EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.23

Author

Richard J. Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies. He is also the Founding Director of the MIT Japan Program. In 2005 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Samuels served as Head of the MIT Department of Political Science between 1992-1997 and as Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Japan of the National Research Council until 1996. From 2001-2007 was Chairman of the Japan-US Friendship Commission, an independent Federal grant-making agency that supports Japanese studies and policy-oriented research in the United States. Grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Abe Fellowship Fund, the National Science Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation have supported a decade of field research in Japan.

Dr. Samuels’ most recent book, Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia, was named one of the five finalists for the 2008 Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book in international affairs. His previous book, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan, a comparative political and economic history of political leadership in Italy and Japan, won the 2003 Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the 2004 Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book in International History and Politics, awarded by the International History and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

His 1994 study, “Rich Nation, Strong Army”: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan won the 1996 John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association of Asian Studies and the 1996 Arisawa Memorial Prize of the Association of American University Presses. His book, The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective received the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in 1988. In 1983, Princeton University Press published his Politics of Regional Policy in Japan. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, International Security, The Washington Quarterly, International Organization, The Journal of Modern Italian Studies, The National Interest, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Daedalus, and other scholarly journals. Dr. Samuels received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

Introduction

Despite-- or perhaps due to-- the enormous impact of Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State, and War and Theory of International Politics, it has long been de rigueur for students of world politics to question-- or at least to nibble at-- the strictest structural assumptions of his brand of realism. Even scholars who accept Waltz’s ideas about relative power as the primary driver of and constraint on state action in an anarchic world have sought explanations for the strategic behavior of nation states that more fully incorporate political dynamics and choice. Locating explanations for foreign policy behavior below the level of the international system has become a holy grail in the study of world politics.

In this essay I will briefly review this search, focusing primarily on scholarship aimed at explaining the “capture” of foreign policy by domestic groups. After a discussion of the metaphorical kidnapping of bodies politic, I will turn to the literal version-- the actual kidnapping of domestic nationals by foreign powers. After noting briefly how political entrepreneurs from antiquity to modern times have constructed “captivity narratives” to advance their interests, I will use the cases of North Korean abductions of Japanese and South Korean nationals to illuminate how captivity narratives can be differentially constructed and deployed under similar structural conditions. This paired comparison offers a particularly clear window on the mechanisms involved in political capture. Foreign assaults on co-nationals in Japan seemed to cut so close to the core of national identity and to the essence of national sovereignty that in the hands of skilled political operatives, they could trigger powerful emotions enabling once marginal groups to engineer state policy. These same assaults in South Korea were handled differently by equally skilled actors with contrary interests. I thus will reject the common privileging of either international or domestic structures in the analysis of foreign policy outcomes and argue for renewed attention to political entrepreneurship and agency-based explanations for political behavior.

Capturing Foreign Policy

The most influential and sustained early alternative to Waltzian realism focused on bureaucratic politics. Allison and others who studied organizations and bureaucrats argued that foreign policy behavior can be traced to the parochial interests of policy-makers-- particularly the executive branch. Individuals battle for their organization’s interests against “stove-piped” competitors in the same government. National policy emerges from conflict and bargaining among often quite contrary perspectives, as well as from deeply engrained standard operating procedures within different organizational cultures. Interests were endogenous to the model, and so interest groups had little to do with policy choice. These models largely ignored the public, focusing instead on the capture of policy by one group of policy elites over another.

But interest group politics and mass publics have never been far from the debate over how to study foreign policy and grand strategy in democratic polities. The most closely studied domains have been trade and foreign economic policies. Scholars have shown that democracies tend to have lower tariffs than autocracies, that they trade more, and that they are more likely to conclude liberalizing trade agreements. Endogenous tariff theorists start with actor preferences based on purported interests and evaluate how political institutions systematically constrain or facilitate political organization to advocate for turning those preferences into policy. Others have shown democratic institutions to have perverse effects on trade and investment because politicians are likely to “sell” protection to domestic capital and labor. Still other approaches emphasize the domestic sources of foreign policy behavior by focusing on how regimes can improve policy coordination by facilitating the flow of information to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma.

The “two level game,” a formal version of the widely held intuition that diplomacy is intermediated by domestic political contestation and bargaining, is probably the most widely cited model linking international and domestic politics. Here, a chief executive must negotiate an international agreement not only with other states but also with the potential domestic opposition-- both inside and outside the state apparatus. Putnam’s original model spawned an entire industry of studies, some of which focus on trade policy, while others have focused on everything from agency vetoes to intervention in the domestic politics of other states. Scholarship on the influence of ethnic- or religious-based interest groups builds upon the same intuition about domestic capture or veto of foreign policy.

While many alternatives to structural realism focus on group dynamics and interest formation below the level of a unified national executive (Waltz’s black-boxed “second image”) some bore deeply into the motives and capacities of individuals (Waltz’s “first image”). Some borrow heavily from psychology and build upon Robert Jervis’ work on perception and misperception. Here the sources of foreign policy behavior are located in the minds of individual decision-makers, minds latticed with beliefs and biases about politics and world affairs that filter and distort the intentions and capabilities of potential adversaries. Other scholars focus on the interests of leaders rather than the interests of states. For them, the chief executive may act on different incentives than “national interest” might dictate, a situation not unlike the “principal-agent” problem in rational choice theory. This perspective is reflected in decades of theorizing on diversionary war-- a presumption that leaders may welcome crises to secure their positions at home, rather than to further a national interest.

Constructivist approaches to international relations take this critique further, by emphasizing the importance of ideas-- including beliefs about the world, norms of appropriate behavior, and actor identities-- for explaining international behavior. On these accounts, neither the structure of the international system nor the distribution of domestic power can adequately explain national policies. Constructivists insist that world politics is about more than the distribution of material power under anarchy and point out that domestic politics is in constant flux over which values ought to be maximized-- e.g., prestige, autonomy, power, or wealth, inter alia. Consequently, their analysis is directed toward ideas as independent forces, ideological conflict within states, the ability of leaders to construct and channel preferences, and the capacity of groups to command and control policy agendas by reframing national identities.

Bureaucratic, liberal and constructivist alternatives notwithstanding, many scholars accept the Waltzian fundamentals-- viz., anarchy, balances of power, rationality, etc.-- and incorporate domestic politics to enhance the theory’s predictive power. Recognizing that frictionless, unitary decision-making is uncharacteristic of most polities, these “neoclassical realists” loosen some of the more restrictive assumptions of structural realism and insist that states will act as rational maximizers of security or power on the international level only to the extent that they can contain domestic political entropy. Since democratic politics are notoriously unruly and domestic political interventions are common, great powers often either overreach or under-mobilize.

Snyder’s explanation of how parochial interests can “highjack” foreign policy is a particularly relevant account of this dynamic for the purposes of the present inquiry. This approach builds upon a long tradition in comparative politics-- including assumptions about state capacity and the distribution of interests. Integrating the notion of “capture” with the structure of domestic and international politics more systematically than either the lobbying literature or endogenous trade theory, Snyder uses Olson and others to argue that groups favoring muscular foreign policies often enjoy advantages in “organizational persuasiveness”-- motivational advantages, control of information resources, and close ties to the state-- which enable them to capture national policy. Groups in society with expansionist interests, he argues, tend to be more compact and concentrated than their opponents. In a cartelized polity, this provides institutional advantages that enable them to “propagate the myth of security through expansion in the guise of the general interest of society.” Armed with a persuasive idea and fortified by cartelized power, they can kidnap politics. Snyder suggests further that the system may become so rigid-- either through logrolling or cognitive dissonance-- that actors may misinterpret or ignore information pointing to overextension and end up with policies that harm the very interest groups that promoted them.

It is possible, however, that skilled political entrepreneurs armed with particularly powerful ideas might succeed in defining a national agenda even in more competitive and open democratic polities. After all, democracies are riddled with entry-points available for capture that are closed in more authoritarian regimes. Politically motivated kidnapping-- the abduction of citizens by a hostile foreign power-- may itself be one such idea. For centuries-- and without regard for location-- political abductions have figured in the construction of national identities and in justifications both for aggression and conciliation. Some narrators have effectively capitalized on captivity to frame and highlight national weakness and the fecklessness of leaders. Others have spun out accounts of heroism to demonstrate national strength and visionary leadership. Either way, the manipulation of the captivity passion for political ends often has been used to mobilize public sympathy to reorient national policies.

The question is whether this requires the structural conditions that Snyder posits, and if, as he proposes, more open democracies are apt to correct for the most extreme excesses. While neo-classical realism directs us toward examining the mechanisms that exist in democracies that enable even weak and marginal groups to define the national interest and set the policy agenda, it remains bound to the structure of both the domestic and international orders. It is worth exploring the possibility that ideas about sovereignty (per the constructivist assumptions) and political entrepreneurship (per the liberal model) might have an independent capacity to empower groups to capture national policy. Let me turn then to one such idea-- captivity itself-- to examine the organizational mechanisms for policy capture in the cases of the abduction of Japanese and South Korean nationals by North Korean agents...(Continued)