Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using a comparative approach to South Korea’s engagement policy toward North Korea (the so-called Sunshine policy) in relation to changes in South Korea’s international environments focusing on U.S. security policies and practices toward the Korean peninsula, this paper aims to examine the ways in which international environments shaped South Korea’s state identity, national interests, and the implementation of the Sunshine policy during the Kim Dae-jung administration from 1998 to 2003. In particular, concentrating on the effects that external environments and state identity had on South Korea’s national security, the paper will address the question of how the ideas held by South Korea related to the ideas that made up the regional security culture. In doing so, it also illustrates conventional constructivist arguments on state identity and national interests in the context of South Korea, what Rationalism ignores in International Relations (IR).
Here, this paper mainly presents four sets of arguments: two analytical and two theoretical. The first analytical argument is that although the South Korean-U.S. collective actions that have addressed the North Korean problem have begun to erode their alliance identity against North Korea and have encouraged latent Korean nationalism embracing North Korea, in South Korea there was a delicate and stable balance between those two seemingly conflicting identities during the Clinton administration. The second analytical argument is that, due largely to a change in international environments that began with the Bush administration in 2001, South Korea’s state identity became deeply contested between 1) the alliance security bond with the U.S. and 2) the nationalist bond with North Korea, and this tension with changed external environments made South Korea difficult to neatly define national interests and also made the Sunshine policy seem to be untenable during the Bush administration’s first term.
The first theoretical argument is that, in conducting substantive empirical research based on constructivism, it needs to focus on not what exactly states’ environments (or norms) might regulate and constitute interests and identities of states but how we might explain the political phenomena or events widely identified as evidence of cultural or institutional environments’ (or norms’) effects. In fact, differentiating constitutive effects from regulative effects of environments (norms) is a vexing (if not, unnecessary) task, because they often generate both effects at the same time. The second theoretical argument is that conventional constructivism can only capture half of state’s identity formation, owing to its strong structuralist tilt to focusing solely on ‘collective identity’ among states in a given social system. It is thus required that, as Alexander Wendt calls, ‘corporate identity’ black box should be opened to make better sense of the formation and diffusion of South Korea’s state identity relating to national security, interests, and the Sunshine policy.