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Abstract
This article analyzes why Nordpolitik, South Korea's positive sanctions aimed to improve relations with the Soviet Union and China, succeeded in the early 1990s despite the huge capability gap between the sender and target states. In conducting this research, I consider Nordpolitik as a deviant case of successful asymmetric positive sanctions, and try to derive theoretical implications about the efficacy of positive sanctions.
Empirically, this article points out the importance of the Sino-Soviet rapprochement and the reluctance of the United States and Japan to develop economic relations with the Soviet Union as permissive causes for the successes of Nordpolitik. Theoretically, it points out the efficacy of positive sanctions is determined not only by the scale of a sender's rewards, but also by the availability of the same rewards from sources other than the sender. This leads me to argue that a sender's ability to use positive sanctions effectively must be measured relative to that of a potential competitor.
Key Words: Nordpolitik (Northern Policy), Positive Sanctions, Soviet-South Korean Relations, Chinese-South Korean Relations
I. Introduction
On June 4, 1990, South Korean President Roh Tae-woo and the General secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, had a summit meeting in San Francisco for the first time in the history of Soviet-South Korean relations. This historical summit meeting led to the establishment of Soviet-South Korean diplomatic relations on September 30, 1990. Two years later, on August 24, 1992, South Korea also succeeded in establishing diplomatic relations with China. Since the 1970s, South Korea had been pursuing the normalization of relations with the two communist giants by utilizing various types of positive sanctions - a policy of promising or giving rewards for a target's compliance. This diplomatic strategy was dubbed Nordpolitik, named after Ostpolitik or the former West Germany's policy of accommodation toward the former East Germany. Although this strategy has not attracted much attention from scholars of International Relations Theory, its successes significantly transformed security environments in East Asia (Cotton, 1993; S. Kim, 2004).
This article addresses why South Korea's Nordpolitik scored remarkable successes in the early 1990s. There are two reasons why such successes are puzzling. First, the success of Nordpolitik runs counter to a prevailing notion among policy makers that positive sanctions are...