Abstract
The twenty-first century has witnessed the unprecedented endurance of international alliances. Not only have many of the present-day military alliances—such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Korea, and U.S.-Australia alliances—existed for over half a century, but they are also redefining their purposes and missions. The phenomenon of alliance persistence, defined as the maintenance of the alliance past the point of its original purpose, necessarily threatens academic and political explanations of alliance formation, maintenance, and dissolution: despite changes in the circumstances that gave rise to them, these alliances persist, thus calling into question both the internal consistency of the alliance’s conceptual structure and the historical consistency of that structure over the alliance’s lifespan. The seemingly contradictory behavior of alliance persistence exhausts the explanatory resources of current academic paradigms in American international relations (IR). As such, it also suggests that the phenomenon is a particularly compelling unit of analysis for the conceptual structure of institutions in general, which has of late received much scholarly attention.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Samuel S. Kim, ed., North Korean Foreign Relations in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Chung-In Moon, ed., Understanding Regime Dynamics in North Korea: Contending Perspectives and Comparative Implications (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1998);
S. S. Kim and T. H. Lee, North Korea and Northeast Asia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
P. H. Park, Self-Reliance or Self-Destruction? Success and Failure of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Development Strategy of Self-Reliance “Juche” (New York: Routledge, 2002);
Meredith Woo-Cumings, Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons (Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute, 2002).
According to a report, even in the 1980s, soldiers spent one-third to half of their time on such nonmilitary activities as farming and construction. Asia Watch and Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee, Human Rights in the DPRK (Washington, DC: Asia Watch, 1988). Hamm argues that such a practice became more widespread in the 1990s to the point where the North’s soldiers functioned more as an organized labor force.
T.-Y. Hamm, Arming the Two Koreas: State, Capital, and Military Power (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Chang-Ho Yoon and Lawrence J. Lau, eds., North Korea in Transition: Prospects for Economic and Social Reform (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2001).
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2001: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 280.
Chung-In Moon and D. I. Steinberg, eds., Kim Dae-Jung Government and Sunshine Policy: Promises and Challenges (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1999);
Chung-In Moon et al., eds., Ending the Cold War in Korea: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2001).
Pak Sunsŏng, Pukhan kyŏngjewa hanbando t’ongil (Seoul: P’ulbit, 2003);
KOTRA pukhant’im, 2003nyŏndo pukhanŭi taeoimuyŏktonghyang (Seoul: KOTRA, 2004).
Leon V. Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998);
Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Kim Ilyŏng and Cho Sŏngrŏl, Chuhanmigun: yŏksa, chaengchŏm, chŏnmang [U.S. Forces in Korea: History, Issues, and Prospect] (Seoul: Hanul, 2003).
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979);
Joseph M. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 485–507.
Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Stephen D. Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 235–264.
Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Celeste A. Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO after the Cold War,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 705–735.
Andrew Moravcsik, “Armaments among Allies: European Weapons Collaboration, 1975–1985,” in Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, ed. Peter B. Evans, Harold Karan Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 128–167.
This criticism is more applicable to neoliberal theories than to other variants of liberal theories. Moravcsik, for example, proposes a liberal theory that looks at how societal ideas, interests, and institutions shape state preferences. Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 513–553.
Michael N. Barnett, “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 400–447; Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO,” ibid., pp. 357–399.
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
If earlier studies of the population of international institutions found that their number increased markedly after the world wars, more recent studies report that international institutions are durable. Michael Wallace and J. David Singer, “Intergovernmental Organization and the Preservation of Peace, 1816–1964: Some Bivariate Relationships,” International Organization 24, no. 3 (1970): 520–547;
Harold K. Jacobson, William M. Reisinger, and Todd Mathers, “National Entanglements in International Governmental Organizations,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 1 (1986): 141–159;
Richard Cupitt, Rodney Whitlock, and Lynn Williams Whitlock, “The (Im)mortality of International Governmental Organizations,” International Interactions 21, no. 4 (1996): 389–404;
John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, “The Politics, Power and Pathologies of International Organizations,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 699–732;
Giulio Gallarotti, “The Limits of International Organization: Systematic Failure in the Management of International Relations,” International Organization 45, no. 2 (1991): 183–220.
For an excellent analysis, see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organization in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Strategies of Inquiry, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), pp. 79–135.
J. J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds., Rethinking Security in Past Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004);
Rudra Sil and Eileen M. Doherty, eds., Beyond Boundaries? Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000);
Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
Alexandra I. Gheciu, NATO in the “New Europe”: The Politics of International Socialization after the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Robert Sugden, “Spontaneous Order,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3, no. 4 (1989): 85–97;
David M. Kreps, “Corporate Culture and Economic Theory,” in Perspectives on Positive Political Economy, ed. James E. Alt and Kenneth A. Shepsle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 90–143.
Paul Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45, no. 4 (1993): 595–628.
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340–363.
The logic of consequences sees actions and outcomes as the product of rational calculating behavior that is designed to maximize a given set of preferences. The logic of appropriateness understands actions and outcomes as a product of rules, norms, and identities that constitute appropriate behavior in a given situation. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 943–969;
March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989).
Judith Kelley, “International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions,” International Organization 58, no. 3 (2004): 425–457;
Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
James Fearon and Alexander Wendt, “Rationalism versus Constructivism: A Skeptical View,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Beth A. Simmons, and Thomas Risse-Kappen (London: SAGE, 2002), pp. 52–72;
Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001): 553–588;
Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 33–75.
For the former, see R. Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). For the latter, see
Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting (New York: Free Press, 1985).
Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994): 384–396;
Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Terry M. Moe, “Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 6 (1990): 213–253.
Ronald D. Asmus, Richard L. Kugler, and F. Stephen Larrabee, “What Will NATO Enlargement Cost?” Survival 38, no. 3 (1996): 11.
James D. Morrow, “Arms versus Allies: Tradeoffs in the Search for Security,” International Organization 47, no. 2 (1993): 207–233.
William R. Thompson, Robert D. Duval, and Ahmed Dia, “Wars, Alliances, and Military Expenditures,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 23, no. 4 (1979): 629–654;
John A. C. Conybeare, “Arms versus Alliances: The Capital Structure of Military Enterprise,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no. 2 (1994): 215–235;
Gerald L. Sorokin, “Arms, Alliances, and Security Tradeoffs in Enduring Rivalries,” International Studies Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1994): 421–446.
Mark Granovetter, “The Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510;
Granovetter, “Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis,” Acta Sociologica 35, no. 1 (1992): 3–11;
Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Moe, “Political Institutions”; Lloyd Gruber, Ruling the World: Rower Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 947–952.
Campbell, Writing Security; Jonathan Mercer, “Anarchy and Identity,” International Organization 49, no. 2 (1995): 229–252;
John W. Meyer and Ronald Jepperson, “The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency,” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (2000): 100–120.
Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 77–96. The concept of social identity was limited to the one relevant to the issue area of national security.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1999).
Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
K. M. Fierke, “Dialogues of Manoeuvre and Entanglement: NATO, Russia, and the CEECs,” Millennium 28, no. 1 (1999): 27–52.
Charles L. Glaser, “The Security Dilemma Revisited,” World Politics 50, no. 1 (1997): 171–201.
Lisa L. Martin and Beth A. Simmons, “Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions,” International Organization 52 (1998): 729–757.
Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). For a second-image reversed argument, see
Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 881–912. For interactive approaches, see
Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427–460;
Peter B. Evans et al., eds., Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
H. Müller and T. Risse-Kappen, “From the Outside In and from the Inside Out,” in The Limits of State Autonomy: Societal Groups and Foreign Policy Formulation, ed. D. Skidmore and V. M. Hudson (Boulder: Westview, 1993), pp. 25–48.
Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Introduction,” in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions, ed. T. Risse-Kappen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–33.
Sigal, Disarming Strangers; Ronald Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Eric V. Larson et al., Ambivalent Allies? A Study of South Korean Attitudes toward the U.S. (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2004).
Richard Ned Lebow, “Thucydides the Constructivist,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (2001): pp. 547–560;
Vendulka Kubálková, “The Twenty Years’ Catharsis: E. H. Carr and IR,” in International Relations in a Constructed World, ed. Vendulka Kubálková, Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, and Paul Kowert (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 25–57;
Albert O. Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” Journal of Economic Literature 20, no. 4 (1982), pp. 1463–1483;
E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
Copyright information
© 2007 Jae-Jung Suh
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Suh, JJ. (2007). Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics: The Military Alliance between the United States and Republic of Korea. In: Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605015_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605015_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53818-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60501-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)