Studies in Asian Security. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. xvi, 224 pp. US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-9416-9.
This book is a welcome and praiseworthy addition to the base politics literature. This is not just because the monograph aims to illustrate base politics through the constructivist lenses of process-tracing, argumentation, and norm diffusion, but also because the author aims to craft a new variable in determining basing policy, an issue that has received an extensive amount of attention by both seasoned and emerging specialists. Before analyzing base politics among three key allies of the US in East Asia, the author initially reviews the constructivist approaches on norms and processes and formulates her own analytical framework in the introduction. Those interested in the confrontations and struggles surrounding base relocation or polluting and criminal acts on and in the vicinity of US military bases may skip the introductory chapter and go directly to the case studies, featuring twelve protests: four in Okinawa between 1945 and 2010, and five in South Korea between 2000 and 2007, and three in the Philippines between 1964 and 1991.
Given her extensive field research, as well as her expertise in base politics in Japan, especially Okinawa, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned with base politics in this period of global power shift, generated by the rise of China and the US pivot to Asia. In particular, the author offers a penetrating peek into the black box of domestic decision-making processes, such as who is going to persuade whom and with what kind of rationale.
Basing policy could take many different forms, but contemporary basing policy is mostly the product of negotiations and compromises between those upholding national security and those calling for the enhancement of all kinds of human and environmental security. Rather than giving proportionate attention to the discourses of both national security and human security, the author devotes the lion’s share of her discussion to whether the protests against US military base policy produce the intended results. This asymmetry might cause frustration to some readers because the fundamental reasons for basing troops overseas are, without doubt, the existence of external threats and the possibilities for the enhancement of national security. Nevertheless, it is understandable why the author attempts to explore a new avenue of research from the perspectives of what is described as the “normative arguments,” defined as “norm-based policy proposals” (13), and how policy makers respond to different normative arguments with significant consequences for policy outcomes.
As the trigger factors leading to base closure or other major decisions, the extant literature has been focused on regime shift (Kent Calder, Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism, Princeton University Press, 2007), regime type and the regime’s level of political dependence on the United States (Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the U.S. Military Overseas, Cornell University Press, 2008), and the security consensus among policy makers of a host state (Andrew Yeo, Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests, Cambridge University Press, 2011). If Calder’s Embattled Garrisons offers a bird’s eye view of base politics, including policy recommendations for the US government, Kawato’s contribution lies in offering a bug’s eye view by featuring how normative arguments, created and delivered in a bottom-up manner, could lead to a shift in base-related decisions by the policy makers. If both Calder and Cooley have taken systematic approaches to explain what drives base-related decisions, the author’s approach is much more nuanced, given that many decisions do not take the form of an all-or-nothing game. For instance, Cooley’s arguments support the possibility that the basing contracts sealed before the democratization of a host country will be the target of contestation after democratization and the United States will find it hard to maintain bases there. This did not happen in a democratized South Korea. What happened there was the revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) on criminal jurisdiction and an increase in the legal and social pressures on the US bases for the observance of environmental guidelines, illustrated in detail by Kawato. Meanwhile, Yeo analyzes a shift in power balances between political elites and anti-base activists, leading to his argument that the weakening security consensus amongst the elites opens the window of opportunities for anti-base activists in changing basing policy. Nevertheless, the emerging consensus might be fleeting when faced with strong opposition from the United States and powerful bureaucracy, just like Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio had to give up his promise to relocate the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma out of Okinawa.
From the outset, Kawato understands that her main thesis, “normative arguments,” has only a limited impact on the policy makers, which could
be regarded as the weakest point of her book, but still argues that large-scale protests are effective for, at least, extracting a symbolic concession from the policy makers susceptible to the mobilized power of citizens, sometimes aligned with governors and mayors. Compared with the previous research, this book illustrates better the process of how normative arguments are crafted, diffused, and finally accepted, rejected, or compromised by the policy makers. The strength of this book lies in the fact that normative arguments could be more effectively used in persuading the policy makers to take action in the direction of strengthening environmental guidelines at US bases or revising criminal custody rather than preventing the construction or relocation of bases. Of course, the normative arguments could generate base closure, like the pullout of US troops from the Philippines in 1991 by ending the leases at Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, or delays in base construction, such as the proposed relocation of Futenma to Henoko, northern Okinawa.
Key-Young Son
Korea University, Seoul, South Korea
pp. 866-868