Title: Democracy and Diplomacy in East Asia

Date: September 16, 9 am~
Venue: Kojima Hall (next to Akamon), University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus
Language: English
No advance registration is required.

The Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Tokyo will be hosting the above conference in two weeks. The meeting will gather scholars from the U.S., Korea, China and Japan to discuss (a) what kind of foreign economic and security policy is characteristic of democracies and (b) under what conditions are electorally appealing foreign policies likely to materialize?

In Korea, Taiwan, and Japan foreign economic and security policies are major electoral issues among parties competing for power. If so, when does the newly inaugurated government successfully realize its election pledge and when does it fail, allowing the status quo to prevail? If democracies pursue distinct foreign policies, how do these policies persist in spite of partisan turnover of governments? Such puzzles will be explored in the meeting.

Taiwan and Korea are new democracies, and all three governments have seen a change of party in power in the last decade. As such, we find a detailed analysis of these cases to empirically explore the causal mechanisms of democratic foreign policymaking which are often theoretically assumed than directly tested.

The meeting will be conducted in English. (Since our main funder JSPS requests a large portion of the participants to be "foreigners," folks with non-Japanese names or nicknames are particularly welcome regardless of their nationality -- Joke! But nonetheless true.)

Apart from the Institute, the meeting is sponsored/funded by The Todai-Yale Initiative, The Macmillan Center at Yale, The Japan Foundation (Center for Global Studies), and The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and the Friends of Todai inc..

The tentative programs is as follows

THE PROGRAM
8:50-9:00 Opening Remarks
Jun Saito (Yale University)
9:00-10:10 The International Context in East Asian Democracies Nobuhiro Hiwatari (University of Tokyo) "Partisan
Governments and Foreign Policy"
Atsushi Tago (Kobe University) "Alliance Commitment to East Asian Countries and
US Party Politics"
Discussants Keisuke Iida (University of Tokyo)

10:20-11:50 Foreign Policy of Korea
Hee Min Kim (Seoul National University) "A New Approach to the Maritime Dispute
Involving a Former Colonizer-Colony Pair: The Case of the Dokdo-Takeshima
Dispute between Japan and Korea"
Yeongun Kim (Keimyung University) "Partisan Turnover of the Korean Presidency
and the North Korea Policy"
Min Gyo Koo (Seoul National University) "Partisanship and South Korean Foreign
Economic Policy"
Discussion Kan Kimura (Kobe University)

12:50-14:00 Foreign Policy of Taiwan
Emerson Niou (Duke University) "Alliance Commitment to East Asian Countries and
US Party Politics"
Yasuhiro Matsuda (University of Tokyo) "Taiwan's Partisan Politics and its Impact on
the US-Taiwanese Relations"
Discussants Gregory W. Noble (University of Tokyo)

14:10-15:40 Foreign Policy of Japan
Jun Saito (Yale University) "Politics of U.S. Bases in
Okinawa: Electoral Politics and
Diplomacy"
Hiroyuki Hoshiro (University of Tokyo) "Building an 'East Asian Community' in Vain:
Japan's Power Shift and Regionalism in the New Millennium"
Ming Wan (George Mason University) "Japan's Party Politics and its China Policy:
The Chinese Fishing Boat Collision Incident"

Discussants Atsushi Ishida (University of Tokyo)

For inquiries, please call 03-5841-4975 or < hiwatari@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp >