Why is There No NATO in Asia

xiaocisan · 发表于 2009-11-24 19:34:54

Why is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism

International Organization v. 56 no3 (Summer 2002) p. 575-607
Regional groupings and regional effects are of growing importance in world politics. Although often described in geographical terms, regions are political creations and not fixed by geography. Even regions that seem most natural and inalterable are products of political construction and subject to reconstruction attempts. Looking at specific instances in which such constructions have occurred can tell us a great deal about the shape and the shaping of international politics.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States attempted to create and organize both a North Atlantic and a Southeast Asian region. The institutional forms of these regional groupings, however, differed dramatically. With its North Atlantic partners, the United States preferred to operate on a multilateral basis. With its Southeast Asian partners, in contrast, the United States preferred to operate bilaterally. Why? Perceptions of collective identity, we argue, played an underappreciated role in this decision. Shaped by racial, historical, political, and cultural factors, U.S. policymakers saw their potential European allies as relatively equal members of a shared community. America’s potential Asian allies, in contrast, were seen as part of an alien and, in important ways, inferior community. At the beginning of the Cold War, this difference in mutual identification, in combination with material factors and considerations of efficiency, was of critical importance in defining the interests and shaping the choices of U.S. decision makers in Europe and Asia. Different forms of cooperation make greater or lesser demands on shared identities. Multilateralism is a particularly demanding form of international cooperation. It requires a strong sense of collective identity in addition to shared interests.

This case is of more than passing historical interest. In recent years, realist and liberal theorists of international relations have debated, more than once, the relative importance and efficacy of material capabilities versus institutions in world politics. Realists have argued that international anarchy and the security dilemma it creates make international institutions epiphenomenal or, at best, marginal to world politics. Liberals have claimed instead that institutions have noticeable effects that can ameliorate the security dilemma. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, neorealist theory, for example, expected the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to disintegrate quickly. Neoliberalism did not. Instead, neoliberals argued that NATO helped create conditions that were conducive to peace in Europe after 1945 and that, therefore, NATO was likely to prosper and endure.(FN1) More than a decade has passed since the end of the Cold War and, far from disappearing, NATO is expanding.

The empirical research program of neoliberal institutionalism remains, however, largely restricted to a small pool of successful Western institutions such as NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO), or the European Union (EU).(FN2) Even in these cases, neoliberal theory encounters uncomfortable difficulties. Why did the Warsaw Pact not persist as uncertainty increased in Eastern Europe’s security environment in 1989-90? And why did NATO rather than the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe become Europe’s preferred security regime in the 1990s? An exclusive focus on unmeasured institutional efficiencies that are created by a stipulated lowering of transaction costs and a variety of institutional asset specificities risks slighting the causal importance of material capabilities and collective identities. "Institutional assets," writes Celeste A. Wallander, "affect the costs and effectiveness of alternative strategies, but they do not determine purpose."(FN3).

Neoliberal institutionalism’s central claim--that institutions develop when states foresee self-interested benefits from cooperation under conditions that are propitious for overcoming obstacles to cooperation--remains in need of further testing and refinement. "A single, deductive model is a bridge too far," conclude Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal, further stating that "Bedrock preferences are constant--a hallmark assumption and limitation of the rational approach."(FN4) Security arrangements in Asia remain a puzzle. Multilateral institutions failed despite the presence of self-interested benefits from cooperation. Even though, as in Europe, multilateral security arrangements would have provided information, reduced transaction costs, made commitments more credible, and established focal points for coordinating policies, after 1945 the U.S. government opted for a hub-and-spokes system of bilateral alliances in Asia with the United States at the center. "If NATO was so successful in Europe," asks Masaru Kohno, "why was it not copied in East Asia in the aftermath of World War II?"(FN5) Neoliberal theory, by itself, offers no compelling answer to this question.

Neither does a realist analysis that focuses exclusively on capabilities and interests. Realist scholars are right to insist that the main U.S. interests were served well by forming a set of bilateral alliances in Asia.(FN6) But they remain silent on the issue of why those interests favored multilateral arrangements in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia. Material capabilities alone offer little help in answering the question of why there was no NATO in Asia.

Strict formulations of both liberalism and realism are less convincing than eclectic variants that also incorporate important insights from constructivist theory.(FN7) Eclectic explanations highlight the causal importance of social facts such as power status and threat perceptions, in addition to the material facts and efficiency considerations stressed by rationalist approaches. Eclectic explanations also undercut reifications such as the distinction between domestic and international levels of analysis. Theoretical eclecticism cuts against the paradigmatic organization of most contemporary scholarship on international relations. Thinking in terms of schools of thought, as James Fearon and Alex Wendt argue, at the very least can "encourage scholars to be method-driven rather than problem-driven in their research, which may result in important questions or answers being ignored if they are not amenable to the preferred paradigmatic fashion."(FN8) To liberalism, constructivism adds consideration of the effects identities have on both formal and informal institutions. To neorealism, it adds consideration of the effects of ideational rather than material structures, specifically the effects of identity on actor interests.(FN9).

In the second section of this article, we briefly contrast the policies the United States pursued in Europe and Asia during the early Cold War. Although strikingly little comparative work has been done contrasting U.S. foreign policy in Asia and Europe, in the following section we briefly explore explanations that can be gleaned from the existing literature on why the United States preferred multilateral organizing principles in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia. Next, we put forward three eclectic explanations that combine the material and efficiency factors stressed in realist and liberal explanations with social factors stemming from the different levels of identification American policymakers felt with regard to their European and Asian allies. Finally, we explore some of the theoretical and empirical implications of this argument.

CONSTRUCTING REGIONS AND REGIONAL INSTITUTIONS AFTER 1945

When the U.S. Senate first began to debate the issue of a formal U.S. commitment to Europe following World War II, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was puzzled as his colleagues began to discuss the relationship between the United States and its potential European allies as a regional one. "Certainly," he argued, "the United States and Western Europe" could not be part of the same region. "Certainly," they could, Senator Arthur Vandenberg responded, "because this is a North Atlantic region." This exchange initiated a short debate over how far the concept of a region could be stretched. Could a region be anything a state wanted it to be, or did 3,000 miles of ocean render absurd any talk of a common region?(FN10) This brief exchange underscores the fact that regions do not just exist as material objects in the world. Geography is not destiny.(FN11) Instead, regions are social and cognitive constructs that can strike actors as more or less plausible.

The creation of NATO and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) form a natural parallel that has sparked surprisingly little attention from students of international politics.(FN12) Comparing the two offers the historian of international relations something like a natural experiment. In the early Cold War, the United States initiated a number of regional alliances to help organize some recently defined regions. The form of these regional alliances, however, varied significantly. The United States consistently treated the newly minted North Atlantic region differently than the newly minted Southeast Asian region. In Europe, it opted to promote a multilateral framework. The United States preferred to deal bilaterally with its Asian allies. Why? Because most of the secondary literature on the creation of these two alliances predates the current theoretical concern with the question of bilateralism versus multilateralism, it is not very illuminating on this issue.

Noting that more than two states make up the SEATO alliance, much secondary literature treats it as a multilateral alliance. SEATO, however, is not multilateral in the same sense as NATO.(FN13) First, the language of the treaty commitment is much weaker. Instead of the NATO commitment to collective defense as outlined in article V, which states that an attack on one will be considered an attack on all, article IV of the SEATO treaty merely classifies such an attack as a threat to peace and safety. Furthermore, in SEATO the United States made it clear that it retained its prerogative to act bilaterally or unilaterally. This was formalized in the Rusk-Thanat joint statement of 1962, in which the United States stressed that its commitment to Thailand "does not depend upon prior agreement of all the other parties to the treaty, since the obligation is individual as well as collective."(FN14) Organizationally, the differences were just as apparent. In SEATO, there was no unified command and no specifically allocated unified forces; and any actions taken under SEATO auspices were handled individually by the member states and not by the institution as a whole.(FN15).

U.S. policymakers contemplated the possibility of establishing an Asian NATO. Indeed, many of its prospective members favored the creation of a NATO-type institution.(FN16) The United States, however, remained adamantly opposed to using NATO as the model and even discouraged the use of the phrase SEATO, fearing unwanted comparisons of the acronyms. As one member of the U.S. State Department wrote to John Foster Dulles:.

In accordance with your suggestion ... we have attempted to get away from the designation "SEATO" so as to avoid fostering the idea than an organization is envisioned for SEA Southeast Asia and the Pacific similar to NATO.... In spite of our efforts, the designation "SEATO" has stuck.... I suggest that we accept that "SEATO" is here to stay and that we continue to make clear in our substantive discussions that so far as the US is concerned, the SEA Pact is not conceived as a parallel to NATO (emphasis in original).(FN17).

In the following section, we discuss existing arguments regarding the rise of multilateral or bilateral institutions to see what they can offer in the way of explanation for why the United States treated NATO and SEATO so differently.

UNIVERSAL AND INDETERMINATE EXPLANATIONS

Even though most studies of the security arrangements the United States sought to create after World War II are regionally limited to Europe or Asia, many seek to explain the rise of multilateral or bilateral institutions with universal explanations. Once Europe and Asia are placed in a comparative perspective, however, the problem with these explanations becomes obvious. As universal explanations, they are unable to account for the regional differences in U.S. policy. A second set of explanations for America’s preference for multilateral mechanisms in Europe and for bilateral mechanisms in Asia is underdetermined. The opportunities and constraints to which these accounts point as the driving force behind U.S. choices could have been satisfied by either bilateral or multilateral security arrangements. Therefore, by themselves, these explanations are insufficient.

UNIVERSAL EXPLANATIONS

More than any other scholar, John Ruggie has drawn our attention to the importance of multilateralism as a novel social institution in twentieth-century diplomacy. Ruggie focuses mostly on Europe in this context.(FN18) He interprets the expansion of multilateral principles after World War II as the result of the U.S. "vision as to what constitutes a desirable world order."(FN19) According to this view, the United States has pushed multilateral principles abroad for a number of reasons. The principles are a convenient mask for U.S. hegemony. They duplicate U.S. domestic order. And they are consistent with the U.S. view of itself.(FN20) While this explains why the United States may find multilateral principles attractive, it cannot explain why the United States pushed multilateralism much more in Europe than in Asia. Ruggie notes this difference, but does not attempt to account for it beyond noting that it "was not possible" to embrace multilateralism in Asia.(FN21).

Anne-Marie Burley offers a similarly universal explanation.(FN22) Following Charles Maier,(FN23) Burley argues that U.S. support for multilateralism was an attempt to apply the lessons the United States had learned from the Great Depression on an international scale. In essence, Burley argues, the United States attempted to implement a global New Deal following the war. However, this account suffers from the same limitations as Ruggie’s. It cannot explain why the United States applied these global principles differently in different world regions. As David Lake notes, the United States projects its norms onto the global scene "in a highly selective fashion that itself needs to be explained."(FN24).

Universal explanations derived from studies focusing on U.S. policy toward Asia during the Cold War are equally limited. One such explanation highlights the unwillingness of the United States to delegate authority. If the United States was going to bear the largest share of the burden for the military defense of Asia, why should it cede control or limit its freedom of action in a multilateral institution?(FN25) In the words of one U.S. Department of Defense official, a "NATO pattern" in Asia would be "inimical to US interests in that it could ... tend to reduce, without compensating military advantage, United States military freedom of action."(FN26).

This explanation also fails to account for the different policies the United States pursued in Europe and Asia. Why would the United States accept the loss of control entailed in the creation of multilateral institutions in Europe, but not in Asia? A realist could answer that the United States accepted this loss of control in Europe because the European states offered a "compensating military advantage." Such an explanation is undoubtedly partly correct. In their material power resources, European states offered more advantages to the United States than did Asian states. This, however, can only be part of the story. During the early Cold War, the United States was so far ahead of both the war-destroyed European states and the newly emerging states of Asia that any differences between these two regions was probably marginal compared to the huge gulf separating the United States from both. By itself, therefore, a general unwillingness to cede control to weaker allies in multilateral institutions cannot explain the regional difference in U.S. policy.