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For forty years, the East Asian regional order has delivered widespread peace and prosperity. That order faces possible upending by an economically and militarily more powerful China and a decreasingly robust and engaged United States. While accepting the possibility that such structural shifts could upend the regional order, this paper contends that three powerful counterweights are working to counter disruptive conflicts and to foster peaceful change, namely strong and rising economic interdependence, expanding institutionalization, and active preservation efforts by number of other Asian states, particularly the region's middle powers. This article analyzes the contribution of these three forces to creating the existing order and to their roles in its continuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite claims that regional institutions and economic interdependence are playing increasingly important roles in maintaining peace in East Asia, the regional security landscape is still molded to a large extent by balance-of-power thinking and practice, in which relative military power is a central consideration. This paper assesses: (1) the changing distribution of military power in East Asia in terms of the evolving roles of extraregional players (the United States, Russia, and West European states) us well as the ginning military capabilities of the regional stales themselves; and (2) the strategic implications of this changing military balance for the region, the United Slates, and Europe. This paper argues that the key factor preventing the degeneration of rivalry between East Asian states into more naked military competition is and will remain the regional military commitment of the United States, which helps to constrain not only China's presumed hegemonic ambitions but also large-scale Japanese rearmament. Recent U.S. regional security policy has focused on reinforcing the stability of the regional balance, most importantly hi bolstering key alliance relationships in the region (particularly with Japan and Australia). However, the balance envisaged in Washington does not rest solely on calculations of relative power: the United Stales has simultaneously attempted to engage China and has supported regional confidence-building dialogues. The present balance, under-pinned by the U.S. regional security role, serves the interests of European slates well. While responsibility for reinforcing the stability of this balance must rest primarily with the United States, Japan, and other regional states, West European governments can contribute to East Asia's "soft security." Moreover, by becoming more self-reliant in their own defence and perhaps by contributing forces in support of the U.S. regional role, they can also contribute to the region's "hard security" as well. West European governments, though, might find such "out-of-area" commitments hard to justify to domestic political constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates achievements to settle the issues of the past in South Korea and its possible contributions to the East Asian history. Japanese colonial policy was dependent on compelling force, and the imperial policy was justified as the policy to make civilized East Asian nations. As for a look back at the 100 Years of Japanese annexation of Korea, this research is composed widely of two parts: first, the problem of imperialistic consequences such as the relationship between a colonized nation and its colonizer, which still remains today. In the context of the East Asian history, the colonized nation has a right to require compensation and apology for damages received from the colonizer. However, the hegemonic power of the United States over Japan and Korea has made this difficult. Second, the efforts of South Korea to solve the issues of the past created some achievements but have limitations because of the current government-level policy and their attitude for its people. Today, education for history and examination of the true history appear as issues. For peace in East Asia, the role of South Korea in rectifying East Asia's history has a great significance. At the end, this paper describes the role of South Korea as recognizing the characteristics of the East Asian Cold War history of the nations such as Taiwan, Okinawa, and Vietnam based on the identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing attention to the geopolitical significance of the Korean Peninsula, many scholars have defined Korean unification as a critical condition for promoting East Asian community-building. During the 1990s, members of the Changbi Group, most notably Paik Nak-chung, Choi Won-shik, and Baik Young-Seo, proposed the idea that Korean unification plays such an important role, following Paik's proposal of the Division System Theory. The East Asia Theory espoused by these scholars provides an opportunity to rethink contemporary Korean reality from the perspectives of both an individual state and the context of East Asia as a region. Despite the significance of these intellectual discussions, academia still awaits a detailed study of the analytic/conceptual strengths and limitations of the East Asia Theory as a whole. Another point of contention that may be raised with previous research on the East Asia Theory is the lack of attention given to the theory's practical implications. To fill this lacuna, this article offers a theoretical examination of the Changbi Group's East Asia Theory, with a focus on its practical implications. Finally, this study looks into the limitations of the East Asia Theory and suggests a possible reformulation of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of its past "Look East" and now "Act East" policies, India seeks to increase the radius of its influence beyond South Asia by broadening relations with East Asian actors, including South Korea. New Delhi and Seoul continue to promote economic cooperation and explore ways to deepen their strategic partnership. However, for relations to grow substantively and enduringly, both will have to show greater concern, creativity, and caution—especially bearing in mind their mutual neighbor, China. This article explores how, through harnessing its unique longstanding relations with both Koreas and investing in non‐realist approaches resonant of people‐centered engagement, India as a middle power with major power aspirations can lay its footprint softly in Northeast Asia by playing a more pro‐active role to bolster and sustain inter‐Korean rapprochement and peacebuilding efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the dominant forces at play in East Asia in an effort to chart regional dynamics within a global non-Eurocentric framework in the course of three epochs.(*) In the first era, spanning the 16th to the early 19th century a China-centered tributary trade order provided a geopolitical framework within which private trade could also flourish. At its height in the 18th century, as East Asia linked to a wider regional and global economy, core areas achieved high levels of peace, prosperity and stability. The second period is notable for dislocation, war and radical transformation spanning the years 1840-1970. In this era profound transformations were the product of system disintegration, colonial rule, world wars, and anti-colonial wars and revolutions. With the collapse of the regional order, bilateral relations, colonial and postcolonial, predominated. Since the 1970s there have been signs of the emergence of a third epoch notable for progress toward the formation of a new East Asian regional order resting on foundations of dynamic economic growth. From the perspective of East Asian integration, the US-China opening of 1970 marked both the end of a century of war and polarization and the emergence of economic complementarity and geopolitical restructuring that have transformed both East Asia and the world economy. In assessing the resurgence of East Asia and the emerging character of East Asian regionalism, emphasis is placed on relations among China, Japan and Korea as ascending regional-global powers and the position of the United States as a powerful but declining superpower. The analysis considers the interplay of geopolitics and political economy in structuring hierarchies of wealth, power and position both within Asia and in the world order or disorder. Is the emergence East Asian regional order a basis for regional independence or a new framework for US penetration? What insights can the past offer toward the emergence of a viable regional order in East Asia, or, at a minimum, pitfalls to skirt? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the recent growth in multilateral security processes, the efforts to forge a ‘security architecture’, and focuses particularly on the role that China's rise has played in this process. It sketches out growth in Asian security cooperation and the efforts to forge a new security architecture. It then considers the question of China as a cause of this increase in security cooperation as well as China's own motives in actively engaging with this process. The final section then reflects on the contribution that security cooperation currently makes to the regional order. The article argues that China's rise has been an important prompt to the efforts to devise new security arrangements, but has not been the only source of this trend. It concludes that while multilateral security cooperation will be important in the emerging regional order, alone it will not provide a robust foundation for regional stability and security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

East Asia has experienced a drastic decline in incidences of warfare and has had exceptionally low levels of battle deaths after 1979. However, East Asian peace had already begun in 1967 inside ASEAN. Is it possible that East Asian peace began in ASEAN and spread to the rest of East Asia? This is the question that this article aims to tackle by showing the association between a reasonable and plausible explanation, the ASEAN Way, and East Asian peace after 1979. The argument about the role of the ASEAN approach in the pacification of East Asia is based on an examination of the patterns of frequency of conflicts, numbers of battle deaths and conflict termination. In this kind of examination, it seems that the recipes for peace in East Asia after 1979 are similar to those of ASEAN after 1967, and that their relationship to conflicts was also very similar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been a staggering decline in battle deaths in East Asia. Several recent studies have testified to this trend by referring to it as East Asian Peace. The decline in traditional conflict battle deaths does not, however, constitute peace. It could be possible that battle deaths have merely moved to less traditional types of conflict. The purpose of this article is to see whether the decline in battle deaths has brought about genuine peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan and the Republic of Korea are the United States' two most important allies in East Asia. Although U.S. alliances with those countries have succeeded in maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia, it is not clear how effective they would prove to be should they be tested by a major incident originating, say, in North Korea, because South Korea-Japan relations are troublesome. The issues that divide these two countries, based on strong and long-standing emotional attitudes that are resistant to change, largely revolve around Korean perceptions that the Japanese have not sufficiently recognized and apologized for past aggression against their neighbors during the first half of the twentieth century. For its part, the United States can improve trilateral relations by avoiding foreign policy decisions that make other countries nervous, such as decisions based on the principle of preemptive attack. A resumption of trilateral security dialogue is also needed. The U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea must be preserved to keep the peace in Northeast Asia, and it is important that politicians and government officials in Korea and Japan adopt a strategic view and not let emotional issues stand in the way of pursuing the best interests of their respective governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security studies of East Asia focus on questions of inter-state war and peace, the distribution of power in the region, and the ways regional institutions mitigate the role of relative power balances and alliance structures. Debate on these issues has become increasingly sophisticated and has evolved theoretically, a process to which The Pacific Review has contributed by providing an important outlet for discussion of specifically Asian issues and by fostering the discussion of regional institutions. The security studies debate on East Asia, however, remains centred on examination of a relatively limited range of independent variables and security threats. Although the field has been redefined to include consideration of so-called 'non-traditional' security issues, work on East Asia has often made the case for non-traditional security studies largely on normative grounds. Further, much of the actual organized violence that has claimed and threatened lives, in particular the region's extensive civil conflicts and state violence against civilians, remains outside the purview of mainstream security studies of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his article "The Geography of Peace", Robert Ross postulates that a bipolar regional power balance has emerged in East Asia. This theory is premised on the assumption that smaller Asian states will seek to compensate for their own vulnerability by clearly aligning with either China or the United States. In the case of Southeast Asia, however, stable but competitive Sino-U.S. relations have provided ASEAN states with considerable strategic leverage. Although these states maintain a close relationship with their respective geopolitically dominant great power, this leverage allows them to manoeuvre between and to strengthen their autonomy vis-à-vis China and the United States. Closer examination of the 1998 addendum to the 1990 U.S.-Singapore Memorandum of Understanding, the 1999 U.S.-Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement and the 1999 Sino-Thai Plan of Action for the 21st Century demonstrates these trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]