I was enormously curious over the claim coming out of the book’s title when asked to introduce this book in this H-Diplo Roundtable. As my fellow reviewers here noted as well, the book’s main claim runs opposite to a well-established view, at least in the discipline of political science and international relations, on the causal link between national identity and international conflict, and indeed on the divisive role of nationalism in national and international politics. I enjoyed reading the book, and was very much impressed by the very fine scholarship Eunbin Chung demonstrates, in framing the research problem, executing empirical exercises, and connecting this research project to a broad scholarly and policy community.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 14-14
Eunbin Chung. Pride, Not Prejudice: National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780472132942 (hardcover, $85.00); 9780472039050 (paper, $39.95); 9780472902934 (open access).
6 March 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt14-14 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Masami Kimura | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Contents
Introduction by Xiaoming Huang, Victoria University of Wellington. 2
Review by Il Hyun Cho, Lafayette College. 6
Review by Aram Hur, University of Missouri 9
Review by Kan Kimura, Kōbe University. 14
Review by Seanon S. Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong. 17
Response by Eunbin Chung, University of Utah. 19
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Introduction by Xiaoming Huang, Victoria University of Wellington
I was enormously curious over the claim coming out of the book’s title when asked to introduce this book in this H-Diplo Roundtable. As my fellow reviewers here noted as well, the book’s main claim runs opposite to a well-established view, at least in the discipline of political science and international relations, on the causal link between national identity and international conflict, and indeed on the divisive role of nationalism in national and international politics. I enjoyed reading the book, and was very much impressed by the very fine scholarship Eunbin Chung demonstrates, in framing the research problem, executing empirical exercises, and connecting this research project to a broad scholarly and policy community.
The book makes the case that East Asian nations, namely South Korea, Japan, and China, and nations in general “can in fact build trust and reconcile with each other when each affirms its own national identity” (2). Chung uses standard social science research logic to organize the investigation. The book theorizes the relationship between national identity affirmation (NIA) and the nation’s preference for trust, reconciliation, and positive image; tests the theory, using various “experimental tools” and “research methods” (10) from different social science disciplines; and generates evidence for the positive relationship between national identity affirmation and the nation’s positive attitude to the other East Asian nations. The book is a fine example of the working of the social science research model by which the researcher travels from theoretical framing to empirical evidence and to the policy implications of the findings. I congratulate Chung for the book’s innovative theoretical framing and groundbreaking methods of organizing empirical evidence.
The book overcomes significant challenges arising inevitably from the particular way the investigation is organized. First, it is “multidisciplinary” (10). I share the view of the reviewers that this is a particular strength of the book. Chung brings excellent knowledge and expertise in “social psychology” to form a theory of national identity affirmation and explain international relations among East Asian states. Empirically, various research methods from “international security, social psychology, conflict resolution, behavioral economics, and history” (13) are used to generate empirical evidence. These include game theory-informed experiments, fieldwork methods, and public opinion surveys. These different research methods and tools are justified for the purpose of testing the hypotheses, however loosely they are implied in the book, over a possible relationship between national identity affirmation and preference for trust, reconciliation, or positive perception across nations. For those who specialize in political science and international relations though, data generated by a different research method/tool for each individual hypothesis may not necessarily add up to a coherent set of empirical evidence for the theory’s central claim. The book is careful not to explicitly frame the empirical chapters, i.e. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, as testing the implied hypotheses, but rather uses them as a process to generate evidence for each individual element in the claim.
This leads to the second challenge. Using a theory and methods of social phycology to explain the policy preferences of nations toward one another, one is expected to show, in one’s empirical evidence, the logical link between social identity and national identity, and between national identity and the nation’s preference in the interstate relations. This is again a very old research problem, or what reviewer Aram Hur calls the problem of “micro-foundations for macro-outcomes,” in the study of foreign policy and international relations. Scholars in international relations developed a very influential research tradition from the 1970s, if not earlier, in discovering, building, or claiming the link. This includes research programs on perception and image in international conflict and conflict solution,[1] political psychology and foreign policy,[2] and personality, national character, world values and foreign policy.[3] These research programs focus largely on the aggregate descriptions of perceptions, images, or behavioral patterns of individuals as the collective preference of the population, whether a social group or the nation, and use these aggregative data to claim the transformative impact of perceptions, images, and national identity on the nation’s foreign policy and international strategic orientation.
This book brings many aspects of the scholarly tradition together, for example, perception and image theory, interview based surveys of the national population, simulated game-theory experiments, and uses them to produce aggregated measurements of the “national” self-identity and “national” attitude towards the other nations. The empirical exercises in the book are as impressive as those in the scholarly tradition. In this context, the purposes of Chapters 7 and 8 could be made a bit more explicit—one wonders whether they are part of hypothesis testing and empirical evidence generation, or whether they are meant to discuss the policy implications of NIA theory. The two chapters are framed as a showcase of how “NIA influences actual policy” (17) and how NIA theory, as very sophisticatedly developed in Chapter 3 and presumably tested in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, applies in two specific policy cases. By the underlying logic of the overall claim, these two chapters can be seen as part of the empirical testing of the hypothesis over the link between national identity affirmation and the policy preferences of the nation.
The third challenge concerns the author’s “independent variables” (14). Hur points out that, in the case of South Korean national identity affirmation, important factors such as the political history of the Korean people, and the binary schism between “conservatives and progressives” in national politics are missing. Reviewer Il Hyun Cho calls for a “better treatment of alternative accounts” in the explanation of policy preferences. This again, as the author notes in the response, is an “age-old” problem in social sciences research, one that involves inductive and deductive pressures in treating elements in one’s analytical framework. The book is influenced by both dynamics: treating NIA as a theoretical framework where the research is to provide evidence for the causal link between NIA and policy preferences, and as one of the factors that influence policy preferences where NIA is treated as an independent variable and other independent variables are expected to be accounted for in the testing. The book does well along the lines of the former, and I do not think one can do well with both, as this would require a more rigorous research design, following the normative process and procedures in theory building, hypothesis formation, and empirical testing.
The final challenge has to do with the overall structure of the book. As touched upon earlier, Chapters 7 and 8 are treated as a showcase of NIA’s “application to policy” (171), but there is no explicit discussion of the overall research design and what hypotheses are tested in which empirical chapters. It is unclear whether Chapters 7 and 8 are empirical chapters and part of theory testing or they are a discussion of the “policy implications” of the NIA theory and its findings (7). By the research logic implied in the book’s overall claim, the book could be better served with a chapter discussing the hypotheses tested in the empirical chapters. If some hypotheses are designed to test the link between national identity affirmation and the nation’s reconciliation policy, we can justify Chapters 7 and 8 as being part of the theory testing. This is perhaps more of the expectations from the perspective of a social science research project. Chung has managed well the transformation of her PhD dissertation into a book where some technical aspects of the original research product must be left out for the possibility of reaching a broader audience.
With its impressive scholarship and the sophisticated way it navigates the challenges, the book makes a significant contribution to the field on the problem of “nationalism and international relations.” If conventional scholarship, particularly in the discipline of political science and international relations, focuses on the shaping of the unitary, ethnic nation and its political consequences for the organization of interstate relations,[4] new scholarship faces a more sophisticated political landscape where nation and national identity are themselves often contestable and very political for reasons other than ethnic dynamics. This is particularly true for understanding nationalism and interstate relations in modern East Asia. Through the twentieth century, the nations in the traditional sense rose to break up the existing power structures and institutional arrangements of the state for industrialization and modern development. On the other hand, nations in the traditional sense were themselves broken up by the powerful dynamics of civil and geopolitical forces into different states where emergent national identity is influenced more by civil, or political, rather than ethnic dynamics. There are now, for example, two Korean peoples for the Korean nation. There are Chinese people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, as well as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). People in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or the PRC form their attitudes toward one another largely through the lens of the influential political forces in the state rather than from the perspective of them being ethnic Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. There are strong pluralist dynamics in the problem of nation-state relations, which are more complicated than the unitary, ethnic nation-state framework can envisage. Cho is right in reminding us of the significant value of the book in helping us understand “liberalism and nationalism.” The book calls our attention to the role of pluralist dynamics in nationalism that might have an unexpected impact on interstate relations. Finding that “stronger subgroup identification improves larger group relations” (10), the book offers a way of thinking about and acting on the nation-state problem if we are looking for a less conflict-ridden relationship with peoples of other states: East Asian or otherwise.
Participants:
Dr. Eunbin Chung is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. Chung’s research interests include international security, conflict resolution, and political psychology. Her book, Pride, Not Prejudice: National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022) is based on her PhD dissertation, which was the recipient of the American Political Science Association (APSA) Best Dissertation in Experimental Methods, APSA Best Dissertation in Political Psychology, and the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) Best Dissertation Honorable Mention. Dr. Chung’s work has been published or accepted in the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Foreign Policy Analysis, World Development, and PLoS ONE, among others. Her research has been supported by the Japan Foundation, Academy of Korean Studies, and the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Korea. Dr. Chung earned a PhD from the Ohio State University, and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Xiaoming Huang is Professor of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Professor Huang earned his PhD in international relations from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1993, and has been teaching, researching, and publishing on East Asian politics, political economy, and international relations since. His latest publications are Political Order in Modern East Asian States (Routledge, 2022) and International Relations of East Asia: Structures, Institutions, and International Order (MacMillan/Palgrave, 2019).
Il Hyun Cho (PhD, Cornell) is Associate Professor in the Government and Law Department and the Asian Studies Program at Lafayette College. He is the author of Global Rogues and Regional Orders: The Multidimensional Challenge of North Korea and Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and his articles and commentaries have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Global Governance, Review of International Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, Journal of Peace and War Studies, Asian Security, The Pacific Review, Chinese Journal of International Politics, The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, The Diplomat, and Washington Post.
Aram Hur is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri and Co-Director of the MU Institute for Korean Studies. She was awarded the Sherman Emerging Scholar Award in 2021 by the Korea Society and is a 2018-19 US Korea-NextGen Scholar selected by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Her research focuses on nationalism and democracy in East Asia. Her first book, Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia, was published by Cornell University Press in November 2022.
Kan Kimura is Professor at the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies at Kōbe University, and has previously been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Korea University, the Australia National University, the Sejong Institute, and the University of Washington. He has published more than twenty books, including The Burden of the Past: Problems of Historical Perception in Japan-Korea Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2019) and many articles and is an expert on the relationship between Korea and Japan.
Seanon S. Wong is Assistant Professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration, and Director of the International Affairs Research Centre, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Review by Il Hyun Cho, Lafayette College
Pride, Not Prejudice: National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia is a timely and ambitious book. Building on theories of identity affirmation in the field of social psychology, Eunbin Chung argues that national pride, or what she calls national identity affirmation (NIA), “can have pacifying effects” on interstate behavior (2). This is because affirmed national identity through positive feelings about national belonging may “switch off rather than fuel” xenophobic nationalism (3). In Chung’s telling, NIA can enhance reconciliation among former enemies or neighboring nations with troubled pasts through “trust, guilt recognition, and positive perception” towards other nations (41). Specifically, NIA elevates the in-group’s status and helps the public realize the benefits of cooperating with other nations, paving the way for interstate reconciliation (72).
The book’s empirical scope is impressive as it covers the history and recent political relations of the three Northeast Asian nations, namely China, Japan, and South Korea. It also analyzes the effects of NIA on both the “inflictors” and “the receivers” of past aggression (14). For instance, the author shows that the Japanese respondents whose national identity was affirmed expressed a greater willingness to support Japan’s reparations to South Korea. Similarly, the South Korean survey participants who had opposed a military intelligence sharing agreement with Japan, formally known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), became more supportive of the agreement through NIA.
Pride, Not Prejudice is a model of multidisciplinary and multimethod analysis. Drawing on a wide array of disciplines, the book skillfully explores the intersection of political science and psychology while effectively combining insights from history, security studies, and behavioral economics. In my view, Chung’s extension of the individual or group-based analysis of social psychology to interstate relations can benefit scholarly analyses of interstate and intrastate conflicts beyond Northeast Asia. Equally admirable is the methodological rigor and scope of the book as it combines experiments, fieldwork, and large-n survey analyses in all three countries under study. The reader marvels at the care and scope of hypothesis testing that Chung exhibits throughout the book.
In addition, Chung’s analysis demonstrates an in-depth understanding of the three Northeast Asian nations and their complex interactions as well as an effective interweaving of various historical events from Asia and the rest of the world. With her analysis based on detailed knowledge of interstate relations in the region’s past and present, the author challenges a set of received wisdom as well. For instance, the book questions the familiar thesis in the literature on East Asian international relations that competitive national identities intensify interstate tension.[5] Chung’s book also refutes existing accounts that tend to treat “historical animosity as a constant” (22). Instead, the book offers an explanation for changes in public perceptions of other nations, especially when national identity is affirmed among the public. Chung provides useful policy recommendations as well. For instance, she does not believe that external pressures on Japan for official apologies and reparations are a viable policy option (81-82). Instead, Chung believes, NIA would yield greater guilt recognition and willingness for reparation.
Furthermore, the book’s scholarly contributions are substantial. Apart from its multidisciplinary and multimethod research, it is also the latest example of scholarship exploring the interplay between domestic politics and international relations.[6] Chung’s conceptual insights on national identity is similar to the work of scholars who have investigated the role of ideas in the study of grand strategy and global financial order.[7] Beyond the field of international relations, the book’s analysis of the positive effects of national identity is in line with the findings of recent scholarship on liberalism and nationalism, such as liberal universalism and civic nationalism.[8] The book would have benefited further from discussing other analyses of nationalism and regime type in promoting interstate conflicts and peace, such as Jessica Chen Weiss’s works on nationalism in China and Jessica Weeks’s study of autocratic peace.[9]
Despite its innovative research and insightful findings, the book also raises a number of questions with respect to its evidence, causal mechanism and treatment of alternative accounts. First, one may ask whether participants in “a lab-in-the-field experiment” are proper representative samples of the general public in the three Northeast Asian nations (83). To her credit, Chung notes “a generational difference” between her samples that consist of undergraduate students and the general public (94). However, younger, college-educated participants tend to be politically liberal with their own set of biases and tendencies, especially their limited experiences in their nation’s troubled past relations with neighboring countries. If so, this particular sample group may exhibit a “psychological bias that inhibits updating,” but not deep-seated grievances towards their neighbors (176). More broadly, one might ask if personal psychological biases are the root cause of the Northeast Asian countries’ inability to mend their ties, as the author contends, or whether the cause instead are nationwide sentiments that have been politicized and hardened over a long period of time. The author herself acknowledges the stickiness and durability of deeply ingrained and politicized national identities (43). The fact that even if a majority of the South Korean public acknowledged the need for GSOMIA, the fact that they still worked to cause its cancellation suggests the lingering effects of long-held resentment towards Japan.
Second, I am not entirely sure if the book’s causal mechanism is sufficiently convincing. Chung’s analysis is at its best in exploring the “micro-foundations of psychological change in public opinion” (229), rather than elucidating its impact on macro, national-level policymaking. Specifically, Chung zeroes in on “trust among the general public” while assuming that small shifts in the public perception of other nations through a quick affirmation of one’s national identity could affect overall public opinion and promote political change between countries (6). Simply put, she believes that “an affirmed public could push an elite for rapprochement” (22). I wonder, however, if temporary individual perceptional shifts in a brief experiment could spark broader changes in public opinion at the national level and enable a foreign policy transformation. Despite her emphasis on “the direction of affirmation effects rather than exact magnitude,” Chung argues that NIA could not only “boost trust between past adversaries into a positive direction” but also lead to “an amplification of the magnitude” (111). Later in the book, however, she acknowledges that NIA is more of “catalyst for easing tension,” rather than “the force that leads toward that as a final state” (232). This suggests to me that NIA may be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for genuine interstate reconciliation. The key question then is how long such affirmation would last after the survey experiment. In this regard, it would be helpful to examine underlying conditions for lasting changes in public perceptions.
That said, Chung made admirable efforts to test the generalizability of the book’s findings, which are based primarily on controlled field experiments. She does so by using survey data covering 7,200 South Korean respondents over a five-year period and demonstrating that those who felt proud to be Korean held positive views of neighboring nations (157). The author also discusses President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address before he announced a new approach to Cuba, but I am not entirely convinced that one speech highlighting US accomplishments either served as NIA in action or fundamentally altered the public opinion about a new US approach to Cuba. It is also possible that the ways in which political leaders and the public affirm their national identity can vary. In this vein, I wish Chung had tested whether affirmed policymakers also adopt more moderate or reconciliatory policies and extended her analysis by discussing other comparable regional cases.
While citing numerous scholarship in the fields of international relations and East Asian politics, the book would have benefited from better treatment of alternative accounts. A case in point is the role of political leadership in interstate reconciliation. Consider the policy of South Korea’s new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, which promotes trilateral cooperation with Japan and the United States. Interestingly, Park Jin, South Korea’s new foreign minister, expressed his willingness to “normalize (GSOMIA intelligence sharing) as quickly as possible,” as the Yoon government was worried about “inadequate intelligence sharing” in the face of Pyongyang’s continued provocations.[10] Without much national-identity affirmation and mainly in response to North Korea’s missile launches, South Korea under President Yoon also agreed with Japan and the United States to hold “the South Korea-U.S.-Japan missile warning and ballistic missile search and tracking exercises.”[11] Similarly, the role of political ideology deserves further investigation. As one of the book’s findings indicates, in South Korea “progressives generally tend to side with China and have more favorable attitudes toward North Korea, while conservatives prefer that South Korea have closer relations with the United States and/or Japan” (172). This internal division along political ideological lines is not fully explained by Chung’s analysis and should be explored further.
The aforementioned questions and comments, however, do not diminish the invaluable contributions of Pride, Not Prejudice. Chung is a first-rate scholar who is dedicated to interdisciplinary and social scientific research. The book features a rare combination of methodological rigor and empirical depth while shedding a new light on a perennial and thorny challenge in East Asian international relations. As such, it should be widely read by both policymakers and scholars.
Review by Aram Hur, University of Missouri
Eunbin Chung’s Pride, Not Prejudice comes at a delicate moment for nationalism. A nationalist resurgence is seemingly fueling democratic backsliding across the world. Demagogues have successfully weaponized nationalist-populist movements or stoked xenophobic nationalism to undermine the democratic process in places such as Hungary, India, and the United States. As France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned at the centenary remembrance of World War I, the “old demons” of nationalism are returning.[12] The belief that nationalism is something to be contained for democracy and the liberal order to flourish appears to be paramount.[13]
Against this backdrop, Chung argues for nationalism’s pacifying potential. National pride, she argues, is a two-sided coin. Pride has a chauvinist side that feeds on competition with the ‘other.’ But it also has an inward-looking, affirmative side that strengthens self-worth and, as a result, expands the capacity for empathizing with others. By cultivating the affirmative dimension of national pride—what Chung calls national identity affirmation (NIA)—she argues that even nations with bitter acrimonies can pave a way forward toward cooperation and reconciliation rather than conflict and retaliation.
Chung’s theory is bold and creative. Interdisciplinary applications of social psychology to the study of behavioral politics have been fruitful for better understanding forces such as status envy and obligation between groups.[14] Yet similar applications to international relations, where the primary interactions are between states rather than people, have been relatively few.[15] The foundational assumption of the book, although Chung never states it explicitly, is that international relations are also interpersonal relations between two or more national peoples. Her book joins a growing literature that sees the psychology of the domestic national public as a key player in interstate conflict.[16]
Chung tests the theory of NIA in the unlikeliest of places to find support: Northeast Asia. National animosities between South Korea, Japan, and China are most recently rooted in Japan’s colonial aggressions in the twentieth century but date back to centuries of cultural competition and entanglement between the three.[17] These are deeply rooted national prejudices that are hard to move.
The most powerful evidence in support of NIA comes from a series of survey experiments in which subjects in the treatment group completed an NIA exercise prior to playing behavioral games and answering questions about a national rival. In the exercise, subjects were asked to choose which values are most important to being a [national identity] and to write about how the national people demonstrate those values. Chung finds that NIA increases trust and positive perceptions of a national rival, as well as more willingness to accept guilt for past actions by co-nationals. The treatment effects are not large. Most times, we are looking at less than a five-percentage point increase. But they are still surprising in a region where interstate cooperation often becomes ensnared in nationalist backlash and the resurfacing of old wounds.
That affirming national identities can be part of the solution to a region where national rivalries are often the roadblock to effective intra-regional cooperation and extra-regional alliances, such as with the United States, is an optimistic claim. It may also be too good to be true.
Chung’s effort to provide the micro-foundations for macro-level outcomes in international relations is commendable, but in the process, the meso-level gets lost. Yet in national politics, the meso-level is where the action—the politics—takes place. Indeed, in a book where nationalism is the shining protagonist, Pride, Not Prejudice remains curiously distant from the mainstream nationalism literature on the causes and consequences of nationalism.[18] I highlight three elements that are largely omitted from the book and thus cast a veil of doubt over the practical policy implications of an otherwise interesting set of findings.
The Historical Origins of National Values
Self-affirmation theory is based on the basic human desire to maintain self-integrity in the face of threat.[19] Instead of attacking or avoiding the source of threat, self-affirmation positively elevates other aspects of identity to grant the individual a degree of flexibility to her sense of self. As a result, the threat to a particular aspect is minimized. In psychological therapy, self-affirmation is practiced by having individuals choose and ruminate on the core values that define them.
Chung’s experimental treatment extends this exercise from the self to national identities, but the extension suffers from growing pains. The treatment asks subjects to choose from a list the values that are important to “Koreans generally,” but it does not update the list from personal to national values. Box 2 (87) omits common national values in the region, such as ethnic purity, that when affirmed would probably yield very different predictions toward national others. Chung notes that “the affirmation treatment is a straightforward, nonpolitical task” (86), but this is a weakness, not a strength, of the experimental design. National values are inherently political values. By omitting values that are integral to the political origins of nationalisms in the region and instead providing subjects with a list that includes personal values such as “health/fitness,” “social skills,” and “originality,” it is possible that the NIA treatment effect instead captures a diversionary effect.
National values are also not sui generis. They are products of a nation’s lifecycle and relationships. The primacy of ethnic purity to South Korean national identity, for instance, is a legacy of Korea’s efforts to maintain national continuity despite the loss of political authority under the Japanese.[20] It has remained an integral value to Korean identity as it served as the impetus behind the twin developments of rapid economic growth and democratization through the 1980s, both of which required a great deal of collective sacrifice in the name of nation. Pacifism is a value that has become important to the Japanese in their national reconstruction after World War II and the US occupation, as well as a stinging reminder of the costs of their past national ambitions.
National values reflect lessons learned from the nation’s past relationships, just as the personal values socialized in the home reflect a family’s relationship history with their kin, village, and broader society. Relational legacies explain why some nationalisms manifest in support of their states, whereas others born out of state persecution are linked to upheavals or secessionist movements.[21] Nationalisms also differ on the relational norms they endorse. Kathleen Powers shows that nationalisms rooted in the value of unity tend to incite conflict with other states, whereas nationalisms founded on equality lean towards cooperation.[22]
Given the distinct relational legacies embedded in national values, it seems more plausible to expect NIA to yield different effects in different national contexts, rather than the convergence effect found in the experiments. Taking NIA seriously requires a nuanced account of how national affirmations interact with the complex origins of the nation’s core values, something that is left wanting in the book.
Nationalism and Party Politics
Another critical meso-level variable in national politics is political parties. The political parties are in many ways the executors of the national will. The complication, especially in the democracies of Northeast Asia, is that political parties are engaged in nationalist family feuds over the estate of the state.
Take South Korea. The left-right partisan divide in South Korea has little to do with redistributive ideology, in contrast to most Western democracies. Rather, the conservative versus progressive parties stand for mutually exclusive nationalist visions for South Korea, embodying the unresolved nationalist conflict following Korea’s independence from Japan.[23] Rival elite factions imagined fundamentally different futures for the Korean nation along Cold War ideological lines. They ultimately fought a civil war that ended in an armistice. Today, the conservative party in South Korea still sees containing the Communist North as the primary national threat and embraces closer ties with the United States and Japan for the practical betterment of the nation. The progressives see reunification as the final step to recovering national wholeness and see foreign intervention as the cause of division. They are thus staunchly pro-North Korea and anti-American and anti-Japanese. Both party factions claim to strive for the best future of the Korean nation. But each party imagines that future very differently.
In such a nationally polarized landscape, which party is leveraging NIA matters for how this fosters or weakens ties with specific countries. In the book, Chung examines the failed General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) between South Korea and Japan—two countries with a long and bitter national acrimony—as a case where NIA could have made a difference. The initial effort toward GSOMIA fell apart in 2012 under the auspices of conservative president Lee Myung-bak, whose backdoor attempt to ink the agreement was met with predictable public protests from the left for kowtowing to Japanese interests. When it was finally signed in 2016, only conservative President Park Geun-hye’s impending impeachment proved to be large enough a distraction to avoid similar nationalist backlash from the left.
The public opinion data in the book stops at 2013, but GSOMIA was recently put through the wringer once more in 2019. Under the progressive presidency of Moon Jae-in, South Korea threatened to pull out of the annual renewal. The South Korean Supreme Court had recently ruled that Mitsubishi should compensate for South Korean forced labor during World War II. Japan saw the move as reopening old wounds that had been bandaged through bilateral agreements in 1965.[24] Japan balked, and South Korea threated to end GSOMIA in retaliation.
What is interesting is that to drum up public support against GSOMIA, president Moon used a great deal of NIA political rhetoric, citing national values such as “sovereignty and principle”—core values of the progressive nationalist vision that opposes foreign intervention.[25] South Korea ultimately renewed GSOMIA at the eleventh hour given strong US pressure and its own security interests, but the case demonstrates that the cooperative effects of NIA are not so straightforward in places where party politics is nationally polarized. Yet such is the political landscape in much of Northeast Asia, between conservatives and progressives in South Korea, the Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan, and to a growing extent within Japan’s dominant Liberal Democratic Party in the post-Abe era.[26]
The prescription that governments can move toward peace if only they practiced more NIA is admirable but does not accord very well with the reality of party politics on the ground.
National Stakes in International Relations
Cooperation versus conflict or reconciliation versus retaliation are presented as mutually exclusive outcomes in the book. Yet many decisions in international relations are about trade-offs. Can conflict now secure peace later? Does strategic cooperation with country A amount to a betrayal of country B?
National stakes in international relations are rarely unidirectional in the way that they are for subjects in the series of experiments. The decision at hand is not simply whether one supports reparative policies toward countries wronged in the past. More often, it is whether one supports such policies in the face of economic sanctions from victim countries or despite accusations that debase the moral character of one’s grandparents or great-grandparents. When one’s sense of national integrity is compromised, can affirmations still generate the sense of grace needed for reconciliation?
As much as Chung shines selective light on the positive effects of NIA, the shadow cast by it hides the real and raw emotions stirred by the national stakes of most foreign-policy decisions. Those stakes frequently incite the dark side of national pride. It may be possible, as Chung argues, to affirm one’s national identity without degrading another nation. But the very motivation for such affirmation is typically an external push that challenges or threatens the nation. The experiments show that NIA can work in controlled settings. The question that the book leaves hanging is whether it can work in real settings, where national animosities are deliberately targeted and activated by political leaders and activists who oppose interstate cooperation.
Chung is careful to specify the scope conditions. She argues that NIA will be difficult in contexts of military threat, where the stakes are life and death, or in the presence of extremist nationalist elites, who will exploit NIA toward illiberal ends. Yet those are precisely the real international contexts in which nationalism flares and matters the most.
The book is a thought-provoking response to nationalism’s overwhelmingly negative reputation in international politics. It takes the first hard step toward paving a new theoretical framework on nationalism and easily invites future work to build on it. Self-affirmation theory targets that elusive space of rationality between threat and response. That more investments into nation-building, not less, can contribute to strengthening that rational muscle in international conflicts is a bold argument that is well worth exploring.
Review by Kan Kimura, Kōbe University
Eunbin Chung’s argument is very simple: “National identity affirmation (NIA) can help detach the public from historical bitterness and dominant negative images, and move toward cool-headed reasoning of self-interest in cooperation,” hence, “elites find economic, strategic, or geopolitical reasons to build new forms of cooperation among nations” (8). Behind this argument, is the author’s strong trust in the NIA theory, which insists that a strong national identity gives people a sense of morality which guides them toward mutual cooperation with each other and the acceptance of past guilt.
This fresh argument seems to offer a significant challenge to previous understandings of the relationship between nationalism and international relations. This is because we tend to believe that strong nationalism is harmful for mutual cooperation. However, although this might be true of the discourses in mass media or among the people, it is not necessarily so within academia. For example, we know that a loss of trust in the nation following the World War I defeat of Germany gave the Nazi Party a chance to make hostile statements against neighbors and minorities that were colored by very strong nationalism.[27] In societies in crisis people will sometimes try to rationalize the difficult situation facing their nation by finding scapegoats.
Of course, similar arguments can be found in earlier cases in Northeast Asia. According to the World Value Survey, the people of Japan had higher levels of pride in their nation during the 1980s than during the 1990s or the early 2000s. From this data, this reviewer explained the changes in the Japanese attitude on historical/territorial issues as follows.[28] In the 1980s, when the Japanese economy reached its peak, people expressed their pride in Japan with the slogan, “The twenty-first century will be a century for Japan,”[29] which is paraphrased from Herman Kahn and Thomas Pepper’s book.[30] In this situation, the people could easily find a reason for confidence in their society, and so they did not need to worry about their national pride, even if they admitted to the guilt of their past. Hence, Japan could keep relatively liberal diplomacy with neighboring countries at this time, and the situation continued until the late 1990s.[31] The 1993 Kōno Statement on the subject of comfort women[32] and the 1995 Murayama Statement on World War II were typical outcomes in this situation.[33]
However, this situation changed in the late 1990s. The Japanese people gradually lost confidence in their society because of the long economic slump that began in the early 1990s. As a result, the people lost their willingness admit past guilt, and a group initiated the nationalistic movement called “the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform.” These changes show how the loss of confidence in the nation affected Japan’s relations with neighboring countries, as Chung argues.[34]
However, for this reviewer, the reality looks more complicated. According to surveys, national pride started to increase once again in Japan in the 2010s.[35] Importantly, this rise in nationalism did not help Japanese relations with neighboring countries. Rather, the Japanese government took a severer stance against South Korea and China on the issues of the past and on disputed territories, and the people strongly supported the policies with ardent anti-South Korean and anti-Chinese sentiments. Revisionism also spread in this period, and many books and columns gained huge popularity with the messaging of “Japan is great!”[36] It is clear that the recovery of national pride in Japan during this period played a role in worsening the relations.
The situation in Japan differs from the Chung’s expectations. Chung argues that in the relationship between national confidence and historical perception, the former is an independent variable, and the latter is a dependent one. However, as we remember from many historical cases, historical perception is not simply dependent on the condition of nationalism but can also become an important element which affects the level of people’s confidence in their nation. As Liah Greenfeld argued, national identities are sometimes sustained even by sense of superiority against neighbors.[37]
In short, the relationship between nationalism and historical perception is not just that the former affects the latter but that each is dependent on the other. Of course, Chung’s finding that national confidence could improve the relations with neighboring countries is academically important; however, as long as the former is never independent of the latter, it is very difficult to simply say that we can improve relations if we have more pride in our nations. In other words, as the author proves, a situation in which people have confidence in their nation may ameliorate foreign relations, but in the process of making the people more confident, those relations could be worsened, especially if they mobilize a kind of revisionism to justify their pasts.
As we find in many examples in world history, the mobilization of historical revisionism is one of the easiest ways to ensure that people are proud of their nations. It is much easier to amend the perceptions of the past than to do the same thing in the present. This is even more relevant in situations where people struggle with difficulties and therefore find it difficult to find reasons to believe that their nation is great. That is also the reason why many political leaders today are mobilizing so-called national populist movements when many people feel frustration. Perhaps the worst example in today’s world can be found in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin is trying to recover the national confidence of the Russian people, and the existence of Ukraine as an independent state is seen as a big obstacle in the process.[38] The war between the two nations is one of the results of his efforts, and here we can see that the connection between national pride and mutual relations is not so simple.
At the same time, it is natural for us to expect that more confidence in their nations—we had better call it a “society,” I believe—affords people the ability to accept the guilt of their past, as the author underscores. The big question here is thus whether and how we can instill confidence in nations without mobilizing the sense of “glories”[39] from the past. In particular, this is never easy for those who live in countries that are struggling with long-term economic slumps or similar difficulties. How to have more confidence in our nations, societies, futures, and ourselves may be a question for all human beings.
Review by Seanon S. Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Eunbin Chung has produced an outstanding piece of scholarship in Pride, Not Prejudice. The book’s contributions are manifold; it would appeal to audiences from a range of backgrounds and with different agendas and interests. Empirically, it sheds light on a phenomenon that has bewildered pundits, scholars, and observers of world affairs, and in fact defied common sense: despite decades of economic, cultural, and social exchanges, nationalistic conflicts have persisted and continue to be on the rise in East Asia. Theoretically, the book meticulously teases out the causal relationships among what are otherwise rather intractable and abstract concepts and constructs concerning human psychology: group affirmation, esteem and pride, trust, guilt, prosociality, etc. That is impressive. Methodologically, it demonstrates a creative use of experiments, public opinion surveys, and case studies. Together, they offer evidence for the book’s argument—and the multitude of finer-grained hypotheses it sets out to test—that is as solid and irrefutable as social science research gets. This is mixed-method research at its best. The book also bears important—and in a way sobering—implications for policymakers (or at least for those leaders who have a genuine interest in promoting peace and cooperation in the region). I shall not belabor on these points. Instead, in the reminder of this review, I highlight one larger contribution I particularly appreciate as a student of political psychology in IR—a contribution that Chung should be enormously proud of but in my opinion has not been highlighted enough in her writing—and end with a mild note of caution about policy implications of the book.
Social psychologists have a long tradition studying intergroup relations, yielding insights on why groups conflict and cooperate with each other that are at the same time broadly generalizable (across definitions of groups, cultures, etc.) and nuanced (the mediation effects of power, the effects of communication, the role of group leadership, etc.). In the past two to three decades, scholars of IR have leveraged such insights in order to make sense of intergroup relations in world politics.[40] However, as some critics have pointed out, much is often lost in transition across the two disciplines.[41] Ideas are frequently borrowed in a cherry-picking fashion or superficially, without regard to the caveats and finer points that come part and parcel with the original research. For instance, international status is often assumed to be relative and therefore zero-sum—an outgroup’s gain in status is an in-group’s loss; ingroup favoritism is often unproblematically translated as out-group bias. Yet, the dynamics of intergroup relations that social psychologists have discovered are in fact more complex.
Cross-disciplinary learning should be encouraged, but it must be done with care. It is at this juncture that I find the publication of Pride, Not Prejudice timely, impactful, and laudable. The book offers what is perhaps to date the most faithful, accurate, and thorough application of research in social psychology to the study of international relations. Chung’s core argument is that the affirmation of national identity promotes international cooperation, mediated through the factors of lessening mistrust, recognition of past guilt, and overcoming the ‘sticky’ image of one’s out-group as enemy. This might be ‘counterintuitive’ for scholars of IR, but perhaps it is not so for social psychologists. Chung has done the discipline a great service by delving deep into the social psychology literature, disabusing some of its misapplications in IR in the past. On the other hand, social psychologists will see that their insights are well corroborated and vindicated beyond the confines of the laboratory and the other non-political social settings that they are more accustomed to studying—in this case, in the ‘real world’ context of rivalries between countries. In short, this book is a paragon of interdisciplinary research.
On a more substantive note, I would caution against ruling out prematurely the promotion of a common identity as a policy prescription for lowering mistrust, reconciling past transgressions, and lessening animosity between rivals. That seems to be a recurring theme in the book. In its opening pages (3-5, 39-45), the book presents as its main “foil” the conventional wisdom, which has been embraced by a broad array of research traditions and programs in IR, from liberals to constructivists, functionalists, globalization theorists, etc., but also by scholars and researchers in social psychology and philosophy, that commonness promotes cooperation (the “commonness” thesis). The construction of an overarching identity through contact and exchange—this conventional wisdom goes—blurs intergroup distinctions, and as such, has the potential to transcend what were once rivals into a more inclusive and harmonious “we.” The “puzzle” (19-20), then, is why are we not seeing a highly interdependent East Asia—the empirical focus of this book—that is less plagued and ridden with nationalist conflicts?
However, the problem with international cooperation in East Asia does not seem to be that rivalries persist despite attempts to create an inclusive, pan-Asian identity, but rather their lack thereof. At the least, the verdict on the “commonness” thesis is still out. Elsewhere in the world, we have witnessed supranational projects whose mandates include the construction of a regional (or what social psychologists call “superordinate”) identity in the general public (through education, adoption of a common currency, etc.). The European Union, and to a much lesser extent, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, come to mind. Granted, these projects have had their setbacks and crises (Brexit and the resurgence of the populist-localist movements are some obvious and recent examples). But in the long haul, these moments may be construed more as temporary hiccups than evidence that achieving cooperation through commonness is futile. It seems logical to surmise that the average Frenchman now views the Germans less as their arch-“other” (that is, their most significant out-group to contrast, compete, and fight with) than they did, say, after World War II, thanks in no small part to decades of European integration. In East Asia, by contrast, there has been nothing comparable. True, the region is closely integrated economically and even culturally, with a dense flow and exchange of students, tourists, businesses, ideas, goods, and services. But there has not really been much attempt to create some form of pan-Asian solidarity (except for a few that failed, and were rather meager in scope and ambition, as Chung discusses on page 20). Nor have any leaders of China, Korea, and Japan—past or present—had the incentive to do so, either because of their beliefs in their nationalist causes or for more sinister, self-serving political reasons (for instance, bolstering domestic legitimacy through xenophobic nationalism).
But that should not preclude the feasibility of the “commonness” thesis, and hence its viability as a policy prescription, in the future. Who knows? Perhaps we may one day see a Chinese Robert Schuman or Japanese Jean Monnet. My caution here does not vitiate the findings or lessen the policy implications of the book. National Identity Affirmation (NIA), as Chung solidly drives home with her impressive research, could indeed improve intergroup trust, overcome “sticky” enemy images, and reconcile bad blood. But if commonness should not be ruled out as a path towards international cooperation, could it work in tandem with strategies of NIA? If so, how? Can one simultaneously be a proud Japanese (or Frenchman) and a cosmopolitan East Asian (European)? In what ways can the two complement each other? Or, would they be working at cross purposes?
Response by Eunbin Chung, University of Utah
I am most appreciative of the thoughtful comments on Pride, Not Prejudice by this group of distinguished readers: Il Hyun Cho, Aram Hur, Kan Kimura, and Sean Wong. The time and energy these reviewers spent on reading and critiquing my work, as well as their very kind words regarding its significance, are gratifying and at the same time humbling. I do hope that my book can fulfill the praise many of the reviewers have given it, in terms of its mixed methods, theoretical impact, and policy implications. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Xiaoming Huang for writing the introduction, and Masami Kimura at H-Diplo for bringing together the roundtable. Here I will focus on some of the key critiques that span multiple reviews. They concern the applicability and extension of experiments to the real world, the appropriateness of experimental tools, a clarification of the book’s scope conditions and theory, and the policy implications.
One theme that arises in related forms is the issue of how the book’s experimental tools, which are an abstraction of messier and more complex themes in the real world, can apply to the context of international relations of Northeast Asia. Il Hyun Cho raises the age-old methodological question of the external validity of experiments, in particular the representativeness of samples in lab-in-the-field experiments. Cho notes that “younger, college-educated participants tend to be politically liberal with their own set of biases and tendencies, especially their limited experiences in their nation’s troubled past relations with neighboring countries.” Such concerns are long-standing in critiques regarding the artificiality of lab experiments.[42] On pages 112-113 I directly address these issues, noting
Aronson et al. (1990) nonetheless explain that lab experiments are not necessarily limited in generalizability compared to field experiments. In fact, labs offer scholars tighter control over the treatment and experiment overall, making them a preferred option for those focusing on the internal validity and performance of their models. Aronson et al. (1990) also note that “bringing the research out of the laboratory does not necessarily make it more generalizable or ‘true’; it simply makes it different. [ . . .] The generalizability of any research finding is limited.” In addition, social scientists have argued that student samples are not inherently different when it comes to experimental realism.[43]
Aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of experimental research methods, I made efforts to enhance external validity and representativeness in four ways. First, beside the student sample shown in Chapter 4, I used samples representative by age and gender in my experiments on guilt in Chapter 5. Second, in Chapter 6, I supplemented my experimental findings with large-n survey analyses of 7,200 South Korean respondents over a five-year period, finding results that are consistent with my experimental results. Third, based on my initial experimental findings, I performed additional analyses of real, unresolved policy issues between the countries in Chapters 7 and 8. Fourth, I complemented my empirical findings with historical case studies from Northeast Asia and elsewhere embedded throughout the book.
Like Cho, Aram Hur questions an experimental tool I use in the book—the identity affirmation treatment. Compared to Cho’s comment, however, which is relatively methodological, this point can be better addressed by both methodological and theoretical clarifications. Hur queries whether the list of values used in the experimental treatment should be updated from personal to national values, suggesting the example of “ethnic purity.” I reviewed the lists of “ingroup values” used in experimental treatments in previous research on group– (not self-) affirmation in social and political psychology,[44] and adapted this list and revised a few of the values in order for the language to more appropriately fit the cultural context of my countries of interest.
As a methodological response I will first clarify that for practical reasons, I tried not to stray too far away from the values that have been effectively used in existing research, and intentionally chose them to be “general enough but broadly applicable” to the experimental conditions. I agree with Hur’s constructive suggestion that providing a list of values with richer historical context that are more tightly intertwined with the countries’ culture and history would be useful. That said, having vastly different treatments across experimental conditions poses threats to the controlled nature of experiments, which is a virtue of the method that directly relates to internal validity, its greatest strength. It would be a challenge to manipulate identity affirmation with very distinct treatments across conditions in the same experiment while maintaining confidence that the affirmation treatment would have similar power and effects across all of the conditions, but perhaps future research can envision better possibilities for this idea.
Hur’s critique can be addressed from a theoretical standpoint as well. Hur’s example of ethnic purity does not apply to the theoretical workings of the mechanism of identity affirmation, as any values which the participants ruminate on should not be ones that evoke some sense of exclusivity regarding an outgroup. In addition, the conceptual distinction of “national values,” especially as separate from values individuals believe are at the core of a Korean identity (as worded in the treatment) is unclear to me. Consistent with the values given in the experimental treatment, existing research has found that Koreans report values such as family, self-discipline, religion/spirituality, achieving your dream, social skills, friendships, health/fitness, and others as being central to the Korean identity.[45] What is it, then, that makes a value such as “ethnic purity” fundamentally a national value, and why can we not say the same for values such as family, religion/spirituality, self-respect, and social skills—values that are often deeply interwoven with the (sometimes Confucian) tradition historically embedded in Korean culture and society? While it can be assumed these are clearly values the majority of Koreans would consider “national values,” they are not intrinsically political. I would therefore respectfully disagree with Hur’s statement that “national values are inherently political values.” If Hur’s definition of national values necessarily entails some political aspect, having that definition would help.
To be accurate to the dynamics of affirmation theory, the beauty of identity affirmation is that it can have effects on how one perceives an outgroup through a nonpolitical task—nonpolitical in that it precisely does not involve a sense of superiority or chauvinism over an outgroup in order to make one feel better about their ingroup.[46] Invoking a value that inherently entails some sense of exclusivity against the outgroup (such as ethnic purity) is most likely to stoke the negative aspect of nationalism, which I explain as twofold—the harmful branch of nationalism that I carefully but explicitly argue must be downplayed.
Hur further notes that “national stakes in international relations are rarely unidirectional in the way that they are for subjects in the series of experiments.” The extension and application of experimental findings to real-world settings is a complex and difficult matter. While experimental results provide insight into the relationship between variables and the psychological workings involved in that relationship, many researchers in their studies are to some extent placing a bet on how said relationship will work in messier social settings. Hur adds, “The experiments show that NIA can work in controlled settings. The question that the book leaves hanging is whether it can work in real settings, where national animosities are deliberately targeted and activated by political leaders and activists who oppose interstate cooperation.” In addition to the issue of the apt application of experimental findings to real settings, this latter point by Hur points specifically to a matter of scope condition. In the book, I specify that the effects of national identity affirmation (NIA) may play out differently in particular cases where entrepreneurs or elites have vested interests in fueling and keeping interstate animosity alive.
It should not be assumed that it is uniformly the case, however, that elites or entrepreneurs have vested interest in promoting interstate animosity. To the contrary, there are cases in which leaders wish to initiate or promote international cooperation to gain the benefits from it, even between longstanding adversaries. In 1979, former United States president Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping, then deputy premier of China, agreed to the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, which opened official communication between the United States and the People’s Republic of China and shifted relations from an enemy to ally image almost overnight. Such drastic changes are possible, yet have proven difficult because images are sticky and, as noted in the book, the public in Northeast Asian states have often exhibited tendencies to object to international cooperation as they “do not like each other enough” to work closely with each other, even if that means forgoing the potential of mutual benefit in a win-win situation of cooperation. Perhaps NIA can help nudge public opinion in a positive direction when leaders perceive of opportunities for cooperative or conciliatory measures with a previous rival state.
This is where a critique by Wong becomes relevant. Wong questions whether the promotion of a common, overarching identity in Northeast Asia is indeed an unlikely or undesirable remedy to persistent tension in the region, or if the region simply has not had enough opportunity or experience to try it out. Historical counterfactuals are a difficult endeavor. But one might also ask whether the attempts to integrate Northeast Asian states under a common identity have not been enough (as Wong asks), or whether the reason they have been few and far between is the very reality of relations between the states, where strong enmity and lingering historical issue between the countries make the commonness strategy difficult to imagine in the region. The latter possibility adds weight to the plausibility of the book’s assumption that efforts to create an umbrella identity that unites Northeast Asian states will likely be futile.
For example, in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s independence from the Federation of Malaya in 1965 is a case where forced attempts to integrate entities struggling from deep-seated antagonism into one common, overarching (superordinate) identity backfired. From a utilitarian perspective, some argued for the mutual benefits of Singapore staying in the federation—Singapore’s security would have been better protected, as the country would have belonged to a larger state (to this day, male-assigned Singaporeans serve in mandatary military service for two years; as a city-state, Singapore is challenged to maximize its security), while the federation would have benefitted from Singapore’s economic power. However, due to public sentiment and political differences, there was just too much resistance to the idea of quickly joining to form “one big happy family” overnight.[47]
The matter of defining and clarifying scope conditions is directly related to another critique of Hur’s that South Korea’s political parties often have “mutually exclusive nationalist visions,” and for this reason “the cooperative effects of NIA are not so straightforward.” I agree that when opposing parties use negative campaigning against each other, achieving an overall step in a unified direction (e.g., toward international cooperation with another country) will be less effective due to such internal divisions.[48] But again, such exclusionary rhetoric is precisely what identity affirmation is not. The example Hur gives to question the benefit of NIA toward international cooperation is that former South Korean President Moon Jae-in cited “national values” such as “sovereignty and principle—core values of the progressive nationalist vision” against foreign influence to drum up public support against the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). However, if these are values that apply specifically to a vision of a particular party in deeply polarized domestic politics—i.e., the nationalist agenda of the progressives, as Hur notes, which is antithetical to the nationalist agenda of the conservative party—it would be a stretch to consider these “national” values.
Along these lines, identity affirmation on such political values, if perceived by only progressives as ingroup-values, would supposedly have a more dividing effect if conservatives (i.e., roughly the other half of the country) are not able to share those as important values in the first place. In addition, if the values of sovereignty and principle were mainly used in a way to emphasize Korea’s need to steer away from foreign influence, as Hur argues, this again specifically entails an emphasis of the boundaries between ingroup and outgroup that divide “us vs. them.” And yet, again, such exclusionary attitudes that specifically invoke and “other” the outgroup do not apply to the theory of national identity affirmation.
Another theme that arises in the reviews concerns theoretical clarification. Kimura constructively hints at the possibility of a cyclical relationship between NIA and historical perception. In other words, besides the relationship mainly emphasized in Pride, Not Prejudice where NIA is a causal variable that can affect public opinion between different countries, historical perception “can also become an important element which affects the level of confidence in their nation.” For this reason, Kimura writes, “as long as the former is never independent of the latter, it is very difficult to simply say we can improve relations if we have more pride in our nations.” However, the reality of social constructs is that many of them are interconnected. To avoid losing direction in a sense of hopelessness caused by perceptions of extreme tautology, scholars can attempt to untangle and identify causal relationships within a complex web of interrelated concepts. It can be expected that once a causal variable is strengthened to increase a dependent variable, a mutual reinforcement of both is possible if the two variables are in a cyclical relationship, especially in future iterations.
Relatedly, Kimura provides interesting insight for future investigation on the reverse causal relationship between NIA and interstate perception. In particular, Kimura notes, “a situation in which people have confidence in their nation may ameliorate foreign relations, but in the process of making the people more confident, those relations could be worsened, especially if they mobilize a kind of revisionism to justify their pasts.” This understanding presumes the process of strengthening ingroup confidence is directly and automatically based on outgroup hate. However, a key tenet of the book’s theory is that ingroup love is not necessarily outgroup hate.[49] Extending this to a national level, we can therefore assume that national attachment has two sides to it—a purely inward-looking sense of attachment (an often-cited example is love for one’s children which in no way necessarily entails dislike of other children), and a darker, chauvinist side that feeds on a sense of superiority over the outgroup. Therefore, if state leaders are mobilizing “a kind of revisionism to justify their pasts” as Kimura hints, the kind of national pride stoked with such intention would be a very different one from the reaffirmed, contented, and secure sense of self-worthiness replenished by NIA. Revisionist motivations of national greatness that, for example, aim to justify one’s militarist or colonial past against an outgroup do not apply to the theory of NIA.
This key aspect of the book’s theory becomes apparent in an example Kimura cites. Kimura notes how Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, “is trying to recover the national confidence of the Russian people,” as an example of how “many political leaders today are mobilizing so-called national populist movements when many people feel frustration,” as “the mobilization of historical revisionism is one of the easiest ways to ensure that people are proud of their nations.” To emphasize once more, the workings of NIA do not entail chauvinism against an outgroup. Numerous studies have found that affirmation of group identities (using a treatment that in no way refers to comparison with or degradation of an outgroup) is possible. It might be relatively challenging to imagine a purely inward-looking affirmation on the level of national identities, as in international contexts national pride has been so often used as a tool that can be harmful to other countries, or views other countries as enemies, as Kimura argues. However, existing research has shown affirmation of national identities to be possible, beyond other group identities such as gender and sports teams.[50]
Finally, Cho posits that NIA may be a “necessary, but not a sufficient condition” for interstate reconciliation. I agree with this point, as NIA is in no way offered as a panacea for conflict resolution. As Cho notes, it may just be the “catalyst for easing tension,” or the initial nudge that helps shift public opinion in a direction that brings states closer to reconciliation. In this regard, Cho’s question of how long affirmation effects found in experiments can last is one that deserves further investigation. In one study, psychologists found that identity affirmation in a school-setting had lasting effects for two years.[51] These are promising grounds for predicting the lasting effectiveness of psychological affirmation, but further research is needed to test their applicability to the context of public opinion in international relations.
The book aims to explain and demonstrate NIA’s potential to influence the landscape of public opinion in international relations without claiming to prove or accomplish more than it can. As a self-assessment, I tried to be careful not to either overstate or undervalue the book’s contributions. This is because acknowledgement of the boundaries of academic work makes possibilities for its application more believable.
Overall, the critique of experimental tools points to an intrinsic characteristic of experimental methods. As experimental researchers, at some point we are required to operationalize the variables we are interested in and test them in an abstract setting. The theories we are testing in experimental settings are often based on ideal-types and are simplified versions of the real world. Experimental findings can first discover promising grounds for a theory. Given the limit of external validity in experiments, while researchers can do their best to presume and extend the applicability of experimental results to messier, real-world politics,[52] further work—oftentimes beyond the purely academic—is needed to specify in finer detail how those findings will carry over.
Again, I would like to state how grateful I am to everyone who has made this conversation possible. The reviewers provide several helpful, highly relevant ideas for future investigation. For example, Cho makes the suggestion to examine how affirmation might affect policymakers to adopt more moderate or reconciliatory policies. With the right access, this would be a terrific avenue to test the scope and challenges of identity affirmation. I am indebted to Hur for providing a rich list of points on connecting the book’s individual-level findings on the micro-foundations of political psychology through a mesa-level to affect interstate interactions. I look forward to conducting and reading future studies that help revise and refine the arguments laid out in the book.
[1] Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
[2] For a detailed review of the field, see Jack S. Levy, “Psychology and Foreign Policy Decision-Making,” 300-333 in Leonie Huddy, David O. Sears, and Levy, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[3] Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Margaret G. Hermann, “Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior Using the Personal Characteristics of Political Leaders,” International Studies Quarterly 24:1 (1980): 7-46; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton University Press, 1997).
[4] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) and National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
[5] Gilbert Rozman, ed., East Asian National Identities: Common Roots and Chinese Exceptionalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Thomas Berger, “Set for Stability? Prospects for Conflict and Cooperation in East Asia,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3, (2000): 405-428, 420; Aaron L. Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter, 1993-1994): 5-33, 16-17.
[6] Daniel S. Hamilton and Teija Tiilikainen, eds., Domestic Determinants of Foreign Policy in the European Union and the United States (Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations and Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2018); Christopher Sprecher and Karl DeRouen, “The Domestic Determinants of Foreign Policy Behavior in Middle Eastern Enduring Rivals, 1948-1998,” Foreign Policy Analysis 1:1 (2005): 121-141.
[7] Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Daniel W. Drezner, The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[8] Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2022) and Jasper M. Trautsch, ed., Civic Nationalisms in Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2020).
[9] Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Jessica Chen Weiss, “Authoritarian Signaling, Mass Audiences, and Nationalist Protest in China,” International Organization 67:1 (January 2013): 1-35, and Jessica L. Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization 62:1 (Winter 2008): 35-64.
[10] Takuya Suzuki and Keishi Nishimura, “South Korea Wants Sharing of Military Intel to Return to Normal,” Asahi Shimbun, June 14, 2022, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14644632.
[11] Sang-ho Song, “S. Korea, U.S., Japan Agree to Ramp up Joint Efforts to Counter N.K. Missile Threats,” Yonhap News, June 11, 2022, https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20220611000654325.
[12] Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic of Paris, “Commemoration of the Centenary of the Armistice Speech,” November 11, 2018. Translated text accessed from the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations.
[13] Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[14] See, for instance, Gwyneth McClendon, Envy in Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Cara Wong, Boundaries of Obligation: Geographic, Racial, and National Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Evan Lieberman, Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[15] James M. Goldgeier and Philip E. Tetlock, “Psychology and International Relations Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 67-92.
[16] Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[17] David Kang, East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
[18] See, for instance, Andreas Wimmer, Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Prerna Singh, How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
[19] David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen, “The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology vol. 38 (2006), 183-242.
[20] Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
[21] See, for instance, Mark Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[22] Kathleen Powers, Nationalisms in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
[23] Aram Hur, “Uses and Misuses of Nationalism in the Democratic Politics of Korea,” in South Korea’s Democracy in Crisis: The Threats of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Ho-Ki Kim (Stanford: Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2022).
[24] Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korean Court Orders Mitsubishi of Japan to Pay for Forced Wartime Labor,” New York Times, 29 November 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/world/asia/south-korea-wartime-compensation-japan.html.
[25] Kim Yoo-chul, “‘Seoul Can’t Renew GSOMIA with Tokyo’: Moon,” Korea Times, 15 November 2019, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/08/356_278807.html.
[26] Christopher Achen and T. Y. Wang, The Taiwan Voter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).
[27] Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Open Road Media, 2013), 59.
[28] Kan Kimura, “Nationalistic Populism in Democratic Countries of East Asia,” Journal of Korean Politics 17:1 (2007): 277-299, at 284-285.
[29] For example, Yasuhiro Nakasone, “Shushō Shiseihōshin Enzetsu,” Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 6 February, 1984.
[30] Herman Kahn and Thomas Pepper, The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success (New York: Crowell, 1979), 143.
[31] Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 31-62; Kan Kimura, The Burden of the Past: Problems of Historical Perception in Japan-Korea Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 95-149.
[32] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary, August 4, 1993,” https://www.mofa.go.jp/a_o/rp/page25e_000343.html.
[33] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama: On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the War’s End, August 15, 1995,” https://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/press/pm/murayama/9508.html.
[34] Dudden, Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States, 57-61.
[35] World Values Survey, https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp.
[36] Tomomi Yamaguchi, “The ‘Japan Is Great!’ Boom, Historical Revisionism, and the Government,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 15:6 (March 2017), 1.
[37] Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kan Kimura, Chōsen/Kankoku Nashonarizumu to ‘Shōkoku’-Ishiki (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 2000), 5-6.
[38] Jeffrey Mankof, “Russia’s War in Ukraine: Identity, History, and Conflict,” The Center for Strategic and International Studies (April 2022), 2-3, https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-war-ukraine-identity-history-and-conflict; Denys Kiryukhin and Svitlana Shcherbak, “The People, Values, and the State: How Vladimir Putin’s Views on Ideology Evolved,” Romanian Political Science Review 12:1 (2022), 11-32.
[39] Hakkı Tas “The Chronopolitics of National Populism,” Identities 29:2 (2002): 127-145, at 131, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2020.1735160.
[40] This literature is too voluminous to reference in full. For an overview and introduction, see Deborah Welch Larson, “Social Identity Theory: Status and Identity in International Relations,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2017), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.290.
[41] See, for instance, Steven Michael Ward, “Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the Study of Status in World Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 61:4 (2017): 821-834; Peter Hays Gries, “Social Psychology and the Identity-Conflict Debate: Is a ‘China Threat’ Inevitable?,” European Journal of International Relations 11:2 (2005): 235-265; and Jacques E.C. Hymans, “Applying Social Identity Theory to International Politics: A Caution and an Agenda,” Paper presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association.
[42] Joshua Aronson, Carrie B. Fried, and Catherine Good, “Reducing the Effects of Stereotype Threat on African American College Students by Shaping Theories of Intelligence,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38:2 (2002): 113-125.
[43] James N. Druckman and Cindy D. Kam, “Students as Experimental Participants: A Defense of the ‘Narrow Data Base’,” Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science 1 (2011): 41-57.
[44] Gregory R. Gunn and Anne E. Wilson, “Acknowledging the Skeletons in Our Closet: The Effect of Group Affirmation on Collective Guilt, Collective Shame, and Reparatory Attitudes,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37:11 (2011): 1474-1487.
[45] Mira Kim, Hong Seock Lee, and Paul T. P. Wong, “Meaning of Life According to Koreans: The Korean Personal Meaning Profile,” The Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 2005.
[46] David K. Sherman and Geoffrey L. Cohen, “The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-affirmation Theory, in M. P. Zanna, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2006): 183–242.
[47] Tai Yong Tan, Creating “Greater Malaysia”: Decolonization and the Politics of Merger. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008).
[48] Youn Ki and Eunbin Chung, “Party Reputation, Moral Expectations, and Voting Behavior in South Korea,” under review.
[49] Marilynn B. Brewer, “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate?,” Journal of Social Issues 55:3 (1999): 429-444.
[50] David K. Sherman, Zoe Kinias, Brenda Major, Heejung S. Kim, and Mary Prenovost, “The Group as a Resource: Reducing Biased Attributions for Group Success and Failure via Group Affirmation,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33:8 (2007): 1100-1112.
[51] Geoffrey L. Cohen, Julio Garcia, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Nancy Apfel, and Patricia Brzustoski, “Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap,” Science 324:5925 (2009): 400-403.
[52] As a first step, academics can test their theory in the context of policy applications. For NIA’s effect on foreign policy attitudes, see: Eunbin Chung. ““Groups Can Change, Therefore War is Avoidable”: How Confidence in National Identity Can Reduce Public Support for Militant Internationalism.” Global Studies Quarterly 2:3 (2022): ksac030.