Abstract
Collective identity provides policy elites with a shared worldview through which the international environment is collectively interpreted; and this, in turn, presents them with a set of images that define viable actions. Japanese government’s reproduction of Korean otherness is no exception. The tenor of bilateral relations is partly a product of Japanese policy establishment sharing a particular, reified, image of Korea nurtured throughout the decades. In this chapter, I examine the various discourses of identity in international relations (IR) theories, ranging from traditional, rational choice, approaches to the so-called postpositivist approaches, particularly constructivism and poststructuralism. I use the term postpositivism as a convenient signifier of contemporary IR theories. While I appreciate that constructivism and poststructuralism are not the only contemporary IR theories with an interest in identities, their common penchant for performance provides us with a platform for further exploration into the possibility of taking reified identity seriously. Nor do I set out distinctions within traditional IR theories. I am not interested in rearticulating the neo-neo debate, for this fails to address the issue of how identities are treated therein. Instead, I place traditional IR under the larger rubric of rational choice theories. Problematic, though this might be, it is justified since their assumptions about state actors are very similar.
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Notes
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
See Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chap. 1;
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See Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), chap. 5.
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There are issues with this view, of course. For debates concerning the potentials for anthropomorphization, see Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See Wendt, “Anarchy,” 404–5; Wendt, “Collective Identity,” 390; Wendt, Social Theory, 330–31; 335; and G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
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See, for example, Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 101; and Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 454.
See, for example, Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);
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AA Fearon and AA Laitin, “Violence and Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 845–77.
See AA Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, no. 3 (1994–1995): 1–49.
AA Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27.
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© 2010 Taku Tamaki
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Tamaki, T. (2010). Identity Theorizing in International Relations Theories. In: Deconstructing Japan’s Image of South Korea. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106123_2
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