The Japanese Challenge to the American Neoliberal Order: Identity, Meaning, and Foreign Policy (review)

The Japanese Challenge to the American Neoliberal Order is an ambitious piece of work. In it, Yong Wook Lee seeks not only to describe and explain what he sees as the "Japanese challenge" to a U.S.-dominated international economic order but also to issue his own challenge to the field of international relations by developing and applying a sophisticated theoretical framework.

Lee's basic thesis is that the late 1980s and 1990s saw the development of a distinctive Japanese approach to international economic matters, based on the formation of a new developmentalist "identity" among policymaking elites. Developmentalism challenged the dominant neoclassical paradigm championed by the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and provided a meaning structure for interpreting events and formulating responses. This developmentalist identity constituted what Lee calls the "primary reason" for Japan's attempt to challenge the United States and IMF by proposing the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) in the midst of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98. Lee presents the AMF proposal as a momentous event: "Intentionally excluding its all-time postwar ally (or patron) the United States from membership in such an international institution was Japan's boldest and most independent policy initiative in the postwar era" (p. 12).

The book consists of a critique of existing approaches to the study of international politics, an explication of Lee's own theoretical framework, a historical analysis of Japanese economic thinking, and an empirical analysis of Japan's roles in the World Bank's East Asian Miracle study and the Asian Financial Crisis. Lee begins by critiquing international relations theory. He is particularly critical of realism and neoliberalism, which rely on expectations that states or subnational actors will rationally pursue their interests. Lee counters that neither rationality nor interests can be assessed without placing them in their correct contexts, through careful analysis of how actors arrive at their values and causal beliefs. He argues that by assuming that states' interests are logically derivable, these "rationalist" approaches miss the essential fact that international actors have agency—i.e., they make choices and exhibit intentional behavior. Although existing constructivist approaches fare better in his analysis, Lee is also critical of many of them for their willingness to engage in tautological reasoning about interests, structure, and behavior.

Lee therefore calls for a more rigorous constructivist approach that allows for falsifiable hypotheses and specifies a method for evaluating actors' belief systems and the ways those beliefs condition their actions. To do so, Lee develops what he calls an "identity-intention analytical framework." Using Alexander Wendt's definition of identity as "a property of intentional actors that generates motivational and behavioral dispositions" (p. 9), he argues that actors operate based on a set of beliefs about who they are, what they value, and about their opponents and partners. These identities are constantly constituted, challenged, and reconstituted (pp. 45–46). There is much more to Lee's theoretical sections, including the notion of "double agency" (meaning that actors have agency first in interpreting a situation and then deciding what to do about it, pp. 57–62), but this is the theoretical and methodological core of the book.

Chapter 4 seeks to add substance to the "identity" of Japanese economic policymakers by examining the history of Japanese economic thought in order to "inductively uncover the deep-seated meaning structures that the Japanese themselves have historically attached to the role of the state in the Japanese economic development experience" (p. 64). Lee examines how neoclassical economics, Marxism, and developmentalism were debated by economists and policymakers, focusing in particular on what he calls "normal-abnormal meaning structures" (p. 65). He argues that both neoclassical economists and Marxists in Japan began by situating the country as "abnormal" in the context of universalizing theories; over time, the debate shifted to seeing Japan first as a special case of universal forces [End Page 127...