A reply to Randy Waterhouse on balancing

Randy Waterhouse graciously addressed some points I raised in response to his discussion of Japanese balancing behavior, and I would like to respond in turn.

Although before I do, I must add that I like the Stephensonian moniker.

1 and 2) I think what we're dealing with here is the difference between balancing as a description of behavior intended to counter or neutralize visible threats to a state's security and balancing as the process by which the structure of international system changes. Japan may be engaged in the former in regard to North Korea and the latter in regard to China. There may be some overlap, but perhaps not as much as meets the eye. (Although any legal or constitutional changes that grow out of the North Korean threat would undoubtedly influence balancing against China.) For example, Japan has little reason to ramp up military spending to neutralize the threat posed by North Korea. The debate is over whether passive or deterrent defense is adequate to meet the threat posed by North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, or whether Japan needs to consider preemptive defense. Arguably meeting the North Korea challenge does not require all-out mobilization, a comprehensive change in how Japan mobilizes national resources in response to external threats. The debate over how to deal with the North Korean threat is obviously connected with the debate over how to deal with a rising China, but the question is how these two debates are connected.

One connection is simply that Japanese hawks are not making clear distinctions between North Korea and China when making their case. I figured that Waterhouse and I agree on the importance of China for Japanese balancing behavior over the long term, but my point was that China may play a more prominent role in Japanese debates about balancing in the near term than I read his post as arguing. After all, Waterhouse wrote of "the lack of bold, provocative military signals from China of late," which may be true in an objective sense, but from the perspective of Japanese elites arguing for balancing behavior of one form or another, China has done plenty to merit more balancing on Japan's part, whether by spending more on its military or by sending the PLA Navy to waters ever further from China (and by acting with greater assertiveness closer to China). Arguments about China may carry less weight than arguments rooted in meeting the North Korean threat, but some elites are making arguments about the China threat. It may not be easy to separate the two: national security hawks are trying to create a climate of uncertainty in order to sell their policies, and they are willing to use any external threat at hand to make their case. North Korea may provide a particular perturbation — but the sensitivity of elites and public to a perturbation may have as much to do with worrying signals from China as with North Korean behavior.

3) Just to build on a point here, there are a number of different ways to think about post-cold war changes to the US-Japan alliance. External balancing against a long-term threat may be the most likely explanation, but there are other plausible explanations, whether domestic politics or a structural explanation rooted less in preparations for a rising China than in the impact of unipolarity of the US alliances that were the legacy of the cold war. It is entirely possible that we may be entering a period in which Japan chafes at a security policy overly centered on the alliance and instead opts for Samuels's "Goldilocks consensus," a grand strategy that features a more even mix of external and internal balancing, maximizing Japan's options in a changing regional security environment. (Of course, if US power declines markedly relative to China's, structural realism would presumably predict greater incentives for external balancing by both the US and Japan and more internal balancing by Japan to compensate for US relative decline.)

Is Japan balancing?

"Randy Waterhouse," the nom de blog of a contributor to the political science group blog Duck of Minerva, looks to Japan in a discussion of when and why states balance against other states.

As I wrote in April, the lack of Japanese balancing behavior is the great puzzle in Japanese security policy since the end of the cold war. Waterhouse considers the possibility that North Korea — as opposed to China — is leading Japan to pursue a balancing strategy. He considers threatening signals from North Korea as a source of "perturbations" (borrowing a concept from Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies) that will trigger Japanese balancing behavior against North Korea.

There are a few problems with this argument. First, while the DPRK is in a sense be "revisionist" in that it wholly rejects the prevailing international order, as a small, impoverished, isolated country dependent on its neighbors to feed its people and having little more than its nuclear weapons, its missiles, and its wits to depend on for survival it hardly constitutes a revisionist power in the sense outlined by Robert Gilpin. North Korea may be revisionist in rhetoric, but do states balance against rhetoric or reach? The idea — implied but not explicitly stated by Waterhouse — is that Japanese conservatives can balance against the state that may one day become a revisionist power if it is not one already (see Alastair Iain Johnston's consideration of this question here) by using the DPRK as a stand-in for China. Policy decisions made to cope with North Korea could serve as a "down payment" on a balancing strategy against China. Or not: as Waterhouse notes, there is a difference between reactionary balancing and long-term balancing. And while Waterhouse argues that elites interested in a more robust security posture are treating North Korea's recent behavior as a catalyst, certain conservatives make no secret of their desire to balance against China. A recent Sankei editorial on the LDP subcommittee's draft NDPG points to China's rise to second place in the SIPRI index of defense spending to make the case for reversing cuts in Japan's defense spending, a call echoed in an op-ed by Sassa Atsuyuki, the first head of the Cabinet's national security office, who calls for an increase in defense spending to 1.5% of GDP (but does not mention China). Japan's desire to purchase the F-22 is explicitly connected to a desire to balance against Chinese airpower. Despite the positive developments in the Sino-Japanese relationship, the China threat thesis is alive and well among the Japanese elites arguing for a more robust security policy. North Korea's actions may help make the case for balancing, but that does not mean that elites using Chinese behavior too.

There is a bigger question in this debate, namely how do we know when a state is balancing? What mix of policies would constitute a Japanese balancing strategy? Waterhouse essentially assumes that any change to the status quo in Japanese security policy would constitute balancing. But there has been plenty of change in Japanese security policy in the past twenty years, but it is debateable whether these changes constitute balancing. Japan may have opted for some balancing: the decision made by Japanese officials in 1994-1995 to keep the US-Japan alliance at the center of Japanese security policy (and to "strengthen" the alliance) was a response to the uncertainty surrounding China's rise, although US and Japanese officials were careful to not mention China when discussing the redefinition of the alliance. In other words, it is possible to argue that Japan has opted for external balancing over internal balancing, which would entail sweeping legal changes and (presumably) an expensive rearmament program that would give Japan greater autonomy from the US to cope with an uncertain regional environment. Nearly a decade of stagnant defense spending in areas aside from missile defense and host nation support — i.e., defense spending directly connected to the alliance — means that autonomy has become increasingly costly for Japan, which may in turn explain why Japanese elites are especially sensitive to recent signals emanating from Washington.

But that being said, there are other explanations for Japan's decision to embrace the alliance that have less to do with balancing and more to do with institutionalist arguments: Japan opted to renew the alliance after the cold war because there was a certain degree of path dependency. While it appeared as if Japan was making a choice between the US-Japan alliance, greater autonomy, and greater independence within the UN and other multilateral organizations, the choice may have been a false one. Japan may have reaffirmed the alliance simply because the balance of power among domestic actors was overwhelmingly in favor of doing so, with little thought to the strategic implications of this choice versus other choices.

Is this about to change? With the defense division of the LDP's Policy Research Council approving its subcommittee's draft NDPG that recommends the acquisition of preemptive strike capabilities — most notably cruise missiles — it is possible that Japan is preparing to shift from external balancing to internal balancing. Prime Minister Aso is favorably disposed to the proposal, although his defense minister, Hamada Yasukazu, is more cautious (triggering two blog posts from Komori Yoshihisa criticizing Hamada for being too soft). But Hamada's caution suggests that there may be skeptics within the LDP who could prevent the government from making a radical break with the status quo. (And there's a strong possibility that the LDP will not be in power long enough to oversee the publication of the new NDPG in December.)

In short, Waterhouse is right to look at domestic politics as a source of Japanese balancing behavior, but he understates the extent to which Japan may have already opted for a particular balancing strategy via the US-Japan alliance, and the extent to which domestic politics constrains political actors who want Japan to embark on a substantial and expensive rearmament program.

Recommended Book: Securing Japan, Richard Samuels

In the aftermath of Japan's first successful test of its ballistic missile defense systems, the "Japan Rising" meme will undoubtedly be on the lips of foreign commentators. Expect more articles like the NYT article by Norimitsu Onishi discussed in this post in July.

Fortunately MIT's Richard Samuels, in his latest book Securing Japan, provides a more balanced look at Japan's changing security posture. Samuels studiously avoids the extremes of the debate, offering instead a level-headed scholarly discussion of the dynamics of Japanese security policy both at present and since the Meiji Restoration. Unlike Kenneth Pyle's Japan Rising, however, which is largely a history of Japanese foreign policy change, Samuels spends at least as much time discussing where Japan is going as where it has been.

His conclusion is that the security policy consensus — the successor of the Yoshida Doctrine — that will emerge from the contemporary debate will not be the result of the revisionists simply imposing their will on the Japanese people. Rather, it will be the result of a compromise (what Samuels calls a "Goldilocks consensus") that strikes a balance between the alliance with the US and economic integration in Asia and a constructive relationship with China, while lifting some of the limits on Japan's armed forces, a process that Samuels shows is well underway.

The new Japan, Samuels argues, will look more like Canada or Germany, a country reluctant to use force aggressively but willing to play an armed role in peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction. As a result of living in a more dangerous neighborhood, the JSDF's mission profile will, of course, differ somewhat from other US allies, in that it will have to monitor activities in the air and seas around Japan and repel intruders when necessary, as Japan's Coast Guard is already doing (documented at length by Samuels). But the end result will be a looser US-Japan alliance — in which Japan might occasionally say no — and a greater focus on Asia by Japan, both as a source of security threats and economic opportunities.

This would be, I think, a positive outcome for Japan (and the US).

I would like to make note of a couple more things about this book. First, as in previous books and articles, Samuels shows his first-class skills as a political "taxonomist." For those confused about the differing schools of thought in the contemporary Japanese debate, Samuels deftly explains the differences and traces their roots back to the late nineteenth century.

Second, for my part I find his theoretical approach appealing. Samuels is a self-described "realist," but he is not a structural realist. As he demonstrated clearly in Machiavelli's Children (discussed in this post), leaders matter — and domestic politics matter. National interests and foreign policies are not simply determined by the international system. They are the result of a complex, messy interaction between the international system and domestic political systems, with politicians and bureaucrats playing a mediating role, trying to advance their personal interests and their visions of the nation's interests simultaneously. The result is that policy changes do not always have obvious international antecedents. There are often lags, as states struggle to interpret changes in the international environment.

The result is that we now have a comprehensive guide to how Japan has interpreted recent international changes and changed its domestic institutions so to be better able to interpret international signals, a guide that will also be useful in putting events like Japan's BMD test in perspective.

Carl Schmitt on the US-Japan alliance

Well, not exactly, but I found this passage in "The Concept of The Political" interesting in light of Japan's schizophrenic relationship with the US.

...It would be a mistake to believe that a nation could eliminate the distinction of friend and enemy by declaring its friendship for the entire world or by voluntarily disarming itself. The world will not thereby become depoliticalized, and it will not be transplanted into a condition of pure morality, pure justice, or pure economics. If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule. The protector then decides who the enemy is by virtue of the eternal relation of protection and obedience.

Discuss.

Constitutions east and west

In his Sunday interview on NHK, Prime Minister Abe reiterated the importance of constitution revision as a point of contention in next month's Upper House election.

Meanwhile, in Brussels this past weekend the European Union's member states concluded a treaty that wraps up the questions that were intended to be addressed by the nixed constitution. The treaty, however, arguably retains a number of the constitution's substantive changes while jettisoning troublesome symbolic changes.

What do Japan's and the EU's constitutional debates share in common?

Without even considering the content of the documents, both drafting processes are wrapped up for the democratic development of both polities. For Japan, the process by which constitutional amendments are debated and presented to the public for approval will be an important test of the strength of Japanese democracy. Will the process be elite-driven, as every other epochal change in the Japanese political system, or will the Japanese citizenry stake a claim in the process and demand that elites respect their wishes and introduce amendments that reflect public desires? In the EU, which is struggling to craft a democratic polity out of more than two dozen democratic polities (i.e., the democratic deficit), the changes envisioned by the constitution — and now the reform treaty — constitute a substantial change in how the member states, their peoples, and the EU interact, but it is unclear the extent to which the new EU will reflect the wishes of the governed. As George Washington University's Henry Farrell wrote at Crooked Timber in a post reviewing the treaty: "It's a shame and a disgrace that the EU member states have responded to the 2005 defeat by going back to their old practice of seeking to achieve integration by boring the general public into submission, and a very substantial backward step. If people aren’t willing to sign up to major changes in the EU system of governance, then too bad for the EU system of governance."

This comparison only goes so far, of course, given that the Japanese people recognize themselves as a polity — whereas it is as of yet unclear if Europeans really think of themselves as European citizens, as far as governance is concerned.

But what both share is a concern about the role of their state/supranational-confederal organization of states in a world of new rising powers (read China and India) that already dwarf both demographically and are prepared to surpass both in economic performance. Hence the debate about article nine, which is not simply about one-country pacifism but signifies a range of questions about how Japan will relate to the US and other powers in the region. And in Europe, the provisions in the treaty about a European president, a de facto foreign minister and foreign service, and mutual defense clause hint at an EU desirous of a proper place at the table alongside the great powers. Niall Ferguson makes this argument in the Daily Telegraph:

The world is a big, bad place and the relative importance of Europe's individual states is declining economically and demographically with every passing year. As Mr Mandelson has found, it is hard enough to sustain the momentum of trade liberalisation even when Europe speaks with one voice. In other spheres, the EU is simply a negligible quantity. What would have been more absurd than to leave foreign policy divided between yet another set of twins, the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (Javier Solana) and the Commissioner for External Relations (Benita Ferrero-Waldner)? The choice is no longer between national foreign policies and a European foreign policy, but between national irrelevance and collective influence.

(Interesting that Henry Kissinger disparaged both Japan ["little Sony salesmen"] and the EU ["who do you call when you want to talk to Europe"] for their inadequacies as great powers; it seems that they have taken his criticism seriously.)

But those in Europe and Japan who would rush to answer fundamental governance questions to enable the pursuit of power internationally must not be allowed to run roughshod over the rights of their citizens. Power must not be an end in itself; it must be grounded in democratic legitimacy. And so the content of constitution revision (or formation) is less important than the process. Will the voices of peoples be heard?

(I suppose this is a good test for the relevance of realism: if responding to changes in the international distribution of power takes the highest priority, then expect both Japan and the EU to run roughshod over popular opposition and implement constitutional settlements that best enable them to cope with changes in the international environment.)

What a time to be alive, for political scientists anyway.

Constructing modern Japan

Every social scientist must struggle with the question of human agency. Are human societies the product of grand social forces or are they the product of the decisions of individuals — Carlyle's heroes?

The question is particularly important for Japan, which was pushed on to a drastically different path in the late nineteenth century when confronted with the encroachment of imperial powers into Asia. But was Japan's modernization the result of powerful impersonal forces — the international system, economics, Japanese culture — or was it driven by the decisions of the elites who forged the new system?

This is the swamp into which MIT's Richard Samuels waded in Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan. Samuels, in essence, "brings the individual back in" to a discussion of the winding roads followed by late-developing Japan and Italy during the 150 years of their existence as modern states. And he succeeds admirably — in the process explaining in rich detail how Prime Ministers Yoshida and Kishi, building upon the prewar past, designed, for better or worse, the Japan we see today (the Japan that their heirs are struggling to bring into the twenty-first century).

As Samuels suggests in his introduction, the comparative analysis of Japan and Italy strikes many as counterintuitive, perhaps because Italy needed Fascists to make the trains run on time. But beyond the superficial dissimilarities — including the widespread stereotype that Italy has dynamic leaders and poor followers, while Japan has faceless leaders and obedient followers — he finds that despite facing similar conditions, constraints, and opportunities as Gerschenkronian late developers, each made drastically different decisions about governance of the economy and society, liberalism, foreign relations, and, in the postwar period, how to rebuild their states and reconstitute their political systems under the American aegis.

There is far too much in Machiavelli's Children to do it justice in this space, and, as such, this is my latest book recommendation. (NB: I will henceforth give book recommendations on a monthly basis, or else whenever I feel like it; recommending one every week was too grueling.)

Book of the week

Apologies for not posting a recommended book last week, due to my travels in China.

This week's selection is Fareed Zakaria's From Wealth to Power (Amazon link at right).

Zakaria's book, while in part a theory-laden discussion of the rise of great powers, focuses on how the US went from being an economic giant but a political and military midget in the late nineteenth century. Zakaria takes issue with the standard realist account of the balance of power, suggesting that in the case of the US what mattered in the emergence of the US were decisions taken in Washington in the decades following the civil war that enabled the federal government to exercise the latent power of the continental nation. The state's ability to draw upon the power of the nation forms the basis for what Zakaria calls "state-centered realism."

The implications of this theory for contemporary Japan are obvious. Twenty-first century Japan, in a manner not unlike late nineteenth America, is in the process of making the political decisions that will enable its government to wield national power that it has heretofore been denied.

One significant difference, however, is that Japan is trying to normalize its security policy in a regional environment more akin to Europe in the late nineteenth century, which means that whatever decisions that Abe Cabinet makes regarding Japan's security policy will undoubtedly raise alarms in neighboring capitals. Hence the absurdity of Abe's remarks last week about Japan's needing to keep its neighbors informed about constitution revision. The problem is not a matter of the fairness of Japan's having to genuflect to its neighbors regarding every mooted change to the postwar regime. No, Abe's pronouncement that Japan will explain changes to its neighbors is absurd because changing the constitution will send a clear signal to Japan's neighbors that it will play a more significant, independent role in the regional balance of power, a reality that no amount of "explanation" will be able to obscure.

In any case, Zakaria's book is an excellent corrective to systemic realism and a reminder that in international politics what happens within states is incredibly important (a point that seems obvious to most people but with which some — though, of late, fewer — IR scholars struggle).