Northeast Asia in the Coming Decade

While the world's attention in 2002 has been largely concentrated on Iraq, an even more crucial arena of the world-system, Northeast Asia, has seen extremely important developments in the past year. China has witnessed a passing of the guard to a somewhat younger generation. Japan has seen a slow and quiet pulling away from the U.S. that parallels that of Germany. And Korea has been the site of two events that promise to transform the situation in the region and the world.

North Korea has reacted to President Bush's tough line - ceasing negotiations and listing North Korea as part of the "axis of evil" - with a demonstration that two can play at that game. The North Korean government announced successively that it has weapons of mass destruction, that it is putting its nuclear reactor back on line, and that it has disabled the nuclear detection devices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And at the very same time, South Korea has elected Roh Moo Hyun, the candidate of the Millennium party dedicated to maintaining the "sunshine policy" of President Kim Dae Jung. True the election was close, but until recently, Roh Moo Hyun was expected to lose the election to a more conservative candidate, one hostile to the "sunshine policy." The tide of anti-Bush feeling no doubt helped Roh to win, as it had helped Gerhard Schroeder in Germany earlier this year.

In the short run, both forms of defiance of U.S. policy mark a setback for President Bush. He may be thinking that he will get to the Korean issues, once he has solved the Iraqi situation and ousted Saddam Hussein. But the reality is that he can do little. His choice in the case of North Korea is negotiate or fight. And much as he doesn't want to negotiate, fighting is not a strong option. For one thing, the last war ended in a draw. And even if the world situation, politically and militarily, has changed from fifty years ago, it is by no means sure that the U.S. could do better this time. What is sure is that a war would find both South Korean populations and the U.S. troops stationed there highly vulnerable to sudden death. But if North Korea can force the U.S. to the negotiating table, it will be seen as a humiliation to President Bush.

What President Bush is counting on, apparently, is that the neighbors of North Korea - South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia - will join the U.S. in getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program prior to any negotiations. It is however unlikely that the neighbors will invest too much effort in getting behind the Bush plan, even if they too would like to see North Korea's program dismantled. And in any case it is most unlikely that North Korea will cede to such pressures. What is more likely is that U.S. pressure will lead to strong internal divisions in South Korea, Japan, and even China.

It would be a mistake to discuss this situation only in terms of the immediate issues. It would be more useful to consider what are the longer-term concerns of the three historic zones of Northeast Asia - China, Korea, and Japan - and how the three sets of zonal concerns interact with each other. China's priorities seem quite clear: hold the country together, strengthen its military, strengthen its share in world production, and reincorporate Taiwan. Furthermore, I would argue that I have listed them in order of importance for the Chinese government. In all four spheres, the Chinese government has made important progress in the last decade, and is likely to continue to make progress in the decade to come. Nonetheless, should it falter in the first objective - holding the country together - the other three would become virtually impossible. And while the Chinese government has been doing well in this regard, it knows that it faces continuing dangerous situations internally.

For Korea - North and South - the primary issue is and will remain reunification. But reunification on whose terms and at what price? Both governments are determined not to make basic political concessions, and without some change reunification is impossible. Economically, North Korea seems to be in desperate disrepair, while South Korea is worried about maintaining its relatively good position in the world-economy, which is threatened both by world economic downturn and the enormous costs of any approach to reunification. The German experience is very much to the fore of South Korean collective consciousness. I suppose South Koreans devoted to a sunshine policy could hope for a North Korean Gorbachev, but what would happen if one appeared on the scene is very uncertain.

As for Japan, the main political mood of the present is absolute uncertainty about what to do and the sense that, if one is unsure where to head, the best thing to do is nothing, or very little. There are two main doubts: how to recuperate the sense of world-economic dynamism Japan displayed in the 1970s and 1980s; and whether or not to become a normal military power, and with that, to become a semi-independent political actor on the world scene.

The reality is that the dilemmas facing the three zones of Northeast Asia are not soluble separately. They are intertwined because the lasting influence of Northeast Asia on the world scene is dependent on their ability to come together as a region economically, and thereby to form a cooperative triangle in the political and military arenas. This means not only solving the internal dilemmas of each but resolving very acute historic quarrels. Neither Korea nor China have forgiven Japan its aggressive policies in the first half of the twentieth century. Japan still suffers from a lingering sense of cultural debt to China and even to Korea, and all its recent achievements have not totally overcome the sense of unspoken inferiority. And China and Korea remain quite wary of each other.

Nonetheless, the three zones have a great deal to offer each other, and do share not merely geographic contiguity but a common cultural heritage not very different from the kind of common cultural heritage that west European countries use as a mode of bonding. But it is the geopolitics of the situation that is in the forefront. In an era of U.S. hegemonic decline, northeast Asia is in competition less with the U.S. than with western Europe as the major locus of capital accumulation in the half-century to come. And in an era of world-systemic transition, northeast Asia will not be able to hold its own unless it can grapple with the problem of global inequality and the demands of the South for a qualitatively different kind of world-system. Facing either issue, that of the loci of capital accumulation and that of overcoming the polarization of the existing world-system, northeast Asia will not be able to play the kind of role it manifestly wishes to play without coming together in some form. And its coming together is dependent on the ability of the three zones to resolve their current dilemmas and to help each other resolve them.