Making Sense of the State Identity-Foreign Policy Nexus: Domestic Institutions, Agency Space and China's and Japan's Changing Attitudes to Regionalism

Abstract

In the realm of international relations (IR), the relationships between state identity and foreign policy have been studied extensively. Nevertheless, problems have remained with why the scholarly findings are vastly different across cases. With some differences in degree, many believe that state identity informs, generates, shapes or even causes foreign policies, while others believe the former is constituted by the latter’s practice. Still others see state identities evolving under structural pressure that forces them to adapt, reframe or change. There is an increasing number of works that emphasize the co-constitutive effect of state identity on foreign policy or even suggest replacing identity with identification. Through a re-examination of China’s and Japan’s changing policy trajectories toward Asian-Pacific regional institutions—especially the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC); East Asian institutions, primarily ASEAN Plus Three (APT); and Northeast Asian institutions, particularly the China-Japan-Korea Trilateral Free Trade Agreement (CJKFTA)—this thesis responds to those theoretical problems and suggests that the relationship between state identities and foreign policies were vastly affected by countries' formal and informal domestic institutions.