. Potter,
Branding Canada: Projecting Canada’ s Soft Power Through Public Diplomacy (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2008), 8.
219
See Catherine Carstairs, “Roots Nationalism: Branding English Canada Cool in the 1980s and 1990s,” Social
History 39, no. 77 (2006): 235-55.
220
Sue Curry Jansen, “Designer Nations: Neo-liberal Nation Branding- Brand Estonia,” Social Identities 14, no. 1
(2008): 121-42.
113
commercial enterprise and political activity. By reproducing nationalism, one is not simply
selling a product, but also selling an idea. In the cases of those businesses and entrepreneurs that
choose to donate a part of their profits as proceeds to non-profit organizations that work on the
cause of territorial sovereignty protection, the boundaries of what is commercial and political
become even more porous. In a way, the fuzziness only contributes to the ability of the
government to facilitate such efforts at commodification. Indeed, it makes little sense to think of
a fixed division of labor for who does what in producing and consuming nationalism.
How Commodification Impacts Tensions
Co-creation and its voluntary and participatory nature of how nationalism gets consumed
and (re-)produced reinforces how commodification is an important element in sustaining public
interest (and motivating some to take ownership by becoming producers themselves) on an issue
of territorial sovereignty. As such, consumables have already been the subject of much
discussion about the potential for explicit national contents in setting the parameters of
nationhood.
221
Consumables are a convenient approach to bringing nationalism closer to
everyday life: one could wear a t-shirt brandishing one’s country’s claims to disputed territory
while dining at a restaurant with a storefront of the territory and even eat foods that are named
after the contested lands. Kemper believes that the making of national identity is “…a negotiated
process by which people recruit themselves through everyday acts of “national” resonance;”
222
a
universal everyday example that comes to mind is the purchasing of country flags either for
221
For a good review of the literature, see Anat First and Tamar Hermann, “Sweet Nationalism in Bitter Days: A
Commercial Representation of Zionism,” Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 3 (2009): 506-23; Jon E. Fox and Cynthia
Miller-Idriss, “Everyday Nationhood,” Ethnicities 8, no. 4 (2008): 536-76.
222
Steven Kemper, “The Nation Consumed: Buying and Believing in Sri Lanka,” Public Culture 5, no. 3 (1993):
393.
114
decorative purposes or for hanging on days that commemorate certain national holidays.
223
Michael Billig has also termed ‘banal nationalism’ to describe the “ideological habits which
enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced...these habits are not removed from
everyday life…daily, the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives of its citizenry.”
224
It is not hard to see then what effects such consumption and distribution of nationalist
products could have on increasing tensions. General public awareness and interest seem to be
necessary components of sustaining some level of inter-state tensions on a territorial issue, and
commodification fulfills this role of supplying greater consciousness and participation of society
on an issue of territorial sovereignty. It should become difficult with the visibility and
accessibility in which products and ideas concerning the territory flood everyday life of the
citizenry that one could simply claim out of sight, out of mind. Moreover, since the consumables
in question are an example of the most intrinsically (and literal) national products that explicitly
engender national sensibilities, there is not much room for interpretation in the act of buying
such goods, c.f.) Coca-Cola can sometimes be locally appropriated, while “Diaoyu hand
grenades” cannot. Commodification then in terms of consumables is an even stronger form of
reinstating public awareness and consciousness for the issue than what is typically discussed
within the standard nationalist literature.
If commercial activity is able to sustain at least some steady stream of public awareness
of the dispute, the government increasingly has little to no recourse in negotiations at the inter-
state level. This is premised on an assumption that domestic audience costs—the price a leader
223
One can also easily think of the domestic analogy of the retail marketplace for college-licensed merchandise,
where nationalism is now replaced by ‘school spirit.’
224
Billig reserves what he calls ‘hot’ nationalism to forceful expressions of nationalism that arise during social
disruption, which (in the tradition of Anthony Giddens) treats nationalism as being rather remote from most
everyday activities of life. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 6.
115
pays for making a foreign policy threat and then reneging—do matter (and the ongoing discourse
tends to lean towards yes).
225
A key mechanism of audience costs is that governments seek to tie
their hands by publicly threatening some action with the expectation that the public will punish
those leaders that say one thing and do another—hence, signaling greater credibility of its
intentions to the other party in the dispute. In terms of territorial disputes and increasing public
awareness, this means that it becomes easier for a government to channel that public interest into
leverage in bargaining than to face the costs domestically, of capitulation. The ability to bind
oneself and resort to this logic of having one’s hands tied has already been noted by Schelling
when he states the following:
226
The essence of these tactics is some voluntary but irreversible sacrifice of freedom of
choice. They rest on the paradox that the power to constrain an adversary may depend on
the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often strength, freedom may be
freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may suffice to undo an opponent.
By framing a potential ‘weakness’ as actual strength, Schelling is stressing the value of using the
leverage of a binding public opinion (that clearly permits no concessions to be made) evident to
the opponent in the negotiation process. That the government desires continued public awareness
for the dispute and is thus, incentivized to support commodification efforts is intimately tied to
this logic. Nevertheless, as Schelling had warned, such tactics involving the power to bind
oneself through public opinion “run the risk of establishing an immovable position that goes
beyond the ability of the other to concede, and thereby provoke the likelihood of stalemate or
225
Joshua D. Kertzer and Ryan Brutger, “Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience
Cost Theory,” American Journal of Political Science, Online first, article first published online: July 16, 2015;
Douglas M. Gibler and Marc L. Hutchison, “Territorial Issues, Audience Costs, and the Democratic Peace: The
Importance of Issue Salience,” Journal of Politics 75, no. 4 (2013): 879-93; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair
Smith, “Domestic Explanations of International Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 15, no. 1 (2012):
161-81. Also see, Michael Tomz, “Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach,”
International Organization 61, no. 4 (2007): 821-40. James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the
Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (1994): 577-92.
226
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 22.
116
breakdown.”
227
.
But why does commodification push tension volume without necessitating greater
intensity? At its core, commodification is not militarization. There are several implications here:
from an adversary’s perspective, these commercial activities are viewed (if at all) to be less
provocative than military campaigns such as maritime exercises and patrol drills—after all, these
are not physical demonstrations or protests on the street, so there is no reason to prevent such
efforts or to imbue them with aggressive/threatening intent. At the same time, greater
involvement by commercial actors alleviates the pressures by the government to act on an
official basis, thereby leaving the option to be less directly involved in the territorial dispute.
Recall that unlike the MIC, the commercial realm is not simply populated by defense contractors
or those in the armaments industry, so that the government could even indirectly support the
commodification and still claim less accountability/culpability for any provocation this may
cause by creating a degree of separation between official state organs and the epicenter of
activity. Moreover, if we acknowledge the reality of finite resources that limit state action on an
everyday basis, this ‘either or’ choice means that one country’s pursuit for commodification in
efforts to normalize its claims to contentious territory entails diverting resources away from
militarization by investing in its defense. Subsequently, if institutionalization pushes for
‘management’ of the dispute as opposed to its ‘resolution,’ the temptation to securitize the
territory and hence, risk escalation becomes less attractive. From the commercial end, there is
also an incentive to prevent the use of force, as it is highly unlikely that militarized conflict
would be good for business. It is more accurate then, to make a clear distinction between a public
necessarily wanting war from pushing for the status quo (in the government’s continued
227
Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 28.
117
sovereign claims to a disputed territory)—with commodification and increased public awareness
reinforcing the latter.
In sum, commodification by heightening both issue salience and resonance makes the
costs associated with government concessions at the inter-state level quite high. In fact, this
dissertation argues that government action may be even more restrictive due to commodification,
as the public is no longer simply passive consumers of nationalism, but producers themselves: on
an intuitive level, a public that has money tied to a cause would be more vested than those
without any personal monetary stake in the matter. So while commodification may not entail a
threat-based security approach to a territorial dispute, it does lower the prospects of any
domestically-feasible resolution and thereby prolong bilateral tensions.
The phrase, ‘business of nationalism,’ then is essentially multi-layered: it reinforces the
role of new actors of the commercial nature, the specific modes in which nationalism becomes
commodified, and the consequence of greater institutionalization of that commodification
generating a business-like approach to managing territorial disputes rather than seeing to its
complete resolution as if it were a security issue. To be clear, the business of nationalism
hypothesis does not deny the role that militarization has in instigating bilateral tension over
territory. States do imbue territorial sovereignty with matters of survival and hence, often employ
proportional measures for its protection. The argument here is simply that a threat-based security
approach is one way but not the only way of attempting to normalize contentious territory. There
are certainly boundaries to this research: since the outcome of interest is tension volume rather
than intensity, the commodification hypothesis would be most adequate for those inter-state
relations that have yet to experience use of force over the disputed territory. It is best to think of
commodification as accentuating the importance of the politics behind territorial conflict rather
118
than its military components. With this in mind, the next chapter seeks to test the argument by
using the ongoing territorial disputes in Northeast Asia.
119
Chapter 6. A Comparative Study of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia
As alluded to by the scope conditions at the end of Chapter 5, the existence of multiple
ongoing territorial disputes with varied levels of tension but an absence of kinetic fighting makes
Northeast Asia a good testing ground for the theory regarding the business of nationalism. The
objective behind this chapter is to test the hypothesis of the effect of commodification on
tensions in Northeast Asia, and in the process, provide a good sense of what the existing
Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC) looks like in the respective countries of Japan and South
Korea. To that end, the chapter has four parts: the first outlines what we should expect to see
when the business of nationalism argument is transposed to the empirical context of territorial
disputes in Northeast Asia. The second focuses on the two ongoing disputes between the two
countries that display disparate levels of tension (Dokdo/Takeshima & Daemado/Tsushima),
where the approach will be the most similar method (or Mill’s ‘method of difference’) in
comparative case study. The case study relies on not only primary documents, but also various
in-person interviews that were conducted in Japan and South Korea during the summer of 2015
with individuals in government and entrepreneurs that take part in commodification efforts. As a
supplement to the qualitative research, the third section introduces some preliminary results of a
statistical analysis of commodification and tensions, which though not exhaustive, is an attempt
to get at the question in as many different ways as one can to increase overall validity of the
argument. The last portion takes the findings of the case study to conceptualize the space—the
Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC)—in which these commodification efforts occur in Japan
and South Korea. In doing so, some implications are made in regards to the role of the state in
facilitating commodification and how this agency factors into the equation of sustaining bilateral
tensions.
120
Theoretical Expectations
The overarching question of this dissertation is on tensions and why they sometimes
represent more of a homeostatic condition than one of escalation towards militarization. As
chapter 4 had already illustrated, much of the tensions in Northeast Asia stem from disputes over
territory. Therefore, it should not be hard to justify the testing of the main argument concerning
the business of nationalism to specifically tensions surrounding territory. By applying the main
hypothesis to Northeast Asia then, the expectation is to find those territorial disputes with the
greatest commodification to exhibit higher bilateral tensions between the state actors than those
with less degrees of commodification. Plotting these dyads and their most representative disputes
on a graph with x and y axes for tension intensity and volume/frequency, respectively, produces
figure 12.
Figure 12. Ongoing Territorial Disputes Plotted against Tension V olume and Intensity
121
The figure is not meant to serve as a statistically exact rendition of absolute amounts of tension,
but rather a conceptual illustration of the existing territorial disputes and their roughly varying
degrees of tension by decoupling tension volume from intensity. With that said, the visualization
is virtually exhaustive, as it subsumes all possible combination of pairs among the three
countries (China-Japan, Japan-South Korea, China-South Korea). The value of disaggregation
opens up the possibility to imagine alternative routes other than immediate escalation into war,
such as why relations may be in perpetual deadlock or stalemate. Additionally, this bird’s-eye
view of all existing disputes rather than simply the two most representative cases of
Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands and Dokdo/Takeshima, reinforces the necessity of getting at why
some territory is more contentious than others even though they all involve some element of
sovereignty.
Visually, it becomes easier to demonstrate the argument regarding the business of
nationalism and the effect that commodification has on bilateral tensions. Recall that the main
hypothesis is that greater commodification should generate greater tension without necessarily
influencing intensity, which means that commodification should move disputes up vertically but
not horizontally (based on figure 12), c.f.) the standard volcanic model of tensions would expect
disputes to move diagonally with both volume and intensity escalating in lock-step till it erupts
into war. According to the theory then, we should see much lower levels of commodification
surrounding the Japan-South Korea dispute surrounding Daemado/Tsushima (or the South
Korea-China dispute over Ieodo/Suyan Jiao) than the South Korea-Japan contention over
Dokdo/Takeshima.
As a brief primer, a few words will be said about each of the disputes depicted in figure
12 (see appendix for geographical location of each dispute). Starting with the two most familiar
122
cases, the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands are a cluster of islands located east of mainland China and
southwest of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. Technically, Taiwan is also a claimant to the dispute, but
the primary actors are China and Japan. The conflicting claims to sovereignty became
particularly heated due to the maritime clash in September 2010 between the Japanese Coast
Guard (JCG) patrol boats and a Chinese boat operating in the disputed waters near the
Senkakus,
228
and the decision in September 2012 of Japan’s national government to nationalize
three of the five islands that make up the Senkakus. The Dokdo/Takeshima (also called
‘Liancourt rocks’) dispute involves conflicting sovereignty over territory (two main islands of
almost 190,000 square meters or 46 acres and 30 smaller rocks) that lies east of the Korean
Ulleung island and northwest of Oki islands of Japan. South Korea has had de facto control over
the islands since the 1950s, but the two countries offer conflicting interpretations about the
historical legitimacy of their respective sovereign claims.
229
Less familiar, yet ongoing disagreements over territory include Ieodo or Suyan Jiao (also
called ‘Socotra Rock’), which is a submerged rock located in the Yellow Sea, southwest of
Korea’s Jeju island and northeast of China’s Yushan island.
230
Both Beijing and Seoul claims the
territory to be part of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and the dispute met its height in 2013
when China redrew its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) to include Ieodo/Suyan Jiao,
228
Since then, the Japanese government has been particularly alert about intrusions into its waters, especially by
Chinese vessels (both government and private). See “Update on Intrusions into its Waters,” [Japanese] Japan’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/page23e_000021.html.
229
For a short (and neutral) summary of the dispute, see Krista E. Wiegand, “The South Korean–Japanese Security
Relationship and the Dokdo/Takeshima Islets Dispute,” Pacific Review 28, no. 3 (2015): 347-66.
230
Technically, one could argue that Ieodo/Suyan Jiao is not an issue of territory, but rather of exclusive economic
zones (and concerns a ‘reef’ not an ‘island’), but seeing as a common framing of the dispute has been in terms of
territorial sovereignty, I will subsume it under territorial disputes. For instance, see “Why Ieodo Matters,” Korea
Times, September 18, 2012, accessed November 20, 2015,
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/09/117_120266.html. For an overview of the debate between
China and South Korea, see Scott W. Harold, “Ieodo as Metaphor? The Growing Importance of Sovereignty
Disputes in South Korea-China Relations and the Role of the United States,” Asian Perspective 36, no. 2 (2012):
287-307.
123
prompting South Korea to respond in kind by expanding its own ADIZ (which of course,
incorporated the territory in question). The satellite island group that is treated as a single entity
called Daemado/Tsushima Island and lie South of Busan (Korea) and Northwest of Fukuoka
(Japan) has been a relatively low-key but consistent issue between Tokyo and Seoul. In March
2005, the municipal assembly of Masan City in Korea’s South Gyeongsang Province
unanimously passed a bill designating June 19 as ‘Daemado Day’ to commemorate the
expedition of Joseon Dynasty General Yi Jong-mu and his troops to conquer Daemado in the 15
th
century.
231
In 2006, the city assembly of Tsushima in Nagasaki Prefecture of Japan then
unanimously adopted a resolution demanding that Masan appeal its ordinance claiming the island
as part of South Korean territory.
232
The latest standoff occurred in 2013, when a Buddhist
statue that was stolen from Kaijinjinja shrine in Tsushima showed up in South Korea, and was
consequently prevented from repatriation on grounds presented by a South Korea court that it
might have been plundered by Japan from Korea centuries ago.
233
Comparative Case Study
The Relatively Low-Key ‘D-T’ Dyad of Daemado-Tsushima Island
There is an enormous comparable difference in the degree of commodification and
institutionalization of the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute within South Korea’s NIC to that of its
dispute with China over Ieodo/Suyan Jiao. In the case of Ieodo/Suyan Jiao, the most activity we
see is the Ieodo Ocean Research Station (IORS) (that includes a heliport), which the South
Korean government completed in 2003, to function as a lighthouse and to conduct monitoring
231
“(2nd LD) S. Korean City Declares Jurisdiction over Disputed Japanese Island,” Yonhap News, March 18, 2005.
232
“Japanese Local Assembly Protests South Korea’s Island Claims,” BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, September 28,
2006, 1.
233
See Martin Fackler, “An Icon and a Symbol of Two Nations’ Anger,” New York Times, June 3, 2013, accessed
November 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/asia/japan-korea-dispute-revived-by-statues-
theft.html?_r=0.
124
and data collection on topics like maritime transportation safety and fishery forecasts. Some have
argued that the much controversial Jeju naval base serves to also reinforce South Korea’s
sovereign protection over Ieodo and that this justification provided additional fodder for going
ahead with the base in the first place.
234
Even if we consider this as part of commodification
efforts surrounding Ieodo/Suyan Jiao, there is not much else—particularly from the Chinese side.
In fact, the near absence of commodification may contribute to explaining the lack of general
tensions concerning the issue.
The Daemado/Tsushima island case is an interesting comparison, as the island is already
inhabited by people
235
and currently controlled by Japan (but with a fair amount of tourists from
South Korea), but with continued resistance from the South Korean public.
236
There are actually
key parallels between Daemado/Tsushima Island and Dokdo/Takeshima, although it is mostly the
latter ‘D-T’ dyad that gains the most media attention: the two issues involve the same pair of
actors, have historical resonance within the two societies, attracts some level of public awareness
and consciousness and tourist activity, but most importantly, exhibits different levels of overall
efforts at commodification and subsequent bilateral tensions. On historical resonance, Tsushima
was the site for the 1905 Battle of Tsushima Strait (or ‘Sea of Japan Naval Success’) during the
Russo-Japanese War that lasted from 1904 to 1905. The battle was a decisive battle for the
Japanese, with the war itself representing an enormous victory that alluded to a shift in the
234
Michael A. McDevitt and Catherine K. Lea, “Workshop Two: Naval Developments in East Asia,” Center for
Naval Analyses (CAN) Maritime Asia Project, Report # DCP-2012-U-002417, August 2012, accessed November 9,
2015, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/rok-navy-chinas-rise-roehrig.pdf.
235
According to the official Tsushima City website, the population as of October 30, 2015 is at 32,590. See,
http://www.city.tsushima.nagasaki.jp/index.html.
236
In 2013, a popular South Korean novelist, Lee Won-ho released a two-part novel titled Cheon Nyeon Han:
Daemado (1,000-year-long Enmity) that traces the journey of protagonists that take back the island from Japan in
2014. Sun-mi Kim, “Interview with Lee Won-ho: Writer of Cheon Nyeon Han: Daemado,” [Korean] Dong-A Ilbo,
April 22, 2013, accessed November 1, 2015, http://news.donga.com/3/all/20130422/54604074/1#. For the Japanese
take on the novel, see “South Korea Chilly Ties: ‘1,000-Year-Long Animosity’ Not Just Fiction,” Japan News,
December 24, 2014.
125
balance of power in East Asia in Japan’s favor. In Korea’s history, scholars have noted that
Daemado was treated as part of its territory “if not by 1418, then certainly from mid-1419,”
237
with the year 1419 marking Joseon’s attack against pirate bases on the island, known as the
Daemado Conquest (‘Daemado Jeongbol’).
Despite the relative unfamiliarity of Daemado/Tsushima to third parties in relation to the
Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, it would be unfair to simply ascribe Daemado/Tsushima as lacking
resonance with the public. For instance, there have been several attempts at collecting signatures
to petition for reclaiming Daemado from Japan.
238
Recently in 2015, there have been comments
to that effect by Korean parliamentarians, citing the first president of South Korea, Rhee
Syngman’s requests (allegedly totaling 60 or so) to Japan for the territory.
239
Incidentally, the
timing of the exponential increase of ‘hometown taxes’ (furusato nozei, essentially a ‘tax break
for donations’ program)
240
to Tsushima city matched perfectly with the 2013 repatriation
incident involving the stolen Buddhist statue from Kaijinjinja shrine in Tsushima (see figure 13).
Although there are no explicit items that appeal to a sense of territorial sovereignty on the agenda
for the hometown dues to Tsushima (many are related to environmental conservation, tourism,
and social infrastructure), it is plausible that the exposure that the city received vis-à-vis the 2013
incident had a hand in the sudden uptick of dues, especially since the upsurge did not carry over
237
Kenneth R. Robinson, “An Island’s Place in History: Tsushima in Japan and in Chosŏn, 1392-1592,” Korean
Studies 30 (2006): 44.
238
Chang-soon Choi, “Civic Organization in Gangwon Province Announces Expedition to Daemado,” [Korean]
Dong-A Ilbo, May 30, 2004.
239
Deok-ho Son, “‘General’s Daughter,’ Kim Eul-dong Urges Moves to Reclaim Historically-Unequivocal Korean
Territory of Daemado,” [Korean] Chosun Ilbo, July 22, 2015, accessed October 30, 2015,
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/07/22/2015072201074.html?Dep0=twitter&d=2015072201074.
240
By allowing citizens to divert a portion of their income-tax payments as donations to their ‘hometown’ of choice,
rural towns in Japan have been gaining much needed capital. See, “Hometown Dues: Struggling Parts of the
Countryside have Found a Novel Way to Attract Money,” The Economist, April 18, 2015, accessed October 30, 2015,
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21648703-struggling-parts-countryside-have-found-novel-way-attract-money-
hometown-dues.
126
into the following year.
241
Figure 13. Trend in Hometown Taxes/Dues to Tsushima City
242
Conversion rate: 100 yen= 1 USD
Tourism, a key component of the intangible channel of commodification also applies in the
case of Daemado/Tsushima Island. As there are already inhabitants on the island, there is quite
an active market for tourism, which got a renewed spurt with the inauguration of the JR Kyushu
Jet Ferry routes between Tsushima and Busan (South Korea) in 2011. Scholars who have
conducted research into the phenomenon of tourism have already elucidated just how reliant the
area is for attracting outside investment:
From the estimated 792,000 passengers who used the Fukuoka-Busan shipping route
(high-speed vessel or ferry) in 2008, about 491,000 were South Koreans and 286,000 were
241
One could go further and argue that the years prior to 2013 should have theoretically garnered greater donations
if interests of Tsushima were predominantly driving the hometown taxes, as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster
in 2011 had negative impacts for tourism. The opposite could apply here also, with greater donations going to those
regions most affected by the disaster, thereby relatively lowering contributions elsewhere.
242
Data collated from the furusato nozei portal site ‘Furusato Choice’ (Furusato Tax), accessed October 30, 2015,
http://www.furusato-tax.jp/japan/prefecture/42209. [Japanese] The figures for 2015 are for the period between April
and September 2015.
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
100000
120000
140000
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Number of Cases
Total Amount (USD)
Number of Cases Total Amount
127
Japanese. Considering the composition of Japanese and South Korean nationals on the
Fukuoka–Busan shipping route, South Korean passengers surpassed their Japanese
counterparts in 2005. This trend continued, reaching a ratio of 58.1% South Korean
visitors to 33.8% Japanese in 2008…In 2008, over 72,000 South Korean sightseers (almost
twice the size of Tsushima Island’s population) visited the island. A survey conducted by
Nagasaki prefecture estimated that tourism contributed 2.165 billion Japanese yen to the
local economy via the purchase of food, drink, souvenirs, and accommodation.
243
If we look at the trend in South Korean tourists to Tsushima Island (figure 14), we do see an
increase in South Korean tourists to Tsushima, about 1461% jump from 2000 to 2014. The
operation of the JR Kyushu Jet Ferry may have contributed to the particularly noticeable spike in
2012. So while we see a greater number of foreigners visiting the island, we also see a stepwise
climb in South Korean tourists as part of that contingent. The fact that South Korean tourists
overtook the entire population of Tsushima City as early as 2001 shows the extent of South
Korea’s tourism to the area.
244
243
Arai Naoki, “Cross-strait Tourism in the Japan–Korean Border Region: Fukuoka, Busan, and Tsushima,” Journal
of Borderlands Studies 26, no. 3 (2011): 317 & 322.
244
The population is stated as 13,813 for 2010. The number has steadily decreased since 1990 (at 15,164). Statistics
on “Population,” Official Website of Tsushima City [Japanese], accessed November 3, 2015,
http://www.city.tsushima.nagasaki.jp/deta/post-6.html.
128
Figure 14. Trend in South Korean Tourists to Tsushima Island
245
Actually, if we were to compare the percentage of South Koreans that make up the foreign
tourists bracket (figure 15), we see a sharp drop in 2007, with levels not recovering to the pre-
2007 period.
246
With that said, we should keep in mind that the absolute numbers of South
Korean tourists have escalated at an undeniable rate, and that even in 2014, almost half of total
foreigners visiting the island are of South Korean origin.
245
Collated from reports on tourism by the Nagasaki Prefecture [Japanese]. Official website of the Nagasaki
Prefecture, accessed November 3, 2015, http://www.pref.nagasaki.jp/bunrui/kanko-kyoiku-bunka/kanko-
bussan/statistics/kankoutoukei/213062.html.
246
In context, this period starts to see greater number of tourists originating from mainland China, Taiwan, and
Hong Kong.
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
0
200000
400000
600000
800000
1000000
1200000
1400000
1600000
Number of South Korean Tourists
Total Number of Tourists
Total Tourists Total Tourists (Only Foreign) South Korean Tourists
129
Figure 15. South Koreans as Percentage of Total Foreign Tourists to Tsushima
247
Moreover, if we look at the population statistics for Tsushima City, as of end of October 2015,
4,801 or 30.96% of the entire population work in the service industry, which is followed by
fisheries at 2,599 or 16.76%.
248
The relative proximity of Tsushima from Busan (roughly an
hour boat ride) facilitates the stream of tourists from Korea, while the receptivity of that tourism
partly stems from the nature of the economy of Tsushima.
So we have clearly established that there is substantial foot-traffic by South Koreans to
Tsushima, which according to the larger argument about commodification, should have
implications for bilateral tensions. As a direct off-shoot of increasing South Korean presence,
there have indeed, been calls of concern from the Japanese government. In November 2008,
Japanese lawmakers had raised alarm about “aggressive purchases” (of guesthouses, inns, and
land) by South Koreans, which prompted the Japanese Lower House member, Takeo Hiranuma
247
Collated from reports on tourism by the Nagasaki Prefecture [Japanese].
248
Statistics on “Population,” Tsushima City [Japanese].
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Koreans as % of Foreign Tourists
130
to equate the necessity of protecting sovereignty over Tsushima with the British dispatch of its
forces to protect Falkland Islands.
249
In 2014, there were reports of right-wing protests and fact-
finding missions by Japanese Diet members to the island amidst growing rumors of potential
espionage by South Korea through its infrastructure on the island—mainly of a South Korean
resort facility (‘Tsushima Resort’) that opened in 2008 adjacent to a Japanese Maritime Self-
Defense Force (MSDF) base.
250
Meanwhile, the South Korean media has also reported on
various business and investment by Koreans in Tsushima (predominantly tourist enterprises),
claiming that “Koreans are also buying land on Tsushima, valued at 100,000 to 6,667,000 won
($102 to $682) per square meter, to build villas.”
251
Recall in chapter 5 of the importance of
territory in territoriality and the central position of land in territorial disputes: this is a classic
instance of where land has created the space for commodification. Incidentally, now there are
reports of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) pushing for a bill that would aim for economic
promotion of remote islands by prompting the central government to purchase land and create
greater infrastructure such as roads and airports for the operation of the Japanese Self-Defense
Forces (SDF) and Japan Coast Guard (JCG), and provide financial assistance to the population
there—Tsushima Island has been cited as a candidate.
252
Not to mention, that there are still
suspicions by the more conservative media in Japan about the undersea tunnel that would link
Karatsu City in Fukuoka to Iki, Tsushima, and eventually Busan, of which the plan was approved
249
Jun Hongo, “New Territorial Row Brewing: Tsushima Latest Flash Point After Heavy Investment by South
Koreans,” Japan Times, November 13, 2008, accessed November 3, 2015,
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/11/13/national/new-territorial-row-brewing/.
250
“Korean Buys on Tsushima Rouse Rightists’ Fears,” Japan Times, April 10, 2014, accessed November 3, 2015,
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/10/national/korean-buys-on-tsushima-rouse-rightists-
fears/#.VjOY67cve70. In 2013, the number of South Korean tourists had far surpassed that of Japanese tourists to
the island at 180,000 versus 30,000-50,000, most likely adding to fears of South Korean ‘encroachment.’
251
Bong-geun Song, “Japanese Island Paradise for Koreans,” JoongAng Daily, January 9, 2006, accessed
November 3, 2015, http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2669669.
252
See “LDP To Craft Bill on Protecting Remote Islands Near Borders,” Japan Times, June 5, 2015, accessed
November 3, 2015, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/06/05/national/ldp-craft-bill-protecting-remote-islands-
near-borders/#.Vlc99nYve70.
131
by the Tsushima city council in 2013.
253
The value of the Daemado/Tsushima case is that it gives us leverage in identifying the
rough sequence in which commodification precedes tensions. It was only with greater
‘encroachment’ by South Korea vis-à-vis tourism and investments, combined with Korea’s own
awareness of the dispute that culminated in such ordinances as ‘Daemado Day,’ which became
the fuel for bilateral tensions. Nevertheless, since Tsushima is dependent on capital to keep its
economy going, politics for the most part have been subjugated to concerns of immediate
livelihood, which means that tensions overall have rarely spiraled to critical levels. In other
words, the country with actual control over the island—Japan—has not shown much
commodification and tensions have been limited. (As an interesting side-note, there are products
like ‘Tsushima ice-cream’ and ‘Tsushima sunset soda’ that are instances of tangible
commodification, although it is doubtful that these were made in the spirit of territorial
sovereignty, lacking any explicit message to that effect accompanying the product.
254
) Of course,
Tsushima has been accused of letting its economic interests take precedence over more national
political concerns; in the case of the theft of the Buddhist statue, Sankei Shimbun had reported
that upon the city announcing that it would resume one of its annual Japan-Korea exchange
events despite the statue’s uncertain return to Japan, there were over 50 telephone calls that week
to protest the decision (mostly from outside Tsushima).
255
253
See Miyamoto Yasashii, “Solidifying the Roots for Further Land Acquisition by South Korea through Plans of
Japan-Korea Undersea Tunnel,” [Japanese] Sankei Shimbun, January 19, 2014, accessed November 3, 2015,
http://www.sankei.com/politics/news/140119/plt1401190022-n1.html. “For internal debates in Korea about the plan,
see “Experts Argue Over Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel,” Chosun Ilbo, May 11, 2007, accessed November 3, 2015,
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2007/05/11/2007051161010.html.
254
See the advertising pamphlet on Tsushima products at the official website of Tsushima City [Japanese], July
2012, accessed November 3, 2015, http://www.city.tsushima.nagasaki.jp/live/kouhou/images/201207/02.pdf.
255
“Tourism Beats Out Principle in Resuming Joseon Tongsinsa Parade in Tsushima, Despite Missing Buddhist
Statue,” [Japanese] Sankei Shimbun, August 3, 2014, accessed November 3, 2015,
http://www.sankei.com/politics/news/140803/plt1408030006-n1.html.
132
In addition to (or likely as part of) the economic motives that suppress tensions, some of
the efforts at (intangible) commodification actually promote greater bilateral cooperation. An
example is the ‘Border Marathon’ that is held in Kamitsushima (the northern part of Tsushima
Island), which attracts participants from both Japan and South Korea.
256
Moreover, there seems
to be agency on the part of the South Korean government to regulate tensions surrounding
Daemado/Tsushima. For instance, the South Korean central government had apparently asked
the local government of Masan in 2005 to scrap its bill regarding its territorial sovereignty over
Daemado/Tsushima and plans for instituting a ‘Daemado Day,’ on grounds that “this kind of act
never helps protect Korea’s sovereignty over Dokdo,” as “they might stir unnecessary
controversies.”
257
This enforcement and regulation from the part of the government is important
as it highlights not only that there is a lot of human agency behind the rhetoric that gets matched
to certain territorial disputes, but also that this framing can easily be inspired by political
considerations rather than some innate ‘history’ or ‘historical legacy’ attached to the land. Now,
the core difference between Daemado/Tsushima and Dokdo/Takeshima not only lies in the
overall level of bilateral tensions surrounding the dispute, but also the degree to which
commodification activities have actually occurred. It is to this more contentious ‘D-T’ dyad that
we will now turn.
The Highly Contentious ‘D-T’ Dyad of Dokdo/Takeshima
Where we do see active commodification of nationalism by the state with de facto
control over territory is the case of Dokdo/Takeshima. It is helpful at this point to provide some
256
For more information, see Tsushima City website [Japanese].
257
Jong-Koo Yoon, “Government Says No to ‘Daemado Day,’” Dong-A Ilbo, March 20, 2005, accessed November
4, 2015, http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?biid=2005032142598.
133
context to just how much resonance the issue carries in South Korea as gleaned by the trend in
official budgetary allotment to the cause of territorial sovereignty protection, particularly as it
targets Dokdo/Takeshima (figures 16 & 17).
Figure 16. Japan’s MOFA Budget on Territorial Sovereignty Protection (2005-2015)
258
258
Compiled from statistics released on the official websites of Japan’s MOFA, MOD, MLIT, along with ROK’s
MOFA and MOD, and personal e-mail correspondence with Japan’s MOFA department on territorial protection on
August 11 & 26, 2015.
0
1
2
3
4
5
0
2,000
4,000
6,000
8,000
10,000
12,000
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
%
Total MOFA Budget (million USD)
Total MOFA Budget
Territorial Budget as % of MOFA Budget
% of Territoral Budget Allotted to Takeshima
134
Figure 17. South Korea’s MOFA Budget on Territorial Sovereignty Protection (2005-2015)
259
There are three specific observations that should be clarified in terms of the respective MOFA
budgets of Japan and South Korea. The first is that the interest towards Dokdo/Takeshima has
indeed, risen, if greater money being spent on an issue indicates corresponding importance. The
line for Japan’s territorial budget dedicated to Takeshima has climbed, while Korea’s territorial
budget has also seen an enormous surge. (There is a difficulty of disaggregating the territorial
budget for Korea into different issues, as most of the budget is earmarked for Dokdo and
Ulleungdo, so it seems plausible to assume that the overall territorial budget is not far off from
Korea’s spending on Dokdo, specifically.) With that said, the second point concerns the value of
comparative analysis as it clearly illustrates the dangers of looking at a specific dataset in
isolation: the absolute dollar amount of Japan’s MOFA budget far exceeds that of South Korea’s
(Japan hovering in between the 6 to 10 billion while the latest figures for Korea in 2015 was at
2.2 billion). So while the proportion of money allotted towards the item of territorial sovereignty
259
Ibid.
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
2,500
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Total MOFA Budget (million USD)
Total MOFA Budget Territorial Budget as % of MOFA Budget
135
protection for Korea has increased quite noticeably since 2005 (by over 2,000%) in relation to
Japan’s rather stagnant spending, it has only been recently since Korea has outspent Japan in
absolute amounts, with accumulative spending from 2005 to 2015 for Japan at USD76 million
against South Korea’s USD26 million. Lastly, the third point is about the proportion of Japan’s
budget spent specifically on Takeshima and how it demonstrates that despite the uptick, it still
only accounts for about 5% of the entire portfolio—so while Takeshima is not the most pressing
priority for Japan, it is certainly for South Korea. In fact, the Japanese central governmental
structure in charge of territorial sovereignty is rather centralized and streamlined, with the Office
of Policy Planning and Coordination on Territory and Sovereignty (‘Territory Office’ or ‘Ryodo-
Shitsu’) under the Cabinet Secretariat representing a rather recent addition that only came about
in 2013. It seems that the central bureaucracy itself then has been reconstituted to deal with
multiple fronts rather than a singular issue (as that of Takeshima alone).
In following, if we examine the priority placed on Dokdo by South Korea, the level of
commodification is incomparable to that of Japan’s. The commodification surrounding
Dokdo/Takeshima by South Korea started in earnest in late 2005, which is the year that the
Dokdo Sustainable Use Act went into effect.
260
This new whole-of-government approach to
normalizing the territory had at least three components. The first involved revising legislation to
facilitate greater accessibility to Dokdo. In 2005, the initial entry permit system of visiting
Dokdo was replaced by a reporting system, which has been periodically replaced by regulations
that have enlarged the scope for greater tourism (i.e. the initial daily cap of 400 visitors in 2005
260
The ROK parliament passed the Dokdo Sustainable Use Act (#12147) on May 18, 2005, which went into effect
on November 19 the same year, and thereby paved the way for a whole-of-government approach to realizing the
sustainable use of Dokdo.
136
was raised to 1,880 in 2007, and consequently scrapped entirely in 2009).
261
As expected, the
number of tourists also surged exponentially (see figure 18): comparing the initial figures in
2000 at 1,472, and 135,372 in 2014 shows an incredible 9,000% jump. What is more is that most
visitors are Korean nationals, with foreigners making up less than 1% of the annual figures.
Second, the Dokdo Sustainable Use Act spawned several organizations such as the Northeast
Asian History Foundation, the Dokdo Research Institute (the first of its kind) at Yongnam
University, and a Dokdo Policy Committee within the East Sea Development Headquarters in
North Gyeongsang province, and; finally, the number of ministries and departments involved in
the issue of Dokdo surged from two in 2004 to 12 by 2013, with a concurrent escalation in
budget from roughly 556 million won in 2004 (a little over USD5 million) to 7.1 billion won
(almost USD650 million) by 2013.
262
As the name of the act suggests (and henceforth plainly
laid out in Article 1) its overarching aim is to contribute towards the sustainable use of Dokdo
and its surrounding waters by regulating the use and management of the marine life and
ecosystem, thereby balancing infrastructural development with preservation of nature.
261
See Official Website of Gyeongsang Province Page on Dokdo [Korean], accessed November 4, 2015,
http://www.dokdo.go.kr/pages/s01/page.html?mc=7287.
262
Hyeon-sun Ha, “Evaluation of the Dokdo Sustainable Use Project,” [Korean] National Assembly Budget Office,
Report #277, April 2013.
137
Figure 18. Trend in Number of Visitors to Dokdo
263
The infrastructural implementation of the 2005 act governing the sustainable use of
Dokdo is the Dokdo Sustainable Use Project (DSUP), which illustrates the follies of only
limiting oneself to examining the foreign affairs or the defense ministry (see figure 19). In fact,
not only does the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries (MOF) rank the highest in budgetary figures
for DSUP—which actually saw an increase of 15,207% from 2004 to 2013—but the item of
facilities construction and management has also exhausted the most money overall, with funds
toward that category alone representing over 62% of the entire portfolio of items.
264
The focus
on building infrastructure then has created a natural role for outsourcing to particularly small and
medium-sized contractors, which is in contrast to Japan where traditional heavyweights such as
Kawasaki or Mitsubishi Heavy Industries play major contractors for the MOD, while the
263
Data collected from the Official Website of Gyeongsang Province Page on Dokdo, [Korean], the Official
Website of Ulleung-gun Dokdo Management Office [Korean], accessed November 4, 2015,
http://www.ulleung.go.kr/mdokdo/.
264
Data collection and research ranks second, with 10% of overall funds, and on-site facilities management and
residential support (on Dokdo) ranks third, taking 7%. Ha, “Evaluation of the Dokdo Sustainable Use Project.”
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014
% of Foreign Visitors
Total Number of Visitors
Total Visitors Nationals % Foreigners
138
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT) too has been mostly
preoccupied with activities of the Japan Coast Guard (which has seen a consistent budget
increase) and their role in protecting and surveying disputed territories, which MLIT has
jurisdiction over.
Figure 19. ROK’s Dokdo Sustainable Use Project (DSUP) Budget Breakdown
1
1
Ha, “Evaluation of the Dokdo Sustainable Use Project.”
140
State-led commodification efforts surrounding the territorial dispute continue at the sub-
national level with the role of provincial and local governments. In the case of Japan, the main
prefectures that carry out activities related to territorial disputes are Shimane (situated in the
southwest Chūgoku region), Okinawa (southernmost prefecture of Japan), and Hokkaidō
(northernmost prefecture): the first aimed at Dokdo/Takeshima-related efforts, the second toward
Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, and the last, to counter Russia’s claims over the Northern
Territories/Kuril islands. For South Korea, there is one region that is most active in its efforts to
bolster territorial sovereignty: North Gyeongsang (or Gyeongbuk) province on the eastern side of
the Korean peninsula has institutionalized its approach to Dokdo/Takeshima by setting up a
specific department in 2005 within Ulleung County dedicated to formulating policies toward the
territory, which guarantees a consistent budget earmarked for that singular aim.
266
As the
administrative center of Takeshima, the Oki District in Shimane prefecture also has a ‘Takeshima
Measures Office’ that was launched soon after the local Shimane parliament enacted a bylaw in
2005 establishing February 22 as ‘Takeshima Day.’ With that said, if one were to compare the
local budgets (see figure 20), it is obvious that South Korea has outspent its neighbor at the sub-
national level—Shimane’s USD1.85 million versus Gyeongbuk’s USD80.36 million from 2005
to 2015. To place this in context, Hokkaidō’s budget to deal with the Northern Territories has
been an accumulative USD146.34 million over the past 11 years, which far surpasses
Gyeongbuk’s budget. Again, this reinforces the relative de-prioritization of Dokdo/Takeshima by
266
Since its inauguration in 2005, the name of the department has gone through several facelifts, ranging from
‘Committee on Measures to Protect Dokdo,’ ‘Department on Defending Dokdo,’ and the most recent (and perhaps
the ‘mildest’) iteration of ‘Dokdo Policy Office.’ The annual budget from 2009 to 2014 totaled 51,170,976 won
(roughly USD46,519). Report Submitted for Audit to ROK National Assembly’s Agriculture, Livestock, Food, and
Fisheries Committee (Daegu: Gyeongsang Bukdo, 2013) [Korean], accessed March 10, 2015,
http://likms.assembly.go.kr/inspection/reqdoc/2013/pdf/000616133.PDF.
141
Japan relative to South Korea.
267
Figure 20. Comparison of Sub-national Budgets on Territorial Sovereignty Protection
268
In fact, Gyeongbuk province (specifically Ulleung County) has clearly embedded itself
as a key actor in South Korea’s NIC by creating various physical infrastructure (and vested
interests) such as hosting the Dokdo museum (not to be confused with the one in Seoul), the Ahn
Yong-bok memorial,
269
and pushing strongly for the completion of a seawall surrounding
Dokdo/Takeshima. In Japan, there is a local fundraising channel (rolling-basis) that solicits
money directly from citizens, which is then channeled into funds for a variety of programs: for
instance, Ishigaki city (in Okinawa) announced that donations for Senkaku/Diaoyu-related
projects as of December 2014 had totaled 13,732,950 yen (roughly USD137,330) since June
267
There are also two specific government commercials that reinforce territorial sovereignty over the Northern
Territories. Both were released in the lead-up to the ‘Northern Territories Day’ on February 7 (one on February 3,
2014 and the other on February 2, 2015), accessed November 5, 2015, Government of Japan, Public Relations
Office, http://www.gov-online.go.jp/pr/media/cm/.
268
Data collated from Shimane prefectural government, Japanese cabinet secretariat, and Gyeongbuk provincial
government.
269
The memorial (opened in 2013) serves to commemorate the life of Ahn Yong-bok, who traveled to Japan during
the Joseon dynasty to work towards gaining recognition of Dokdo and Ulleungdo as part of Korean territory.
0
50
100
150
200
250
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Sub-National Budget (hundred million)
Shimane's Takeshima Budget
Gyeongbuk Dokdo Department Budget
Hokkaido Cabinet Northern Territories Office Budget
142
2012
270
; Shimane prefecture has also accumulated a total of 20,646,000 yen (roughly
USD206,460) from 2008 to 2014 towards the Takeshima cause.
271
In the end, while these
demonstrate the willingness of the state to encourage public participation by stressing that these
hometown taxes are easily tax deductible, and the donations themselves have certainly increased
(figure 21),
272
these are neither as sustainable nor institutionalized as infrastructural
development or even small-scale business. In the end, if one believes that money really talks, it is
hard to look over the initial fact that Shimane’s overall budget of USD1.85 million is only a tiny
fraction of Gyeongbuk’s USD80.36 million for the period between 2005 and 2015.
Figure 21. Trend in Hometown Taxes/Dues to Shimane Prefecture
270
“Senkaku Islands Donations” [Japanese], Department of Planning and Policy, Official Website of Ishigaki City,
Okinawa Prefecture, accessed March 21, 2015,
http://www.city.ishigaki.okinawa.jp/home/kikakubu/kikaku/sub_page_senkakukifu.htm.
271
The drop in 2011 is likely attributable to the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. “Status Update on Donations”
[Japanese], Official Website of Shimane Prefectural Government, accessed August 15, 2015,
http://www.pref.shimane.lg.jp/admin/seisaku/keikaku/furusato/jyokyo.html.
272
The Sankei Shimbun has reported that donations for Takeshima have reached a record high by January 2015. See
“To Contribute to the Takeshima Cause: Shimane Hits Record High in Hometown Taxes” [Japanese], Sankei
Shimbun, February 20, 2015, accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.sankei.com/west/news/150220/wst1502200072-
n1.html.
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
% Allotted for Takeshima
Total Donations to Shimane (1USD)
Total Donations % Allotted for Takeshima
143
In sum, the comparative analysis of the two ‘D-T’ territorial disputes adds support to the
hypothesis concerning the business of nationalism: while the Daemado/Tsushima Island case
exhibits relatively low levels of commodification and corresponding degrees of bilateral tension,
the Dokdo/Takeshima issue has consumed most of South Korea’s commodification efforts and
thereby elevated its tensions in regards to territorial sovereignty with Japan.
Statistical Testing of Commodification and Bilateral Tensions
It is difficult to quantify a concept as amorphous as nationalism; the same applies to
measuring the degree of commodification of nationalism surrounding territorial disputes. In
order to acquire additional leverage on the tangible behavioral outcome of nationalism
surrounding the main Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, this dissertation decided to utilize the proxy of
trademarks—specifically, a raw count of the number of times that individuals, businesses, and
the government have incorporated either Dokdo or Takeshima in registering their trademarks.
The rationale here is that the behavior of applying for trademarks that make direct references to
the name of the contentious territory is a fairly good equivalent of what we are interested in
capturing—the coupling of the market rhetoric with nationalism. Aside from the added benefit
that trademarks also capture actors of diverse sizes, there is the element of variance, so that we
are not comparing a static variable with a dynamic one as that of tensions. While the proxy of
trademarks may not be exhaustive, it is possible to gauge the trend in the rough breadth of
commodification, particularly for the popular channel of consumables.
Figure 22 is the result of transposing the data on overall Japan-South Korea tensions as
well as those specifically surrounding Dokdo/Takeshima to the statistics on trademark
144
applications in the South Korea for the same period. Immediately, one sees that the
Dokdo/Takeshima issue has come to subsume the Japan-Korea relationship in the post-2005
period, adding to the rationale for why we are looking at tensions through territorial disputes and
why the peculiar case of Dokdo/Takeshima. Meanwhile, the visible peak in 2008 is somewhat
attributable to the nine applications submitted by large companies such as Binggrae Co., Ltd and
Tong Yang Magic Co. Ltd. that ran campaigns related to Dokdo, but also the five applications
submitted by Gyeongbuk province.
Figure 22. Japan-South Korea Bilateral Tension & Applications for Trademarks
The initial incongruence is apparent upon searching the databases of the Japan Platform
for Patent Information (J-PlatPat) and the Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information
Services (KIPRIS). Excluding those applications that were either rejected or have expired, there
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014
Bilateral Tension
Bilateral Tension over Takeshima/Dokdo
# of Trademark Applications (South Korea)
145
are only 2 trademarks in Japan that adopt ‘Takeshima’ as part of its goods/services,
273
while we
see 141 under ‘Dokdo’ that have been granted or are in the process of being granted certification
in the case of Korea (of which 60% are by individuals/entrepreneurs). Actually, 106 or roughly
71% of those trademarks are categorized under goods, particularly food and drink. We do see a
similar preference in Japan to capitalize on food as the carrier for nationalism surrounding
territorial sovereignty, however, as is also the case with products sold on the sidelines of
Takeshima Day celebrations in Shimane prefecture, most of these items remain strictly at the
local (tourist) level. On a national scale, there is a notable actor that does sell items such as
stickers and key holders with messages about territorial sovereignty (including
Dokdo/Takeshima), but it is in fact a governmental actor—a small right-wing party in Japan
called the Restoration Political Party-New Wind (Ishin Seitō-Shimpū).
274
If we run a preliminary correlation of the time-series data of trademarks and tension to
test for the absence or presence of a relationship, we do indeed see a positive correlation between
commodification as measured in trademarks and bilateral tension between Japan and South
Korea, i.e.) more trademarks are linked to more tensions. Figure 23 shows the Cross-Correlation
Function (CCF) of the two time-series data of monthly trademark applications and monthly
diplomatic summonses concerning Dokdo/Takeshima between Japan and Korea from 1998 to
2014.
273
There are two trademarks listed under ‘Takeshima’ (Takeshima Aquarium and Hotel Takeshima) but both are in
reference to the small island in Aichi prefecture that is also called Takeshima rather than the contentious territory of
Dokdo/Takeshima.
274
Their catalogue of products for purchase is available online. See “Products for Sale,” [Japanese] Official Website
of the Restoration Political Party-New Wind, accessed September 7, 2015, http://tosho.sblo.jp/category/1190717-1.h
tml.
146
Figure 23. Cross-Correlation Function (CCF) of Trademarks & Tensions
There is a positive relationship and the peak is at -3 (0.4606), with the minus sign telling us that
the trademarks data leads tensions by three periods (months). The fact that the correlations are all
positive indicates that as commodification as captured by trademarks is increased, the output of
tensions also increases. Now, while the choice of the third-order lag is likely in part an artifact of
random noise from month-to-month that is not directly modeled, ultimately, the significance of
any lag suggests that the effect of trademark applications on bilateral tensions is not
instantaneous but rather, percolates for a period of time until it reaches a threshold that the
analysis has identified as in and around the three-month mark.
The analysis here is mostly preliminary and only serves to supplement the in-depth case
study rather than completely supplant it. There are limitations on how much causal inference one
can do from the existing data, especially as the larger theory is not arguing that trademark
applications alone cause bilateral tensions concerning Dokdo/Takeshima. As good measure, both
time series data were tested for unit roots and data stationarity using the augmented Dickey-
Fuller test, then plugged into a Negative Binomial Regression (an event count model approach
-1.00 -0.50 0.00 0.50 1.00
-1.00 -0.50 0.00 0.50 1.00
Cross-correlations of trademark and summons_specific
-10 -5 0 5 10
Lag
Cross-correlogram
12 0.1215
11 0.0711
10 0.0260
9 0.1741
8 0.0736
7 0.1123
6 0.1137
5 0.0850
4 0.0859
3 0.0900
2 0.0954
1 0.0951
0 0.1754
-1 0.0304
-2 0.1504
-3 0.4606
-4 0.1139
-5 0.1821
-6 0.2848
-7 0.2304
-8 0.2122
-9 0.1232
-10 0.0819
-11 0.1255
-12 0.0393
LAG CORR [Cross-correlation]
-1 0 1
147
that deals with non-negative integers given the likelihood of over-dispersion or skewdness from
the population of zeros in the dataset). Due to autocorrelation (using the Durbin Watson test), the
model used a lagged variable of tensions as a right-hand-side variable, and included the third-
order lag of trademarks. In the end, the model produced insignificant coefficients, which
underscores the importance of adding omitted predictors; the same goes for a Granger Causality
test (whether one can better forecast Y using the histories of both X and Y than using the history
of Y alone), which returned insignificant results.
Future iterations could find additional measures that might capture commodification in a
comprehensive enough way as to make it more amenable to statistical analysis, along with
control variables that may sharpen the relationship between commodification and tensions.
Having said that, some consideration needs to be made for the fact that commodification in this
context is an extremely hard concept to identify in a meaningful quantifiable way, and any
single-minded attempts to use only statistical analysis to get at the concept may bring more ills
than good. A note needs to be made though, that if one was interested in simply gauging the
rough scope of commodification of nationalism surrounding territorial disputes in a specific
country, using trademarks alone may actually under-report the existing scope of
commodification, as realistically, not everyone resorts to the formal channels to register their
trademarks. This is especially salient in countries with less transparency and institutional
structure at the state level.
The Comparative NICs of Japan and the ROK
So far, the evidence has shown that despite both Japan and South Korea having control
over territory (Tsushima and Dokdo, respectively), the two exhibit stark differences in their
148
approach to managing territorial disputes, which has produced diverging levels of bilateral
tensions. The comparative case study has provided enough detail in order for us to generalize
about how we may conceptualize the respective Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC) at work in
Japan and South Korea. The South Korean case is relatively straight-forward, as the main
territorial dispute that the domestic industry targets is Dokdo. South Korea has a multilayered,
de-centralized NIC with a host of commercial agents that show active efforts at commodifying
nationalism (see figures 24.1). While not completely exhaustive, the figures allow for the visual
representation of actors that have a varying stake in the territorial dispute. As the governmental
actors have already been discussed in the comparative case study, the focus here will be on the
commercial realm.
149
Figure 24.1 Representative Snapshot of South Korea’s NIC
In addition to the micro-level entrepreneurs (as gleaned by trademarks), there are three
large agents of commodification within the commercial sphere: conglomerates dedicated to
large-scale physical construction, those aimed at specific infrastructure, and banks. As part of the
DSUP, a consortium led by Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co. and involving Daewoo
E&C were awarded a government contract in 2011 to construct a comprehensive marine science
research station
275
near the waters off Dokdo (but plans have run into bureaucratic hurdles and
inter-departmental politics).
276
Projects that have been aimed at smaller-scale infrastructural
275
This should not be confused with the Ulleungdo-Dokdo Marine Science Station operated by the Korea Institute
of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST).
276
Hyo-jung Kim, “43 Billion of Precious Taxpayers’ Money Poured into the Dokdo Marine Science Research
Station that Has Been Going Nowhere for 4 Years,” [Korean] Weekly Chosun, January 4, 2014, accessed November
10, 2015, http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/01/03/2014010301747.html?news_Head1. There are
reports that steel frames for what would make up parts of the station are just being stored in Hyundai’s factories in
Yeosu, in Korea’s South Jeolla Province. The initial announcement in 2011 incurred immediate backlash from the
Japanese government and corresponding protests against the plans for construction. See, Press Conference by
Minister for Foreign Affairs Takeaki Matsumoto, April 15, 2011, Japan MOFA, accessed November 15, 2015,
http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/fm_press/2011/4/0415_01.html.
Office of the Prime Minister
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Ministry of Ocean & Fisheries
Ministry of Education
Ministry of Defense
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure &
Transport
Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Rural
Affairs
Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism
Ministry of Patriots & Veterans’ Affairs
Ministry of Environment
Korean National Police Agency
ROK Coast Guard
Gyeongsangbuk-do Ulleung-gun
Construction: Hyundai Engineering &
Construction Co., Daewoo E & C
Infrastructure: Korea Electrical Contracto
-rs Association (KECA), KT Corp., SK
Telecom, LG UPlus
Banks: National Agricultural Cooperative
Federation (NACF), Nonghyup Bank Co.
Ltd, Daegu Bank, Suhyup Bank
Tour companies & ferry service
Entrepreneurs: registered trademarks
under ‘Dokdo’ (total: 141): foods,
restaurants, clothing & accessories,
services
GOVERNMENT COMMERCIAL
Industrial
Bank of
Korea;
Korean
Broadcast
-ing
System
150
development on the actual island include those carried out by the Korea Electrical Contractors
Association (KECA) and its success in building a solar power plant on Dokdo, which celebrated
its fifth anniversary in 2015 of its operation. The KECA solar power plant has a unique history,
given that the funds for its construction was based on voluntary donations from roughly 3,000
students, practitioners, and business people in the electrical sector, which amounted to about 3
billion won (or USD2.7 million).
277
Telecommunication giants, SK Telecom, KT Corp. and LG
UPlus, launched a satellite Long-Term Evolution (LTE) mobile network on Dokdo in May
2015,
278
promoting some to report that “It’s surprising that the carriers have teamed up for LTE
because it is their main battlefield. The firms said that they agreed to cooperate to defend the
nation’s territory.”
279
The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) is placed in the middle space of
the NIC given its status as a public corporation with funds from the government but with
independent management and revenue-generating operations. KBS World Radio operates a
website on Dokdo (offered in 11 languages),
280
and also signed a Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU) with Ulleung county to install a radio transmitter for KBS FM on Dokdo
in January 2015.
281
Lastly, banks are an extremely fascinating case, but one that might be more peculiar to
the context of Korea. Here, banking refers to the activity of financial institutions dedicated to
commercial/retail or investment services. Not to be confused with ‘banking nationalism,’ which
277
“Korea Electrical Contractors Association (KECA) Holds Celebration to Mark Fifth Anniversary of Dokdo Solar
Power Plant,” Yonhap News, August, 7, 2015, accessed November 10, 2015,
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2015/08/06/0200000000AKR20150806152100848.HTML.
278
Sung-won Yoon, “KT Builds Satellite Network on Dokdo,” Korea Times, May 24, 2015, accessed November 10,
2015, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2015/05/133_179468.html.
279
Yoo-chul Kim, “Carriers Team Up For LTE Service in Dokdo,” Korea Times, December 10, 2012, accessed
November 10, 2015, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2015/02/129_126583.html.
280
The site is available here: http://world.kbs.co.kr/dokdo/english.
281
It was reported that North Gyeongsang Province will invest 150 million won (roughly USD136,363) in the
project. See “FM Transmitter for KBS Radio to be Installed on Dokdo,” KBS World Radio, January 27, 2015,
accessed November 10, 2015, http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/news/news_Dm_detail.htm?No=108297.
151
is often referred to practices by the government that support certain regulations that protect the
domestic banking industry over foreign competitors, the instance of banking here refers to how
banks as commercial actors appeal to nationalism to sell their own product, i.e.) savings accounts
and the like. A case in point is the Industrial Bank of Korea that launched a product named
‘Dokdo is Our Land’ back in 2005, which offered customers the choice of opening a deposit
account, an installment savings account, or certificate of deposit (CD), wherein fixed deposits
could earn up to 3.8 annual percentage rate (APR), with an additional 0.1 percentage point for
younger customers (purportedly to get to their sensibilities toward history at an early age). The
product was actually based on a similar product the year before, which was aimed at protecting
the historical ownership of Goguryeo, amidst contentions over its heritage with China. This
practice is reminiscent of Diaspora bonds, bonds that are marketed to members of the diaspora
(that are typically more wealthy) to offer the home government funds for investment, which
usually come with ‘patriotic discounts’ as investors would accept returns much lower than on the
open market. These specialty bank accounts do, however, tend to have a clear target/opposition
in mind by the very virtue of being locked in a territorial dispute, while the Diaspora bonds
capture patriotism without necessarily evoking an oppositional ‘other.’ Nevertheless, both
demonstrate the power of mixing emotions with profits. In the case of banking, one is not only
being paid for embracing nationalist sentiments, but it also illustrates the transaction of money
(interest) for money (deposit), which marks the most complete form of where consumerism
meets nationalism.
282
Gauging Japan’s NIC is comparatively demanding as Japan has several weighty ongoing
282
Hana Financial Group has also participated in ‘patriotic marketing’ by offering time deposit and installment
savings products ahead of the 70
th
anniversary of Korea’s independence in August 2015. See Kyong-ae Choi, “Hana
Financial Turns to Patriotic Marketing,” Korea Times, June 7, 2015, accessed December 24, 2015,
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2015/06/488_180365.html.
152
territorial disputes that require a more multifaceted approach on its part. So while Japan’s NIC
might be rather streamlined with just a handful of centralized government actors, and minimal
degrees of commodification vis-à-vis micro-level entrepreneurs (see figure 24.2), there are
notable commercial actors that are worth mentioning; an important point to keep in mind is that
most of these actors are dedicated to the cause of the Northern Territories rather than Takeshima,
and this is even despite the fact that Russia currently has control over the islands. Therefore, the
commercial realm of Japan’s NIC can be divided into three sections to account for the three
issues of the Northern Territories, the Senkakus, and Takeshima.
Figure 24.2 Representative Snapshot of Japan’s NIC
The infrastructure dedicated to the Northern Territories could very well warrant a
separate study on its own, given its immense scope; thus, for the purposes of this dissertation,
only a few central characteristics will be discussed. As part of the government’s project on the
Northern Territories (particularly in the area of Japan-Russia visa-free visits and people
(Cabinet Office):
Northern Territories Affairs Administration
(Cabinet Secretariat):
Office of Policy Planning and
Coordination on Territory and Sovereignty
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Ministry of Defense
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science & Technology
Geospatial Information Authority of Japan
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure,
Transport and Tourism
Japanese Coast Guard
Shimane, Okinawa, Hokkaido
Restoratio-
n Political
Party-
New Wind;
Org. to
Protect
Senkaku
Islands
GOVERNMENT COMMERCIAL
Senkakus:
Tourism
Registered
trademarks under
‘Senkaku’ (5)
Northern Territories:
Ferry services: Rosa Rugosa;
Tufted Puffin Bird
Tourism & related
infrastructure
Entrepreneurs: Northern
Territories Senbei (rice
crackers)
Takeshima:
Daito
153
exchange), vessels or ferries have been involved in facilitating visits by the bereaved families to
the graves of their families located on the islands (the visits began in 1964 on humanitarian
grounds).
283
A classic example is the commercial vessel named the ‘Tufted Puffin Bird’ (え とぴ
りか) that was unveiled in 2013 and started its operations the following year.
284
Not unlike the
Korean case, the name of the vessel was selected in May 2011 as a result of a nation-wide
competition that attracted a total of 2,469 ideas.
285
Other vessels that have been involved in the
exchange program include the cruise ship Rosa Rugosa, which operated till 2007 at which point
the Shari town government in Hokkaido put the aging ship up for auction,
286
and the National
Fisheries University also employs a training vessel to be used in the visa-free visits, but the
university is run under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of
Japan, making it not entirely commercial. There are also legal measures in place to (financially)
support the nearby areas of the Northern Territories in ways of tourism and also foster these
points as gateways or hubs to the Northern Territories.
287
An example is Nemuro City, which is
located in Hokkaido. Actually, Nemuro City is a great example, as there is a department
specifically dedicated to the Northern Territories issue,
288
and also exhibits various channels of
commodification that were mentioned in chapter 5, as that of speech contests for middle school
283
For more context regarding the graves, see “Measures for Reversion of the Northern Territories,” [Japanese]
Hokkaido Government, accessed November 13, 2015, http://www.pref.hokkaido.lg.jp/sm/hrt/hp-en/toriku-en.htm.
For information regarding the actual instances of graveyard visits, see “Status of Graveyard Visits,” [Japanese]
Japanese Cabinet Office, accessed November 13, 2015, http://www8.cao.go.jp/hoppo/shiryou/kouryu.html.
284
“Unveiling of the Tufted Puffin Bird Vessel, Part of the Northern Territories Exchange Program,” [Japanese],
Japanese Cabinet Office, accessed November 13, 2015, http://www8.cao.go.jp/hoppo/henkan/koukei.html.
285
See “Introducing the New Vessel- the Tufted Puffin Bird,” [Japanese] Japanese Cabinet Office, accessed
November 13, 2015, http://www.hoppou.go.jp/exchange/ship/.
286
See “Tax Delinquent’s Diamond Receives Record Bid of 93 Million Yen,” Asahi Shimbun, November 27, 2012,
accessed November 13, 2015, http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201211270068.
287
See “Promotion of the Adjacent Region of Northern Territories,” [Japanese] Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and
Transport and Tourism (MLIT), accessed November 13, 2015, http://www.mlit.go.jp/hkb/hoppo.html.
288
See Northern Territories Policy Division, Nemuro City’s Official Website, [Japanese], accessed November 14,
2015,
http://www.city.nemuro.hokkaido.jp/dcitynd.nsf/doc/A1F12A7E4779F2AC492570C70034CFD8?OpenDocument.
154
students on the issue of territorial sovereignty,
289
and marathons under the theme of sovereignty
over the Northern Territories.
290
Last but not least, there are tangibles that appropriate the
territorial theme: one may purchase senbei (rice crackers) in nationalist packaging that displays
Japan’s claims over the Northern territories as souvenir items upon visiting the facilities of the
former Hokkaidō Government Office in Sapporo.
291
A part of why mapping the actors for the Northern Territories is particularly taxing is
that there is a two-way exchange in the Japanese visiting the disputed Northern Territories but
also the Russians visiting Japan. Hence, not captured in the NIC would be businesses that cater
to those Russians visiting Japan as part of the visa-free visits. So although the accumulative
number of Japanese who have visited the four islets between 1992 and 2015 (total: 12,439)
outnumber the Russians’ visits to Japan (total: 8,859), (see figure 25), capturing the Japanese
domestic industry targeting the Russian visits could be a promising avenue for future research.
289
See “Main Tasks,” Northern Territories Policy Division, Official Website of Nemuro City, [Japanese], accessed
November 14, 2015,
http://www.city.nemuro.hokkaido.jp/dcitynd.nsf/doc/26fb6d471871362949257d90001f52cc?OpenDocument.
290
See “Nosappumisaki Marathon,” Northern Territories Policy Division, Official Website of Nemuro City,
[Japanese], accessed November 14, 2015
http://www.city.nemuro.hokkaido.jp/dcitynd.nsf/doc/A0642E7E18EE8EB24925766600108238?OpenDocument.
291
Kuzo, “[Sapporo] Incredible Souvenir Sold at Hokkaido: Reversion of Northern Territories Senbei!” [Japanese]
Rocket News, October 3, 2012, accessed November 14, 2015, http://rocketnews24.com/2012/10/03/253619/.
155
Figure 25. Number of Individuals Partaking in the Japan-Russia Visa-Free Exchange
292
The Senkaku Islands represent a slightly different case within the context of both the
Northern Territories and Takeshima. Although we see greater militarization rather than efforts at
commodification, there is greater evidence of commercial activity by businesses than Takeshima.
Accordingly, there are five trademarks registered under Senkaku as of 2015 (see table 14).
Table 14. Registered Trademarks in Japan Using ‘Senkaku’
293
Business/Individual Approval Date Description
Globeride Inc. March 22, 1976 fishing and sport goods
Senkaku Corporation February 3, 2012 seafood processing for seafood caught
around Senkaku Islands
Ryunosuke Megumi April 7, 2013 Japanese sake
Yaeyama Fishery
Collaborative Association
August 30, 2013 ‘Katsuo’ (a type of fish) caught around
Senkaku area
Yaeyama Fishery
Collaborative Association
August 30, 2013 ‘Hata’ (a type of fish) caught around
Senkaku area
292
“Visitation Achievements,” [Japanese], Japanese Cabinet Office, accessed November 14, 2015,
http://www8.cao.go.jp/hoppo/shiryou/kouryu.html.
293
Compiled using the J-PlatPat Database [Japanese], accessed November 14, 2015, https://www.j-
platpat.inpit.go.jp/web/all/top/BTmTopPage.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014
From Japan to Northern Territories From Russia to Japan
156
Of the five, the Senkaku Corporation may just fit the commodification model the best.
Established in 2012 and located in Ishigaki of Okinawa Prefecture, the company has an
undeniably clear sense of purpose—to reinforce Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands; at
the same time, it is very much a business. One glance at its business plan shows that the central
items on its agenda include selling fish caught off the nearby waters of Senkakus, to start a cruise
ship and facilitate tourism to the islands, and produce and sell souvenirs displaying its Senkaku
logo.
294
The company states that the profits from the various products as that of key-rings and
cellphone accessories are used to fund efforts aimed at territorial sovereignty.
295
In the
overlapping area of where government meets commercial activity lies the Organization to Protect
the Senkaku Islands ( 尖 閣諸島を守る会).
296
With headquarters in Ishigaki in Okinawa and the
governing board composed of provincial lawmakers, the third article of its regulation specifically
stipulates that it will operate cruise ships to the Senkakus.
297
Moreover, the group has made a
2016 Senkaku Islands calendar, which is available for purchase online for a price of 2,000 yen
(excluding shipping) or roughly USD16.
298
So all in all, while commodification is yet limited
and state-led militarization activities are what seem to capture the most space in the media, there
are still observable instances that hint at a growing space for commodification—especially if
public interest on the issue in Japan keeps growing.
The third and last issue in Japan’s NIC is Takeshima, which takes up the smallest portion
of commercial activity. The de facto control by South Korea over the disputed territory works
294
See The Senkaku Corporation [Japanese], accessed November 14, 2015,
http://www.senkaku114.net/schedule.html.
295
The products can be found here [Japanese], accessed November 14, 2015,
http://www.senkaku114.net/report.html.
296
See the official website for the Organization to Protect the Senkaku Islands [Japanese], accessed November 15,
2015, http://www.senkaku.net/.
297
Ibid.
298
The calendars are only available for purchase online, through its official website [Japanese], accessed November
15, 2015, http://www.senkaku.net/home/unei.htm#sell.
157
against Japan in any infrastructural development, but there is also not much commodification
from either the businesses or micro-level entrepreneurs to speak of. This suggests that the role of
the state may be an important factor in influencing the general direction of commodification
efforts.
Agency and Role of the State
That the two realms can be integrated into a holistic structure suggests that there is
interaction between the two spheres. The example of ‘Dokdo bread’ is an interesting one, as it
illustrates the extent of the ‘invisible hand’ of the government in facilitating participation by the
public in the commercial sphere. ‘Dokdo bread’ started out as a cooperative,
299
and received
funding from the Small Enterprise and Market Service (SEMS), a division of the Small and
Medium Business Administration (SMBA) under the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry
and Energy (MOTIE). What is more, these businesses often designate a part of their profits
(despite their revenue rarely exceeding that of initial expenses) as proceeds to non-profit
organizations working on the issue of Dokdo/Takeshima.
300
There is a clear social component
then to running such a business, and unlike public donations that require the government to
become the end-user/implementer of the funds, the indirect support by the government to
encourage sustainable business now places what once were, consumers as the producers of
commodification.
In the case of Japan, there was actually an instance where the Japan Patent Office (JPO)
had declined the application to register a trademark back in December of 2006 by the Japanese
299
Since then, restructuring has occurred and now it is effectively a one-man operation. From in-person interview
with its current CEO, Ki-sun Kim, on July 14, 2015 (Pohang, South Korea).
300
Some other representative examples include Dokdo ramen and Dokdo cookies. The heads of these companies
were interviewed in person on June 26, 2015 (Yongin) and July 28, 2015 (Seoul), respectively.
158
company, Daito
301
that had produced ‘Takeshima Manjū (Japanese snack)’ as part of a tourist
item for Okinoshima, a town located on Dōgo, in Oki District, Shimane Prefecture. Apparently,
the JPO had initially cited reasons of unnecessarily stoking misgivings between the two countries.
Nevertheless, the JPO had later accepted the application in February 2007, on grounds that it
would not be fair to judge a trademark based on the surrounding political context. This is
somewhat reminiscent of the diplomatic spat in 2004 over ‘Dokdo’ stamps issued in South
Korea,
302
when it was reported that the Japanese government had rejected several applications at
around the same time for the issuance of ‘Takeshima’ stamps (although the Japan Post did honor
one request by a private stamp collector).
303
Ironically, the entrenchment of various stakeholders during the process of
commodification and institutionalization has at times, led to bureaucratic gridlock, which may
turn out to be another cause (albeit inadvertent) that suppresses militarization and sustains
homeostasis. For instance, four ferry companies that were servicing routes to Dokdo were found
guilty of price-fixing by the Federal Trade Commission and handed over to prosecutors in
October 2014.
304
Moreover, plans to build a maintenance and safety facility on Dokdo (initially
301
The company is known for infusing the theme of politics into food, as evidenced by their other product of
‘Abenomics Manjū.’ See official website of Daito, accessed March 17, 2015, http://omiyage-daito.com/products
[Japanese].
302
Koo does a great job covering the spat, also noting that 2004 was actually the third time that the image of
Dokdo/Takeshima had been featured on a stamp (the Japanese government was apparently unaware of the second
release in 2002). See, Min Gyo Koo, Island Disputes and Maritime Regime Building in East Asia: Between a Rock
and a Hard Place (New York: Springer, 2009): 93-4. For more on how stamps are generally used in the context of
territorial integrity (particularly in East Asia), see the following: Hugh Dobson, “Japanese Postage Stamps:
Propaganda and Decision Making,” Japan Forum 14, no. 1 (2002): 21-39; Phil Deans and Hugh Dobson,
“Introduction: East Asian Postage Stamps as Socio-Political Artefacts,” East Asia 22, no. 2 (2005): 3-7; Alan M.
Wachman, “Stamped Out!: Carto-Philatelic Evidence of the PRC’s Constructed Notion of China’s Territorial
Integrity,” East Asia 22, no. 2 (2005): 31-55.
303
See Kyung-seo Park, Promoting Peace and Human Rights on the Korean Peninsula (Seoul: Ewha Womans
University Press, 2007), 127.
304
Dae-ho Kim, “Four Ferry Companies Servicing Ulleung-Dokdo Found Guilty of Price-Fixing” [Korean] Maeil
Shinmun, October 10, 2014, accessed August 15, 2015,
http://www.imaeil.com/sub_news/sub_news_view.php?news_id=51232&yy=2014.
159
projected for 2009-2016 with a budget of 10.9 billion won) has faced numerous hurdles starting
from the planning stages and have yet to break ground on actual construction, finally being
placed on hold by the government; the project to erect a seawall (requiring roughly 474 billion
won from 2009 to 2020) has similarly run into problems regarding rejections on budget requests
and has also yet to start construction; after being rejected by the Cultural Heritage Administration
(CHA) in 2013, while the Dokdo marine science facility has been looking for a new home.
305
Summary
The core objective of this chapter was to test the business of nationalism hypothesis, that
greater commodification sustains bilateral tension volume (but not necessarily tension intensity).
The empirical testing ground was Northeast Asia, which was selected for its diverse combination
of dyadic relations and their ongoing territorial disputes. Meanwhile, the rationale for
specifically targeting tensions surrounding territorial disputes was a direct result from chapter 4,
where the diplomatic summonses database found that territorial disputes was the number one
issue that was instigating much of the tensions in Northeast Asia. In fact, its disruptive powers
are perhaps most evident in the Japan-South Korea dyad, which has seen territorial sovereignty
subsume the relationship in the past few years. Subsequently, the Mill’s method of difference
was employed to focus on the two ongoing ‘D/T’ disputes between Japan and South Korea—
Dokdo/Takeshima and Daemado/Tsushima. As the hypothesis would suggest, the former dispute
displayed greater levels of commodification—predominantly by South Korea—which also led to
greater bilateral tensions with Japan. The latter, was a stark contrast in its significantly lower
305
For a good summary of the status quo, see “Only Plans, No Construction…Business of Guarding Dokdo at a
Standstill,” [Korean] Yonhap News, February 25, 2015, accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2015/02/25/0200000000AKR20150225122100053.HTML?input=1195m.
160
degrees of commodification and ensuing tensions, but it also clarified the exact sequence in how
commodification precedes tensions.
The final section on mapping the Nationalist Industrial Complex (NIC) served to
highlight the various units that are involved (but often ignored) in the ‘business’ of territorial
sovereignty protection. Despite the general under-theorization of commodification in the
discipline, it is empirically visible in various territorial disputes; this was particularly salient in
the multifaceted NIC of Japan. An implication of the findings also suggested the importance of
state agency. This will become more central to the discussion in the next and final chapter about
the takeaways of the research along with some future avenues for research.
161
Chapter 7. Conclusion
Three keywords that have guided this dissertation are tensions, nationalism, and
commodification. Tensions dominated the first half of the dissertation, as the DV to be explained:
specifically, why do inter-state tensions sometimes become ‘stuck’ without bubbling over to war?
Early on, this notion of an ‘arrested peace’ was exemplified through the state of relations in
Northeast Asia so as to illustrate the importance of the research agenda. Moreover, since standard
accounts in conflict studies would suggest that tensions predominantly serve as precursors to
militarization, particular attention had to be paid to the conceptualization and operationalization
of tensions—inter-state hostility (whether manifest or latent) as expressed by the number of
diplomatic summonses. By disaggregating tensions from the likelihood of war and aligning its
sub-war character to a proxy that gets at politico-diplomatic disputes, tensions became much
more amenable to the question of why we may not necessarily observe escalation thereof. In fact,
constructing the tensions database for Northeast Asia was a critical step in capitalizing on the
innovation that tension volume and intensity need not develop in lock-step, so that we could
theoretically think about four different types of tension based on the axis of intensity and volume:
low-high, low-low, high-high, and high-low. Instead of only treating tensions as unidirectional
and sliding towards war, the concept of tensions was made richer, more interesting, and
empirically relevant.
The IV of commodification of nationalism was proffered as the answer to prolonged
homeostasis of tensions. The second half of the dissertation thus began with a detailed account of
commodification: what it is, how it works, and the ways in which it impacts bilateral tensions.
Recall that commodification—or the way in which we can frame a certain phenomenon in the
language of commodities or services with exchange value as expressed in money—has two main
162
channels that facilitate the consumption and reproduction of nationalism: consumables/private
goods and non-consumables/club goods. The main logic is that as commodification facilitates
greater visibility for and awareness on the part of the public of an inter-state dispute, it becomes
harder to resolve the issue at the governmental level. Unlike state-led propaganda,
commodification actually encourages (or ‘woos’) the public to engage in a certain issue on their
own accord; so to some extent, it matters less that the public may be motivated by the ‘profit
motive’ as opposed to a pure ‘nationalist’ agenda, but that by partaking in commodification, they
populate the space in which nationalism is consumed and reproduced—the Nationalist Industrial
Complex (NIC). The beauty of commodification is that the populace also has the opportunity to
not only shape the direction of nationalism, but also produce a certain narrative by becoming
entrepreneurs that sell products or services that capitalize on nationalism. With that said, even
though the government may increasingly face little to no recourse in negotiations at the inter-
state level, commodification at its core is not militarization. What this means is that since
commodification is generally relegated to domestic consumption, it would be less provocative
then demonstrative acts that are clearly targeted at the other party in the dispute, such as military
drills or mass street protests. Hence, tensions may become ‘stuck’ but not escalate towards
militarization.
Taking this dynamic of commodification, the third part of the dissertation brought the IV
and DV together by suggesting the following hypothesis: that greater commodification of
nationalism will result in greater tension volume (but not necessarily intensity). The testing of
the argument required a dual specification of the regional context of Northeast Asia, and the
particular dispute area of territorial sovereignty. Certainly, both issues are en vogue and by that
very fact may warrant examination, but the reason for narrowing the scope as such was directly
163
informed by the finding that territorial disputes in Northeast Asia (especially in the past few
years) were driving much of the tension between countries. The regional context also allowed for
enough variation among the ongoing territorial disputes that one could identify each dispute
according to the type of tension based on volume and intensity. Accordingly, among the four
existing disputes involving the three actors of China, Japan, and South Korea
(Daemado/Tsushima Island, Dokdo/Takeshima, Ieodo/Suyan Jiao, and Diaoyutai/Senkaku
Islands), the two ‘D/T’ disputes that exhibited contrasting degrees of bilateral tension yet
involving the same dyad of Japan and South Korea were isolated as comparative case studies. As
per the hypothesis, a detailed look at the two cases demonstrated that active commodification did
lead to sustained tensions (Dokdo/Takeshima), while a lack of commodification produced the
opposite (Daemado/Tsushima Island). A preliminary statistical analysis of the relationship
between commodification of nationalism surrounding a territorial dispute (as captured by the
number of registered trademarks that utilize the name of the contentious territory) and bilateral
tensions seemed to offer further support for the hypothesis. Along the way, the space in which
these commodification efforts occur, or the NICs of Japan and South Korea, were also mapped
out, so as to translate a conceptual idea into a more tangible visual representation that shows the
diverse actors involved in the consumption and reproduction of nationalism.
Making the Familiar less Familiar
In addition to the reconceptualization of tensions, this dissertation has challenged a few
conventional assumptions in IR. The first involves the relationship between nationalism and
business. Typically, the sequence has been to place nationalism before business, so that we could
examine the various impacts of the former on the latter. A good example of the interest in the
164
effects of politics on the economy is reporting on the boycotts that arise as a result of nationalist
sentiment. The coverage of the economic fallout from the ongoing dispute between China and
Japan over the Diayotai/Senkakus has been particularly popular.
306
Therefore, if the focus up till
now has been on examining business as a result of nationalism, this dissertation has treated
business as a part of nationalism. Subsequently, less attention has been paid to the definitional
aspects of nationalism, and rather, on how various actors (particularly in the commercial realm)
appropriate nationalist sentiment as embodied by territorial sovereignty vis-à-vis
commodification and how this impacts bilateral tensions. That products or services may come to
represent simply more than a commodity but a vessel for a political reality is not new: for
instance, the new stamp issued by the Japanese postal service upon quietly ‘consolidating’ the
Korean communication services in 1905 more than anything signaled the realities of
colonialism.
307
In a similar fashion, the infrastructure, products, and services surrounding
territorial sovereignty contain a nationalist rhetoric that perpetuates a certain narrative about the
state.
In so doing, this dissertation has come to upset what has become the ‘normal’ division of
labor between the producers and consumers of nationalism. Certainly, it is comfortable and
intuitive to ascribe clear roles to elites and the masses, so that one comes to be in charge of
propagating nationalism while the other is responding and reacting to what is being generated.
306
For example, see Kazunori Takada, “Discretion Pays for Japanese Brands in China Amid Territorial Dispute,”
Reuters, May 21, 2014, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/21/us-japan-china-
companies-idUSBREA4K16M20140521#1PXm7pKMKPXpjmeK.97.; “China-Japan Dispute Takes Rising Toll on
Top Asian Economies,” Bloomberg News, January 9, 2013, accessed November 15, 2015,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-08/china-japan-dispute-takes-rising-toll-of-asia-s-top-economies.;
“Japanese Car Sales Plunge in China after Islands Dispute,” Guardian, October 9, 2012, accessed November 15,
2015, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/09/japanese-car-sales-china-islands-dispute.
307
Kathleen Wunderly, “1905 Japan Issue Put Best Face on Takeover of Korea Post,” Linn’ s Stamp: News and
Insights, International Stamps and Postal History, December 4, 2015, accessed December 24, 2015,
http://www.linns.com/en/insights/international-stamps-and-postal-history/2015/12/1905-japan-issue-put-best-face-
on-takeover-of-korea-post.html.
165
By envisioning a holistic space (NIC) where commodification meets consumerism, we can
capture several layers that include commercial actors, sub-national governments, and individuals
that become entrepreneurs that sell and package nationalism; in the end, there is a greater sense
of fluidity rather than lock-in in terms of who does what.
The porous boundaries also apply to multiple fronts: between politics and economics,
security and economics, and the business and social. In the rare case that an issue of territorial
sovereignty does elicit an inquiry as to the dollar amount spent towards the cause, it has been to
cite the budget for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Defense. The way that
politics meet economics then, has been limited and predictable. By widening the scope vis-à-vis
commodification, this dissertation has revealed a much more interesting platform where money
somehow figures into everyday interactions that serve the larger aim of reinforcing territorial
sovereignty. At the same time, by moving away from a strict security-lens of analyzing territorial
disputes, the boundary separating security and economics has also become relaxed. In effect, this
dissertation has suggested that militarization is one way, but not the only way to deal with a
territorial dispute. The underlying premise here is that if kinetic conflict is less common than we
give it credit for, the notion of commodification needs to be given serious thought. Finally,
elements in the dissertation seek to redefine the contours of what we consider to be the
business/commercial and social spheres. The notion of social entrepreneurship in business is
nothing new, but the way that some of these entrepreneurs donate proceeds to organizations that
work on territorial sovereignty protection is an under-theorized area where profit-generating
activity and civic participation becomes collapsed into one.
166
Addressing Pushback
Due to the emphasis placed on micro-level entrepreneurs in the NIC, one may raise the
critique that these actors are negligible (due to their size), and that there is no way that they could
have any impact on something as ‘high politics’ as that of inter-state tensions. While this sounds
logical, it also misrepresents the main argument. The critique would only stick if this dissertation
was claiming that these agents themselves were directly linked to instigating tensions. However,
the main thesis is that tensions become stuck because these activities are inherently less
provocative, and often not picked up by the other disputant. The whole point of the NIC is that
these commercial activities foster domestic consumption of nationalism (rather than radiate
directly outwards) so as to constrain and limit the government, thereby making it difficult to
resolve tensions. As outlined earlier on in the introduction, there are similarities with Putnam’s
two-level games, as the internal domestic interaction becomes central to the inter-state outcome.
Nevertheless, a similar charge concerning size could be made about how low-level
entrepreneurs do not matter enough to constitute a genuine ‘industrial complex,’ so that it makes
little sense to be talking about a NIC. The implicit consensus behind the Military Industrial
Complex (MIC) is that it works because it bounds actors that are influential and a part of that
influence comes from their size as gauged by budget and revenue. Although this dissertation did
not get around to incorporating the element of ‘patriotic marketing’ into the analysis, the NIC
could easily account for the activity of large conglomerates that utilize territorial sovereignty as
part of their marketing and advertising strategy. The following excerpt from a 2008 news report
illustrates just how far-reaching commodification is in a highly active market as that of South
Korea’s:
167
On July 18, Interpark, a leading online shopping mall, started to produce and sell a “Dokdo
T-shirt” bearing the inscription, “Do you know Dokdo? Dokdo belongs to Korea.” It costs
2,900 won, plus free shipping. More than 20,000 Dokdo T-shirts were sold on July 18
alone, the company said…Top retailer Shinsegae Department Store and its E-Mart affiliate
have been raising “funds to guard Dokdo” to be donated to a civic group…KTF, Korea’s
No. 2 mobile carrier, has a plan called “Dokdo is our territory,” under which subscribers
donate 500 won per month to civic groups to help raise the international awareness of the
tiny islets. The pricing plan was introduced in 2005.
308
Shinsegae Department Store is considered a prominent ‘Chaebol’ (Korean business
conglomerate) in South Korea, and surely of a size that no one would associate with irrelevance.
If anything, a case could be made that every day practice is what counts, so that tracing the
behavior of micro-level businesses as well as those of the ordinary citizens is just as important as
actions of the state. The NIC in that regards, is quite agnostic about the size and relevance of the
various actors.
A more challenging demand is guarding against endogeneity, so that one could
confidently claim that the causal arrows run in the direction from commodification to tensions
and not the other way around. There was some discussion in chapter 6 with the case of
Daemado/Tsushima Island, and the benefit of being able to isolate the impact of greater
commodification on the part of South Korea and how it instigated bilateral tensions with Japan.
Nevertheless, it is plausible that since the territorial disputes in question are of a protracted
nature, it becomes harder over time to be able to isolate the effect of commodification on
tensions—especially if we believe that an issue of territorial sovereignty tends to have a fairly
long half-life. Theoretically, positing that commodification predominantly grows in reaction to
greater tensions suggests that there must be some rational calculation that makes it profitable to
become involved in the commodification in the first place. The in-person interviews with the
South Korean entrepreneurs involved in selling products related to Dokdo were particularly
308
Hyun-joo Jin, “Companies Jump on Dokdo Bandwagon,” Korea Herald, August 1, 2008.
168
enlightening because they demonstrated the lack of incentive for one to get into the business. For
instance, when asked about whether sales of Dokdo Ramen (noodles) were influenced at all by
provocations on the part of Japan, the CEO of Dokdo Co., Ltd, Ra Su-hwan stated the following:
They [sales and provocations] are entirely unrelated. Fundamentally, you have to win over
the consumers with taste and quality…if you only look at profits, it’s actually a losing
game…in fact, the ramen business is particularly hard, given the low profit margin…that
is how I came to devise BaroCook, the world’s first flameless cooking system that cooks
without fire. I was planning on integrating the ramen with the flameless cooking system.
Right now, I’m mainly focused on exporting to relatively high-end markets…actually,
Japan has quite an expansive and developed market for cooking systems, so BaroCook
does relatively well there….although I’m not completely denying ‘Dokdo marketing,’ it
actually works against you to appropriate the Dokdo title. If you’re interested in making
money, you’re better off doing something else.
309
The message is quite powerful. Commodification efforts do not readily translate into profits,
which makes it more likely that these activities lead to greater domestic consumption of
nationalism that then sustain tensions, rather than the reverse of tensions creating incentives for
greater commodification.
Potential Extensions
There are roughly two directions that this dissertation could take in future iterations:
demonstrate generalizability of the argument in its entirety, and illustrate the portability of
certain elements and approaches utilized in the dissertation. The first mainly entails expanding
the number of cases for hypothesis testing. The most immediate candidate may be the waters
adjacent to and sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands, of which China is heavily
involved in. China offers some intriguing observations for theory, as it is far from what we would
normally call a capitalist market economy; yet, a quick glance reveals quite an active market for
309
The interview was conducted on June 26, 2015, at the headquarters of BaroCook/Dokdo Ltd., in Yongin City,
Gyeonggi Province. The entire interview was conducted in Korean, and translated in English for the purposes of the
dissertation. More information can be find about the product at the official website: http://www.barocook.net/eng/.
169
nationalism that implicates large actors like Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc.
310
Moreover,
South/Southeast Asia offers various examples of commodification of nationalism concerning
territorial disputes, i.e.) The Filipino government has not only targeted the Kalayaan island
group/Spratly Islands for tourism, but we also see familiar efforts at commodifying nationalism
through non-consumables such as essay competitions aimed at reinforcing one’s territorial
sovereignty (first prize in the college category came with a monetary award of 50,000 pesos or
USD1,250).
311
Since the Paracel and Spratly Islands have yet to be center of any militarized
conflict, the hypothesis regarding politico-diplomatic tensions should be particularly useful.
In that regard, bilateral tensions between Malaysia and Indonesia surrounding competing
sovereign rights in the Celebes (Sulawesi) Sea may be an ideal candidate. There are two sea
blocks near the state of Sabah (the Malaysian side of Borneo) and Kalimantan (the Indonesian
portion of the island of Borneo), referred to as ND6 and ND7 by the Malaysian government that
partially overlap with the sea blocks of Ambalat and East Ambalat as referred to by the Indonesia
side.
312
Despite concerns of escalation, tensions have waxed and waned below that of kinetic
conflict, leaving the impression that tension may be carefully ‘managed’ but not completely
‘resolved.’ There are strong commercial interests involved; in 2005 Malaysia granted oil
exploration contracts to the Dutch Shell Oil Company in the contested area wherein Indonesia
310
See Jason Subler, “Chinese Companies Wave Flag To Profit From Anti-Japan Protests,” Reuters, September 18,
2012, accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/chinese-companies-patriotic-japan-
dispute_n_1892565.html.
311
See “Philippine President Congratulates Essay Writing Contest Winners,” Commission on Filipinos Overseas
(CFO), February 26, 2013, accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.cfo-pso.org.ph/news/39-philippine-president-
congratulates-essay-writing-contest-winners.html.
312
For a good summary, see Stephen C. Druce and Efri Yoni Baikoeni, “Circumventing Conflict: The Indonesian-
Malaysian Ambalat Block Dispute,” in Contemporary Conflicts in Southeast Asia: Towards a New ASEAN Way of
Conflict Management, ed., Mikio Oshi (Singapore: Springer, 2016), 137-56. Also see, Areej Torla, Salma Yusof, and
Mohd Hisham Mohd Kamal, “The Dispute between Malaysia and Indonesia over the ND6 and ND7 Sea Blocks: A
Malaysian Perspective,” Journal of East Asia and International Law 8, no. 1 (2015): 171-93; Ida B. R. Supancana,
“Maritime Boundary Disputes between Indonesia and Malaysia in the Area of Ambalat Block: Some Optional
Scenarios for Peaceful Settlement,” Journal of East Asia and International Law 8, no. 1 (2015): 195-211.
170
had previously granted rights to Italian ENI in 1999 and to Union Oil Company of California
(UNOCAL) Corporation in 2004.
313
The discontent from Indonesia has been particularly
palpable, as there were spill-over effects from another feud involving the same pair of countries
over the territorial integrity of two small islands (Pulau Sipidan and Pulau Ligitan) and its related
maritime boundaries in the Celebes (Sulawesi) Sea. The two had managed to take the dispute to
the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which rendered a decision in 2002 in favor of Malaysia,
but made no decision as to the maritime zones and boundaries; this encouraged Malaysia to
make further claims to the territorial seas, EEZ, and the continental shelf.
314
The existence of nationalist sentiments in the Indonesia-Malaysia dyad also makes it a
prime candidate for the hypothesis regarding the business of nationalism. In contextualizing the
relationship, it is hard not to mention the period of Confrontation or Konfrontasi during the mid-
‘60s when Indonesia initiated an overtly anti-Malaysian policy that involved slogans such as
“ganyang Malaysia” (“Crush Malaysia”).
315
In the more contemporary scene, the two have also
fought over recognition of cultural heritage, like when the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced in September 2009 that it would add batik (a
technique of hand-dyeing fabrics, or the cloth itself) to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, which
was viewed as a win for Indonesia “after a run of what Indonesian nationalists view as
Malaysia’s poaching of its culture.”
316
Some have predicted greater nationalism and
313
See “East Ambalat Row Started as ‘Corporate Dispute,’” Jakarta Post, March 10, 2005, accessed November 20,
2015, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2005/03/10/east-ambalat-row-started-039corporate-dispute039.html.
314
John G. Butcher, “The International Court of Justice and the Territorial Dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia
in the Sulawesi Sea,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 35, no. 2 (2013): 235-57.
315
In part, the confrontation was founded on an anti-colonial ideology (viewing Malaysia as a representation of the
neo-imperialist plot by the British), but it also magnified by an ongoing territorial dispute over parts of Borneo. For
an extensive review of the historical roots and the various elements involved in the Konfrontasi, see John O. Sutter,
“Two Faces of Konfrontasi: “Crush Malaysia” and the Gestapu,” Asian Survey 6, no. 10 (1966): 523-46.
316
See Peter Gelling, “Score One for Indonesia in the War Over Batik,” New York Times, September 14, 2009,
accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/world/asia/15iht-batik.html?_r=0.
171
perpetuation of bilateral tensions under the relatively new President of Indonesia, Joko “Jokowi”
Widodo DK, who assumed office in 2014,
317
which gives the added incentive to study the pair
involving Indonesia.
The extensions need not replicate the hypothesis in its entirety. One potentially
interesting extension of this dissertation would be to expand the tensions database so as to
include dyads from different regions and of varying sizes. The aforementioned examples in
Southeast Asia represent a fertile ground for collecting data on diplomatic summonses.
318
A
quick online search actually produces a wide sample, which may lead to other theoretical
questions that get to patterns in relations (that may not necessarily be limited to territorial
sovereignty), and insights into foreign policy priorities. Since summonses are collected over a set
period, the database would be able to also capture change and produce a longitudinal narrative of
within-dyad variation over time. A larger sample would facilitate analysis beyond that of the pair,
so that we could examine clusters and any regional configurations that make sense. As such, the
database could be multi-functional for various sub-disciplines outside of simply conflict
studies—the most immediate area that comes to mind is Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) given its
dual interest in both individual actors and the bureaucracy of foreign policy.
Speaking of bureaucracy, there is an additional theoretical extension that this dissertation
317
Connelly has given the following assessment: “Though Jokowi’s key advisers are pragmatic about working with
the country’s neighbours and great powers, the Indonesian political context will reinforce the trend towards greater
nationalism. Jokowi faces a hostile opposition coalition and rebellious members of his own party in the legislature,
with both sides ready to criticize the new President if he is seen as insufficiently nationalist. This nationalism will in
turn make it more difficult for Indonesia to play a leadership role in ASEAN or on South China Sea issues - a role
that Jokowi’s senior advisers seem uncertain they still want. Under Jokowi, then, we are likely to see a less clear,
less conciliatory and less cooperative foreign policy, offering less leadership in Southeast Asia and the world.” See
Aaron L. Connelly, “Sovereignty and the Sea: President Joko Widodo’s Foreign Policy Challenges” Contemporary
Southeast Asia 37, no. 1 (2015): 21.
318
For instance, the Philippines was quite active in lodging diplomatic protests with China over its actions in the
South China Sea particularly after a stand-off near Scarborough Shoal in early April 2012. It was reported that there
were 12 protest made against China by July. See Simone Orendain, “Philippines Summons Chinese Ambassador,”
Voice of America, July 24, 2012, accessed November 25, 2015, http://www.voanews.com/content/philippines-
summons-chinese-ambassador-about-planned-military-outpost/1444154.html.
172
sees as warranting further investigation, if even as a separate study: bureaucratic structure and its
effects on foreign policy. From the findings, it is clear that sub-national governments are
important actors. In Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TGM) played a pivotal role in
raising donations to potentially purchase three of the five islets referred to as the Senkakus,
which incidentally, is still in the TGM’s coffers—as of January 2015, the fund reserve is at
1,410,395,943 yen (a little over USD1.5 million).
319
The Tokyo government has acknowledged
that they have received several inquiries from donors about a refund (since the islands were
nationalized), but the ordinance stipulates that the funds cannot be diverted from their initial
purposes of reinforcing effective control over the Senkakus and that the reserve can only be spent
after resolution in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly.
320
This suggests a continued role for the
TGM in the central government’s policy toward Senkaku Islands. In the Korean case, there were
hints of sub-national regionalism at work in the commodification of nationalism surrounding
Dokdo. When asked about assistance from the local government for his efforts in producing
Dokdo Bread, its representative, Kim Ki-sun claimed that he had requested for help in obtaining
machinery for baking from a lawmaker in the Pohang City Government, but that he could not
look to Ulleung-do for help since he was not a citizen of Ulleung-do.
321
(Dokdo is under
Ulleung-do’s administrative district.) So it is ironic that even though nationalism is seen to be a
matter of the entire state, in practice, there are clear sub-national (and bureaucratic) boundaries at
work.
319
See “The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Website of the Senkaku Islands,” Bureau of General Affairs, Tokyo
Metropolitan Government, accessed November 25, 2015,
http://www.soumu.metro.tokyo.jp/senkaku/lang/en/kikin.html.
320
Personal e-mail correspondence on July 9, 2015, with Toshio Amatsu, Director, Planning Section, International
Affairs Division, Office of the Governor for Policy Planning, Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
321
In-person interview with the CEO of Dokdo Bread, Kim Ki-sun, on July 14, 2015 (Pohang, South Korea).
173
Policy Recommendations
An implication of the research here is that there is actually quite a bit of agency behind
bilateral tensions. If commodification is what is sustaining tensions, and there are people behind
that commodification, it would be remiss for this dissertation to not make any efforts at policy
suggestions for something that is purportedly under our control. Could the business of
nationalism be resolved through business? That is actually a proposition that was raised by Walt
back in 2012 at the height of the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku
Islands:
…If the Japanese government can pay roughly $2 billion to buy the islands from a private
family, why can’t China pay the same amount (or whatever the market will bear) to obtain
them from Japan? …why not just view this as a simple matter of business? The main
obstacle to this obvious solution is nationalism. China regards the islands as Chinese
territory, so why should they pay Japan in order to get something they think is rightfully
theirs? Similarly, some Japanese might regard selling the islands as an affront to their own
national pride, or something like that, even though nobody in Japan is likely to live there
or even get anywhere near the remote little rocks. Nonetheless, it would be smart move for
Tokyo to offer to sell the islands at roughly the same price they just paid.
322
Walt was essentially arguing that in principle, there was no reason for the two states to be stuck
given the option of bargaining and side-payments, but he himself had acknowledged that none of
this would likely transpire, and that security competition will continue to increase in the region.
The proposal here is for a different kind of business, making the government
accountable to its own citizens rather than to another country, with greater payoffs but perhaps
just as challenging to implement as that of Walt’s ‘grand bargain.’ The latest news from the
South Korean media was that the 2016 budget allotted for territorial sovereignty protection had
322
Stephen M. Walt, “Why Doesn’t China Just Buy the Senkaku Islands? (Updated)” Foreign Policy, September 21,
2012, accessed November 25, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/21/why-doesnt-china-just-buy-the-senkaku-
islands-updated/.
174
increased by 9.4%.
323
There were also reports in December 2015 of a ‘Dokdo school’ opening in
Shanghai.
324
Someday, the country is going to have to answer the question of what happens
when the issue of Dokdo gets resolved. What happens when South Korea reaches an accord with
Japan and the existing NIC becomes superfluous? For a NIC that is as narrowly focused on one
thematic issue as that of South Korea’s on Dokdo, dealing with the disappearance of a sense of
purpose will be a vexing task. That is why at least the government-level efforts at
commodification of nationalism surrounding territorial disputes need to be re-oriented towards
its own citizens that are currently looking elsewhere for compensation and assistance: this means
taking care of war veterans, the surviving victims of sexual enslavement during Japanese
colonialism, the former forced laborers that worked for Japanese companies during World War II,
and the soldiers (and their families) that are wounded in sporadic military provocations involving
North Korea. This is not an exhaustive list, but at least these all resonate in society and currently
involve a disputant state that serves as the outlet for public discontent and anger.
The same could be said about Japan. Theoretically, there is more fungibility within
Japan’s NIC since it is much more multi-dimensional, which means that a potential resolution of
one issue may simply prompt a doubling-down of resources into an existing dispute. With that
said, Japan also faces foreign policy issues that could use the resources; the resettlement of
former Japanese abductees (and their families) of the North Korean government, assistance for
Japanese victims of crimes allegedly committed by U.S. forces stationed in Japan, and subsidies
323
“Next Year’s Budget for Protecting Territorial Sovereignty (Dokdo & East Sea) Set to Increase by 9.4%,”
[Korean] Yonhaps News, December 3, 2015, accessed November 25, 2015,
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2015/12/03/0200000000AKR20151203109700014.HTML?input=1195m.
324
The effort is driven by a prominent Dokdo activist, Seo Kyoung-duk, a professor at Seoul’s Sungshin Women’s
University. The Shanghai unit is the second such foreign branch after a similar set-up in New York in 2014. The
main aim behind such units is to increase overall awareness by foreigners of the Dokdo issue. See, “Dokdo School
Opens in Shanghai,” Yonhap News, December 22, 2015, accessed December 24, 2015,
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2015/12/22/0301000000AEN20151222001900315.html.
175
to those that rely on fishing for their livelihood but are hurt by Chinese poaching vessels
operating in Japan’s EEZ. The donations that were raised by the TMG may be legally bound to
the sole cause of territorial sovereignty protection, but if the public had a choice in having the
funds be re-routed domestically and be spent on the welfare of its own people, the domestic
option may give the initial cause a good run for its money.
Public diplomacy, or the communication with foreign publics with the intent to persuade
and influence, has become an important activity for most states in the contemporary conduct of
international relations. Territorial disputes are no exceptions. The bottom line though, is that the
best PR for any country starts from home. It is when the public has faith and confidence in the
ability of its own government that the state effectively has power to be successful at the inter-
state level. The benefit of re-directing at least the government resources in the NIC towards
causes that also contentious foreign policy issues, is that directly addressing the needs of those
individuals that have been harmed, hurt, or disenfranchised may eventually lead to a change in
perceptions in those very individuals. Once those perceptions reach a critical mass, they may
influence the overall mood within the state, thereby facilitating a reduction in bilateral tensions
by giving the government (now less encumbered by audience costs) more leeway in negotiations.
First healing from within may induce a different mindset about the ways to deal with the other.
To be clear, this dissertation is not suggesting that the states suddenly give up their
claims to disputed territory—it simply views the continued investment and resources into
territorial sovereignty protection by the state as most likely following the law of diminishing
returns. To speak of the present rather than project too much into the future or reflect about the
past, the least that the respective governments may do is to take care of its citizens that are
suffering now. Although the objective of this dissertation was not a normative one, it does view
176
reduction in tensions as a good, and one that may salvage us from the irony of having to face the
condition where we are advancing individually as states, but going backwards in our interactions
with others.
177
Appendix
Map of Territorial Disputes in Question
1. Dokdo/Takeshima
2. Daemado/Tsushima Island
3. Ieodo/Suyan Jiao
4. Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands
178
Examples of Commodification of Nationalism (Consumables)
Dokdo Ramen & Dokdo Bread
179
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This doctoral project puts forth an argument concerning the business of nationalism: how nationalism can be consumed and (re-)produced like a commodity by various actors within the nation-state that engage in the selling and packaging of nationalism through goods, services, and infrastructure. The central logic is that the more we see such activities of commodification of nationalism, the greater the overall bilateral tension volume/frequency between state disputants. To capture the importance of sub-war level politico-diplomatic disputes, I constructed a ‘tensions’ database using instances of diplomatic summonses. Moreover, I was able to conduct fieldwork and utilize the method of interviews in Japan and South Korea to examine the businesses that were involved in commodifying the litigious territory of Dokdo/Takeshima, and embed these in the overall domestic industry of what I call the ‘Nationalist Industrial Complex’ (NIC). In the end, commodification sustains bilateral tensions as it encourages consumption and reproduction of nationalism and raises the resonance of the dispute on the public, thereby making a deal at the inter-governmental level difficult.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Bang, Jiun
(author)
Core Title
The business of nationalism: how commodification sustains bilateral tensions
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Political Science and International Relations
Publication Date
06/30/2018
Defense Date
03/09/2016
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
commodification,nationalism,Northeast Asia,OAI-PMH Harvest,tensions,territorial disputes
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English
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Kang, David C. (
committee chair
), James, Patrick (
committee member
), Katada, Saori N. (
committee member
), Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar (
committee member
)
Creator Email
jiunbang@usc.edu,ricebubble@gmail.com
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-258953
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Bang, Jiun
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Tags
commodification
nationalism
Northeast Asia
tensions
territorial disputes