Regional Security Complex Theory and Chinese policy towards North Korea

With the end of the bipolar rivalry of the Cold War, emphasis on the system level power structure (dominant in international relations theory since the rise of neorealism in the late 1970s) has declined. One of the most interesting theoretical developments to have emerged in this context is Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT). Like neorealism, RSCT focuses on security. However, the rationale behind early Security Complex Theory was that for the majority of states, the most relevant scale for conceptualising military and political security functioned at the regional rather than the system level. RSCT has now opened the analysis to a wider range of sectors - including economic, societal and environmental security - and the tendency to refer to 'units' rather than 'states' acknowledges the importance of agencies other than the state in terms of security. Nevertheless, the central idea remains that because most threats travel most easily over short distances, security interdependence is normally patterned into regionally based clusters, called security complexes. This essay seeks to examine RSCT with reference to the region, or subregion, of Northeast Asia, focusing on Chinese policy towards the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) after the Cold War. Northeast Asia is not a straightforward area to look at, because of the difficulty in distinguishing between the regional and the global levels. There is a heavy American military presence, and three of the main actors with security interests in the region - the United States, China and the Russian Federation - are nuclear weapons states with permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. Nevertheless, Northeast Asia is an important area in terms of security - because of the heavy concentration of military capability, high levels of tension, the economic and technological capacity to support a hi-tech arms race and the absence of a multilateral security framework - and provides a worthwhile context in which to assess the analytical applicability of RSCT.