In Search of Regional Security Cooperation in East Asia: With Special Emphasis on the Human Security Paradigm
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Oh Young-Dahl 
Published: June 2018

Scholars of International Relations has been regarding wars, i.e., military conflicts, as the most important task in running political community for long time. This traditional view of security was based on the assumption that protecting the people from the enemy's armed attack was bound to lead to the protection of individual citizens' safety. Nevertheless, it is an undeniable trend that states are pursuing supranational cooperation in the field of security and economics due to the rapid advancement of regionalism and globalization. However, this trend is remarkably absent in East Asia including Republic of Korea, China, and Japan. Of course, While it is a fact that East Asia has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations(ASEAN) established in 1967 and ASEAN Regional Forum for regional security purpose, these are insufficient in terms of institutionalization and substance. Thus, it is necessary for the countries in this region to discuss and seek regional security cooperation. The current picture of the East Asia shows a dual trait of its geopolitics, i.e., actively engaging in intra-regional economic exchanges on the one hand, and vigorously involved in armed race on the other hand. In this sense, the realists' typical contention that cooperation in the field of security is very rare seems to be compelling in the setting of East Asia. In general, traditional military cooperation is very difficult to achieve in international relations when mutual trust is not sufficiently formulated because the short-term costs of betrayal is bigger than the long-term costs of cooperation. Mutual trust can be better advanced among countries of liberal democracy, and this implies that international security cooperation should be preceded by liberal democracy. It is quite probable to states to face security dilemma when individual states deal with their security affairs separately. This means that supranational institutionalization of security cooperation is crucial in overcoming the security dilemma. From the above understanding, this article approaches the security cooperation from the perspective of human security as well as traditional military security. For this purpose, it also discusses the differentiated position on security cooperation among realism, liberalism, and constructivism of International Relations. While the traditional security discourse tends to focus on state actors as the points of reference, the nontraditional human security paradigm sees individual human beings as the point of reference in addressing the question of security. In addition, the human security paradigm comprises a more concrete content of freedom from fear and freedom from want as its main content and this is the key content of liberal democratic political system as well. Therefore, the human security paradigm is a normative approach to the security concept in that it seeks to guarantee people freedom from a variety of sources of fear and want on the domestic and international level. It is true that this approach is criticized by some scholars because it deals with too comprehensive a scope of issue- areas and tends to lack a intellectual consistency and to weaken analytical function as well. However, this article argues that this problem could be attenuated by giving priority to freedom from fear rather than freedom from want. In other words, when people are guaranteed their freedom from fear, they can enjoy the freedom from want as well because people have a better life environment in which they can fulfill their creativity. This means that people can enjoy civil and political rights under the liberal democracy. From this viewpoint, it is noteworthy that there exist a mixture of countries with liberal democracy and authoritarian and dictatorial rule. The authoritarian and dictatorial regimes tend to shun the traditional security cooperation, let alone the human security one.