Peter J. Katzenstein

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

In this paper, we explain why the U.S. government chose multilateral security arrangements in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. After reviewing the inadequacies of a number of universal and indeterminate explanations, we put forward three explanations—great power status, efficient responses to threats, and regional identity—which rely on the combination of material and social forces for their explanatory power. Starting with common rationalist explanations that focus on material capabilities and institutional efficiency to explain the forms of international cooperation, we add to them the important effect that Americas collective identity had on the formulation of its foreign policy goals. U.S. policymakers believed that the United States was a natural part of the North Atlantic community but that Southeast Asia was part of an alien political community. This difference helped drive the U.S. government to adopt divergent policies in two regions that, far from being natural, were constructed politically only in the 1940s. We conclude by pointing to the advantage of eclectic combinations of rationalist and constructivist insights, with an extension to the politics of regional collective identity in the 1990s.

International relations and domestic structures: Foreign economic policies of advanced industrial states

Recent writings on problems of the international economy have focused attention primarily on changes in the international system. This paper attempts to show that foreign economic policy can be understood only if domestic factors are systematically included in the analysis. The papers first part groups the recent literature into three paradigms which distinguish between three international effects. The second part offers a comparison of the differences between a state-centered policy network in France and a society-centered network in the United States. The third part of the paper combines the arguments of the first two and analyzes French and American commercial, financial, and energy policies as the outcome of both international effects and domestic structures. These case studies show that domestic factors must be included in an analysis of foreign economic policies. The papers main results are analyzed further in its fourth part.

Small States and Small States Revisited

The meaning of books lie not only in what authors write but how readers read. When author becomes reader, matters become even more complicated. The author experiences research and writing as a long and messy process. The reader encounters the ultimate product wrapped in neat covers. Since life is short, authors do not tend to reread the books they have written. At best they spend a bit of time with them, reading a page here or there as they leaf through the volume. The experience is comparable to meeting a long-lost friend. The occasion elicits mixed emotions. There is the pure pleasure of easy familiarity. There is nervousness about hidden insecurities. And there is the admittedly immature curiosity about looks. Has the scourge of age dealt with us equally? Or has it played favourities so that new jealousies complicate a nervous reunion? This range of feelings has marked my encounter with Small States before sitting down and writing this article. I enjoyed my visit with that old friend. Human vanity being what it is, I acknowledge readily at the outset that I liked what I read. Suppressing the nagging and uncomfortable question whether I would do as well writing it today as I did then, I think I would go about the task pretty much the same way. Small States was a follow-on project to an analysis of comparative foreign economic policies of advanced industrial states published under the title Between Power and Plenty. That book had developed a typology of capitalist states that, whatever its virtue, remained oblivious to differences in their size and openness and neglected the international determinants of domestic structures and strategies. Furthermore, the historical part of Between Power and Plenty was overly schematic and determinist, locating important historical junctures in the distant past and neglecting the sequences of choices which connect one historical juncture to the next. There was room for improvement. Two things I learned from writing Small States have stayed with me over the years. There is a great difference between understanding-a-thing-on-its-own and understanding-a-thing-in-context. I had done my dissertation research on Austrian history and had read a lot of the literature on Austrian politics since 1945, including a very sizeable literature on its nationalised industries. I had read it, but I had not understood it. Only after reading a great deal about the Swiss

Regionalism in Comparative Perspective

Processes of globalization are occurring in a world marked by processes of regional integration that are comparable though different. Integration processes in both Asia and Europe are open to global forces and marked by multiple centres of influence. In Asia, integration processes occur in informal and inclusive network structures. This contrasts with the more formal and exclusive pattern that characterizes the integration process among continental European states. Our analysis of international politics could be enriched if it took more account of these emerging structures in different world regions.

Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms Across Research Traditions

This paper defines, operationalizes, and illustrates the value of analytic eclecticism in the social sciences, with a focus on the fields of comparative politics and international relations. Analytic eclecticism is not an alternative model of research or a means to displace or subsume existing modes of scholarship. It is an intellectual stance that supports efforts to complement, engage, and selectively utilize theoretical constructs embedded in contending research traditions to build complex arguments that bear on substantive problems of interest to both scholars and practitioners. Eclectic scholarship is marked by three general features. First, it is consistent with an ethos of pragmatism in seeking engagement with the world of policy and practice, downplaying unresolvable metaphysical divides and presumptions of incommensurability and encouraging a conception of inquiry marked by practical engagement, inclusive dialogue, and a spirit of fallibilism. Second, it formulates problems that are wider in scope than the more narrowly delimited problems posed by adherents of research traditions; as such, eclectic inquiry takes on problems that more closely approximate the messiness and complexity of concrete dilemmas facing “real world” actors. Third, in exploring these problems, eclectic approaches offer complex causal stories that extricate, translate, and selectively recombine analytic components - most notably, causal mechanisms - from explanatory theories, models, and narratives embedded in competing research traditions. The article includes a brief sampling of studies that illustrate the combinatorial potential of analytic eclecticism as an intellectual exercise as well as its value in enhancing the possibilities of fruitful dialogue and pragmatic engagement within and beyond the academe.

Japan, Asian-Pacific Security, and the Case for Analytical Eclecticism

Without saddling them for any of the remaining errors of omission or commission, we would like to thank for their criticisms, comments, and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article: Amitav Acharya, Thomas Berger, Robert Bullock, Thomas Christensen, Susanne Feske, Michael Green, Walter Hatch, Brian Job, Chalmers Johnson, Alastair Iain Johnston, Kozo Kato, Robert Keohane, Stephen Krasner, Ellis Krauss, David Leheny, T.J. Pempel, Richard Samuels, Keiichi Tsunekawa, and Robert Uriu, as well as members of seminars at the University of California, San Diego, Cornell University, and Aoyama Gakuin University. We are also very much indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions and to a large number of Japanese and Chinese government ofacials and policy advisers for generously sharing their time with us.

Religion in an expanding Europe

With political controversies raging over issues such as the wearing of headscarves in schools and the mention of Christianity in the European Constitution, religious issues are of growing importance in European politics. In this volume, Byrnes and Katzenstein analyze the effect that enlargement to countries with different and stronger religious traditions may have on the EU as a whole, and in particular on its homogeneity and assumed secular nature. Looking through the lens of the transnational religious communities of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, they argue that religious factors are stumbling blocks rather than stepping stones toward the further integration of Europe. All three religious traditions are advancing notions of European identity and European union that differ substantially from how the European integration process is generally understood by political leaders and scholars. This fascinating collection of papers makes an important addition to the fields of European politics, political sociology, and the sociology of religion.

Japan's National Security: Structures, Norms, and Policies

Japan’s national security policy has two distinctive aspects that deserve analysis. First, Japan’s definition of national security goes far beyond traditional military notions. National security is viewed in comprehensive terms that also include economic and political dimensions. The second feature of Japan’s security policy worth explanation is a distinctive mixture of flexibility and rigidity in the process of policy adaptation to change: flexibility on issues of economic security, rigidity on issues of military security, and flexibility combined with rigidity on issues of political security.’ With the end of the Cold War and changes in the structure of the international system, it is only natural that we ask whether and how Japan’s national security policy will change as well. Optimists insist that the Asian balance of power and the U.S.-Japan relationship will make Japan aspire to be a competitive, noninterventionist trading state that heeds the universal interest of peace and profit rather than narrow aspirations for national power.2 Pessimists warn us instead that the new international system will finally confirm Herman Kahn’s prediction of 1970: Japan will quickly change to the status of a nuclear superpower, spurred perhaps by what some see as a dangerous rise of Japanese militarism in the 1970s and 1 9 8 0 ~ . ~

Conclusion: domestic structures and strategies of foreign economic policy

An inventory of the objectives and instruments which characterize the differing political strategies of six advanced industrial states in the international economy yields three groups of states: the two Anglo-Saxon countries, mercantilist Japan, and the states of the European continent. Corresponding differences exist in the distinctive elements of domestic structure: the coalition between business and the state and the policy networks linking public and private sectors. An historical explanation of these differences is most appropriate. In the future, stresses in the relations between business and the state and contradictions between ruling coalitions and organized labor may lead to changes in political strategies.

Same War—Different Views: Germany, Japan, and Counterterrorism

German and Japanese counterterrorism policies differ from those adopted by the United States as well as from one another. Defeated in war, occupied, and partially remade during the Cold War, Germany and Japan became clients of the United States first, then close allies. Both countries offer easy tests to explore the extent to which the United States can hope to fight the war against terrorism, as it did the Cold War, supported by a broad coalition of like-minded states. On this central point the articles conclusion is not reassuring. In contrast to the Cold War, the relative importance of different self-conceptions and institutional practices appears to be larger and the systemic effects constraining national divergences smaller. Even among the closest allies of the United States, the very early stages of the war against terrorism point to substantial strains. Over a prolonged period such strains are likely to affect profoundly long-standing patterns of alliance.