Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xi, 215 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$29.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-69053-0.
South Korea’s Rise: Economic Development, Power, and Foreign Relations begins by identifying the relative paucity of attention in the existing literature to the issue of how economic development affects a country’s foreign relations. As countries undergo the structural transition that marks development, the question itself certainly has applicability outside of South Korea’s experiences to other “rising powers,” as the authors note (10). The book claims to present a “theory on how economic development affects foreign relations” (3), with South Korea as a case study, focusing on security relations, economic and political ties to major powers, and increasing involvement in areas outside of Northeast Asia.
A brief introduction is followed by chapter 2, which outlines the “theory.” Succeeding chapters are organized around South Korea’s relations with individual or a group of countries. To wit, Chapter 3 focuses on inter-Korean relations, chapter 4 relations with the US, chapter 5 Russia and China, chapter 6 Japan, chapter 7 the EU, chapter 8 India, and chapter 9 with the developing world: Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Chapter 10 describes South Korea’s contributions to multilateral agreements and international organizations such as UN Peacekeeping Operations, the OECD, and Official Development Assistance programs. This is followed by a short conclusion.
In empirical terms, the most useful element of the book is that there are compact and clear descriptions of South Korea’s foreign relations. However, specialists expecting new empirical information will be disappointed. Newspaper articles and a sampling of some relevant works in English are used, but nothing in the way of archives or interviews. Further, the absence of any engagement with several touchstone works in English on Korea’s history of development, such as books by Robert Wade or Alice Amsden, means a missed opportunity to point out the paucity of analyses of externalities of the developmental state, or explain how this book might differ from previous work on state power and development. Also, only a couple of published academic articles in Korean are cited despite the voluminous and increasing body of work on a range of related subjects that has been published in the last ten years alone.
Some of the passages are compact to the point of distortion. For example, the authors claim that South Korea was unable to become an official member of the United Nations (UN) prior to 1991 due to the vetoes exercised by Moscow and Beijing (173). In actuality, the relevant Korean archives and published debates of the 1980s indicate there was constant lobbying to win votes by both Seoul and Pyongyang from the 1960s onwards to be allowed entry into the UN. In addition, there was intense domestic debate within South Korea about the desirability of being recognized prior to unification either jointly or separately, as some argued that the division of the peninsula would become legally recognized within the UN and by South Korea itself as an indirect result, regardless of the conditions of entry into the UN. Another case is the mistaken assertion that the Japanese government claims that “it made restitution” for the colonial past under the terms of the 1965 Normalization Treaty (102). In fact, Japan’s official position is that past claims were “settled”; the difference is crucial. The Japanese government has deliberately avoided using the terms “restitution” or “compensation” in any portion of the treaty itself or in comments about it after.
In analytical terms, the argument is dulled by some questionable assertions and puzzling elisions of literature. The authors argue that because development leads to democratization, new elites emerge, the government gains more transparency and responsiveness, resulting in a stronger sense of national pride and identity. This in turn attracts more FDI, generating improvements in infrastructure, outward FDI and ODA, and, ultimately, greater international influence (10–26). While some of the propositions are useful to use as tests in analyzing long-term changes in Korea’s foreign relations, the actual causal mechanisms outlined in chapter 2 are not applied in any of the body chapters. There are simply descriptions, followed by a short claim in each chapter that the arguments apply. The linear causal dynamics that invoke 1960s modernization theory instead of more contemporary frameworks in international political economy also mean that there is no attempt to explain why historical issues stemming from the colonial period have not been resolved between Japan and Korea despite the improvement in Korea’s economic performance, which, according to this book, should simply result in better relations. Nor is there an attempt to account for the rapid growth in exports and overall growth rates under the authoritarian presidency of Chun Doo-Hwan from 1981 to 1986, and the challenges this posed for the US government in its handling of the bilateral relationship. Similarly, there is no discussion of negative production externalities, such as how industrial pollution, produced through economic development or overfishing, might affect foreign relations. There are various other conceptual issues, such as the lack of clear distinctions between effects of development as opposed to growth in foreign relations, or the claim that the size of trade flows makes other countries desire more relations (21). The latter point is not cogent without specification regarding whether trade balances (as opposed to just scale) or types of exports (high end, primary goods) matter or not.
Moreover, the engagement with the existing theories of economic diplomacy and international political economy is uneven. The authors refer to the applicability of their “theory” to “rising economic powers” (10) without even referring to the existing literature in international relations on “middle powers,” even though this concept had been applied to analyses of Korea when it co-hosted the G20 meetings with Canada in 2010. Other scholars whose work readers might expect engagment with, such as John Ruggie, Robert Cox, or John Ravenhill, are entirely missing from the footnotes. Puzzlingly, books by Robert Gilpin that are more directly connected to international political economy, such as The Challenge of Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2010), and The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton University Press, 1987), are not cited at all, while another of his works with more tenuous relevance, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1981), is.
The book never claims to contribute new empirical information, but the fact that the analytical framework is hampered by limited engagement with the relevant theoretical literature, and that it is not consistently applied in any of the body chapters limits its appeal for specialists of Korea and international political economy. The book, however, provides compact descriptions of South Korea’s foreign relations with a wide range of countries, making some of the chapters potentially useful as a textbook.
Hyung-Gu Lynn
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 451-453