East Asia in the post–Cold War era has been the world's most peaceful region. Whereas since 1989 there have been major wars in Europe, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and significant and costly civil instability in Latin America, during this same period in East Asia there have been no wars and minimal domestic turbulence. Moreover, economic growth in East Asia has been faster than in any other region in the world. East Asia seems to be the major beneficiary of pax Americana.

North Korea has become the focus of international attention once again. In October 2002 it admitted to a visiting U.S. envoy of having a clandestine nuclear program through uranium enrichment, which is a violation of, among other things, the bilateral agreement it signed with the United States eight years ago. In retaliation, the United States canceled shipment of heavy fuel oil to North Korea, that shipment being part of the agreement to compensate for North Korea's abandonment of its nuclear program. Since then, North Korea has astonished the world with a series of highly provocative moves: it restarted the nuclear facilities that it had frozen since 1994; expelled the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); declared immediate withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); and threatened to resume test-firing long-range missiles that it voluntarily stopped in 1998.

Although quite a few third-wave democracies in Southern and Central Europe became consolidated within a decade of their origin, all of those in East Asia are still fragile and fledgling. Ever since South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines embarked on democratic transition or restoration more than a decade ago, elections have been regularly held, and democratic competition is widely considered the only path to power. Rough edges remain, however. Rules are stretched, even bent. Political stalemate tends to delay, if not prevent, timely policy action. And public cynicism toward underperforming, if not malfunctioning, democracy in these four polities is so pervasive and unnerving that pundits warn against a crisis of governance in East Asia's new democracies.

Since late 1998, Japan reversed its exclusive support for the multilateral trade regime and endorsed for the first time bilateral and preferential trade pacts, signing one with Singapore, negotiating another with Mexico, and announcing free trade talks with South Korea. The newfound Japanese interest in pursuing free trade agreements (FTAs) therefore represents one of the most significant departures in Japanese trade diplomacy of the past half-century. This article seeks to explain the birth of a preferential trading policy in a country that until recently had been a staunch multilateralist, and to analyze the reasons for the launch of FTA negotiations between Japan and Mexico. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of Japan's new trade bilateralism is its cross-regional orientation, seeking preferential trade with a Latin American nation. Trade negotiations with Mexico are of great consequence to the development of Japan's FTA strategy for one more reason. Japan has embarked on this new regionalism to offset the negative effects of competing FTAs, but at the same time it has tried to minimize agricultural concessions to bilateral trade partners. Mexico is the first large agricultural exporter that Japan has approached for trade negotiations and is therefore an important test for the success of the Japanese FTA strategy.

New democracies face the arduous task of determining how to deal with gross human rights violations committed during their authoritarian pasts, or the “torturer problem,” to quote Samuel P. Huntington (1991). A new democracy can enhance its legitimacy if it brings human rights violators to justice, thus demonstrating the supremacy of democratic values, including the rule of law. By ensuring that no wrongdoer will go unpunished, the democratic regime prevents the danger of a future military coup d'état and future human rights abuses. Equally critical, it strengthens the power base of democratic forces by delegitimizing or even occasioning a purge of key authoritarian leaders, who often wield influence within the institutions of power, including the military, even after democratic transition. Punishing past wrongdoings constitutes an act of preempting a democratic reversal. In this sense, the question of the past becomes a struggle over power with today's authoritarian forces and for the future of third-wave democracy.

Almost exactly a half-century following the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korea president Kim Dae-jung made a historic visit to Pyongyang for the first-ever summit meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas in June of 2000. A decade following the collapse of communism in the rest of the world, Kim's journey would inevitably be judged in history as a potential starting point for the end of inter-Korean confrontation. Three days following direct, broad-ranging discussions with his counterpart, Kim Jong Il, Kim Dae-jung confidently returned to Seoul with an inter-Korean summit declaration promising enhanced efforts at reconciliation and inter-Korean exchange. Upon his return to Seoul, Kim Dae-jung declared that there would be “no more war” on the Korean Peninsula. The next task was to institutionalize an array of exchanges and inter-Korean interactions designed eventually to lead to national reconciliation.

People are subject to a variety of psychological factors that distort their reasoning. Emotions such as anger, fear, greed, and envy are examples of “hot” impulses that can cause such distortions. As well, motivations such as conformity and competition are another common source of judgmental errors. This paper, however, addresses a number of “cold” impulses that can also contribute to biased judgment. The focus is therefore on the cognitive rather than affective dimensions of judgment under uncertainty, and on situational rather than personality explanations, seeking to account for departures from rational decisionmaking.

Globalization pressured a rebirth of the state in Korea, but in an unexpected direction. Whereas the welfare state retrenched in Western Europe under pressures of the borderless global economy, the Korean state reinvented itself into the guardian of public welfare. That regime shift occurred when the “Asian crisis” struck in 1997 to end the developmental state's way of growth. Previously, the state channeled subsidized bank loans to the chaebol firms (monopolistic conglomerates in strategic industries) and the chaebol company welfare to its workforce in order to secure industrial peace in strategic growth sectors. This de facto class bargain, partly forced by the developmental state and chaebol firms and partly prodded by organized labor, crumbled with the Asian crisis. No longer too big to fail, the chaebol firms plunged into downsizing and restructuring in order to raise profitability, thus precipitating a profound social crisis. The rules and norms of lifetime employment and promotion by seniority gestated during Park Chung Hee's authoritarian rule (1961–1979), and labor's acquiescence—if not consent—to the chaebol-led hypergrowth strategy collapsed as the crisis damaged a third of Korea's top thirty business conglomerates in 1997 and 1998.

December 2002 shook up South Korea's conservative establishment and its U.S. ally. Five days before the South Korean presidential election, with a quarter of the electorate still remaining undecided, leaders of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and religious activists staged a massive candlelight vigil in front of Seoul's city hall to protest against “unequal” provisions in South Korea's Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with its U.S. ally. The political rally drew some 40,000 protestors from all walks of life. Moreover, it was only one among many climaxes in a long mobilization drive launched by NGOs and “netizens” since June, when a U.S. armored vehicle driven by Sergeant Fernando Nino and Mark Walker ran over two teenage girls during a military exercise in Hyochonli. That month saw some thirty NGOs establish a national umbrella organization to demand the trial of Nino and Walker under South Korean law. Then, in December, the Catholic, Buddhist, and Protestant religious orders joined in to lend their authority to the protestors by collectively calling for the revision of SOFA to give South Korea “primary jurisdiction” over criminal cases. The radical hanchongryon university students, too, showed up in protest sites to stir up and escalate anti-American sentiments, regularly raiding U.S. military bases in Uijongbu and Yongsan and even breaking into the U.S. Embassy compound in November. But unlike the past, this intrusion of radical hanchongryon activists did not drive away presumably conservative middle-class groups from political rallies. On the contrary, the call for a SOFA revision grew louder after the U.S. military court judged Nino and Walker not guilty of negligent homicide.

March 20, 2000, constituted a milestone in Taiwan's modern political history. That day its electorate chose as president Chen Shui-bian, the candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who had been defamed as an antistate rebel only a decade before. The election also marked the end of the forty-year-plus hegemony of the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalists). That the DPP ascended to the island's supreme political office in spite of its rival's powerful organizational and economic arsenal suggested that the rules of the democratic electoral game finally took root in society, respected by all major political players to produce a peaceful and orderly regime change. Taiwan joined the club of consolidated democracies, so declared many observers.

No country in Asia has more experience with democratic institutions than the Philippines. Over more than a century—from the representational structures of the Malolos republic of 1898 to the political tutelage of American colonial rule, from the cacique democracy of the postwar republic to the restoration of democracy in the People Power uprising of 1986—Filipinos know both the promise of democracy and the problems of making democratic structures work for the benefit of all. Some 100 years after the introduction of national-level democratic institutions to the Philippines, the sense of frustration over the character of the country's democracy is arguably more apparent than ever before. On the one hand, the downfall of President Joseph Estrada in January 2001 revealed the capacity of many elements of civil society to demand accountability and fairness from their leaders; on the other hand, the popular uprisings of April and May 2001—involving thousands of urban poor supporters of Estrada—highlighted the continuing failure of democratic structures to respond to the needs of the poor and excluded. Philippine democracy is, indeed, in a state of crisis.

Factionalism is a dimension of informal politics that is hardly unique to China, but it has become well entrenched there for several reasons. We know from available survey data that Chinese political culture is relatively low in trust, and the faction provides a particularly useful refuge from the tiger world of politics, organized as it is around that culturally sanctioned dimension of trust known as guanxi (connections) (Shi 2001 and 1997; Pye 1981). From an individual perspective, although this has been changing more swiftly in society at large via marketization, the institutional landscape of elite politics is still dominated by the looming presence of a single monolithic party-state, to which all auxiliary organizations are subordinated in a corporatist hierarchy; any smaller and more personally useful organizations must be formed sub rosa on a self-help basis. From a structural-functional perspective, the faction serves several functions neglected by party-state corporatism: it services individual careers, in both a defensive and an offensive capacity (i.e., to protect against damaging criticism or purge, and to mobilize support for upward mobility); it provides a way of mobilizing minimal coalitions in policy conflicts; and it may even provide a microcosmic unit beyond the family for social identity and solidarity. Factions have always been rampant in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics, but precisely because of the universally acknowledged propensity for factionalism, they are formally proscribed by the Leninist rules of innerparty life and hence exist only semiclandestinely, looming more clearly when the central leadership weakens or is in dispute (as, for example, during a succession crisis). Factions are assembled on the basis of a combination of one's formal and informal “bases” (zhengzhi jichu), the formal consisting of trusted colleagues and subordinates in one's current work unit, the informal consisting of ties made during one's previous socialization or career and carefully cultivated thereafter. Factional activities may most easily be understood according to realist or realpolitik methodological assumptions, but as we shall see, they need not operate in an ideological vacuum. Inasmuch as factions exist tacitly and become politically operational opportunistically, the precise affiliation of a given political actor may change over time depending on the issue at stake and other circumstances; hence faction membership can never be tabulated with certainty, even by faction leaders. A given political actor may have at his or her disposal a range of connections that varies in chronological depth (i.e., spanning x generations) and institutional breadth (i.e., spanning x organizational hierarchies). At a given time and place, the actor may need these categories to define him- or herself factionally. On such occasions, a strong factional network (i.e., one that has been assiduously cultivated over time) is useful and perhaps even indispensable to the actor's survival and highly useful for the pursuit of future political ambitions.

Since 1997, following the twin transformations of economic meltdown and comprehensive constitutional changes, practically every area of Thailand's public sphere has undergone significant reordering. New checks and balances have been created, new institutions established, old institutions abolished and merged, and new rules of the electoral game put into place. A major new political party has emerged that currently dominates the parliament, civil society is flourishing, and dozens of mass protests are thriving all over the country. Yet beneath this veneer of change, the old Thailand is recognizably intact. Politicians of doubtful integrity still flourish; social cleavages are as evident as before; corruption is endemic and accountability weak; election results are contested and contentious; and the military, though lying low, retains an inordinate number of privileges. Despite the reform process, the Thai political system remains in a feeble state; new institutions designed to improve the functioning of the parliamentary and party political orders have thus far failed to change the rules of the game.

One of the fascinating theoretical questions posed by the spread of industrialization and today's nation-state-building process is how these originally Western and quintessentially modern institutions come to take root in other civilizations. The question becomes even more intriguing when the process of adaptation is unusually swift and successful as in East Asia. In Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the states and peoples had scant time to learn and absorb modern practices, norms, and concepts before undertaking, or being subjected to, countless reforms and revolutions in the name of “modernization.” How, or in what terms, did the people in this “great transformation” understand and interpret what they were doing? If the as-yet imperfectly understood concepts and values could not be appealed to, what resources—intellectual and ethico-moral—were at their disposal to use to motivate themselves and persuade others to undertake or endure such massive changes?

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the United States—from the government to the public, from the White House to Congress, from policymakers to pundits, from China specialists to people who know little about China—has engaged itself in the seemingly endless debate on China. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people debated whether China was still important to the United States and whether the Sino-U.S. special relationship was worth preserving. Since the early 1990s, with China's remarkable economic “soft landing” and the consequent robust and sustained economic growth, Americans seemed to have reached a consensus that China still matters to the United States for better or worse. U.S.-China relations were often referred to as one of the most important bilateral relations to the United States. But important in what way? Much debate ensued with a series of frictions between the two countries that climaxed in the dispatch of two U.S. aircraft carriers to the South China Sea during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996, the U.S.-led NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the midair collision between the two air forces in 2001. The U.S. media tirelessly asked the question: “China: friend or foe?” The pattern for U.S. China policy since the end of the Cold War is that whenever the relationship appeared to be stabilizing and a consensus was shaping, new crises emerged and destroyed the hard-won progress, triggering another round of debate on China as if people never learned anything from the previous debate; the old and familiar discourse started all over again.

Although Korea has made significant strides to strengthen its democratic system since the successful transition in the late 1980s as part of the “third wave” of global democratization, a look into the process of making budgetary policy in the National Assembly would suggest that Korean democracy is far from consolidation. Korean politics has shed itself for the most part of its authoritarian past, when the military was the main conduit of action and oppression. The principle of free, regular, and fair competition has taken root as the procedural norm in both national and local elections. Korean citizens enjoy civil liberties to a degree unprecedented in the authoritarian era, and civil society transformed into an increasingly open, transparent, and pluralistic field of political action.