동아시아 갈등문제에 대한 해결방안 – 미군 철수/일본 자위대의 한반도 주둔 (국제정치학 뉴스과제 11)

Written on November 26, 2013

International Herald Tribune, November 23, 2013
“A Growing Chill Between South Korea and Japan Creates Problems for the U.S.” By Martin Fackler and Choe Sang-Hun


해당 기사는 한국과 일본간의 갈등이 고조되고 있는 상황에 대해 설명하고 있다. 한국의 박근혜정부는 일본의 사과, 특히 위안부 문제에 대한 사과를 요구하고 있다. 박근혜는 반일정책의 일환으로 이번 중국과의 회담에서 안중근 기념비를 설립하기로 합의하였으며, 일본과의 정상회담을 거부하고 있다. 반면 일본의 아베내각은 미국까지도 동아시아의 갈등 고조를 야기하리라고 우려한 호전적인 언사를 여태까지 보여왔고, 초보수주의인 지지기반을 고려할 때 위안부문제에 대해 사과할 가능성은 낮다. 이러한 역사적 문제에 기반한 갈등상황은 앞으로도 계속 깊어질 전망이라는 것이 기사의 내용이다.

동북아 갈등상황의 해결이라는 미국의 지역적 목표의 관점에서 보았을 때, 한일 갈등은 매우 우려스러운 현상이다. 그리고 한일갈등이 한국의 입장에서도 바람직하기는 힘든 것이 사실이다. 한국의 외교적 목표를 단기적으로 한반도 비핵화, 장기적으로 평화적 통일로 볼 때 동북아 평화가 그 전제조건이 됨은 어느정도 분명해 보인다.

지금부터 이러한 한국의 외교적 목표를 달성하기 위한 새로운 방안을 제시해보고자 한다. 이 방안의 핵심은 한일 관계 증진과, 한반도 미군(일부) 철수&일본 자위대의 주둔이다. 말도 안되는 방안으로 보인다는 것은 알지만, 실현만 된다면 한국의 목표를 달성하는 것이 가능하다고 생각된다.(1)우선 미국의 입장에서 보았을 때, 중국이 현실주의에 입각하여 지역적 헤게모니를 확보하고자 하는 상황에서 한미일 삼각공조는 Pivot to asia 전략의 핵심이다. 따라서 한일 유대와, 이에 따른 자위대의 한반도 주둔은 바람직한 것으로 받아들여 질 것이다. (2)현재 일본은 집단적 자위권 확보가 가시화되는 상황이다. 자위대 한반도 주둔은 집단적 자위권을 문서화하는 것을 넘어 실질화 하는 효과가 있으므로 이로부터 일본이 얻을 수 있는 정치적 이익은 막대하기에 이 안을 적극 지지할 것이다. (3)중국이 한반도 통일을 가장 꺼리는 이유는 미국과의 접경이다. 그런데 주한미군을 적어도 일부 철수함으로써, 중국이 느끼는 안보위협을 이완할 수 있다. 이로부터 통일에, 적어도 한반도 비핵화에 대한 중국의 지지를 이끌어 낼 가능성이 늘어날 것이다. (4)러시아는 극동개발에 관련하여 북한보다 남한에 유화적이고, 자위대 주둔이 이 관계를 변화시킬 것 같지는 않다. (5)북한은 중국으로부터의 압박을 통해 개혁 개방으로 이끌어질 필요가 있다. (6)마지막으로 한국은 미군이 감소하는 점에서는 안보가 불안해지는 측면이 있으나, 한국군과 일본군의 공조가 전제되는 상황에서 북한의 전면전 시도는 불가능하다고 생각되므로 전쟁의 위험성은 낮다고 여겨진다.

이에 따라 동아시아 5개국이 해당 안을 지지하여 한국이 외교 목표에 근접할 수 있으리라고 생각된다. 한국 내의 반발, 북한의 도발 가능성, 전제되는 국제적 상황, 예상되는 국가별 행동에 대해 보다 자세히 적고 싶으나 추가적인 서술을 위한 공간이 좁아 더 적지는 못하였다.


자료정리

TOKYO — In the courtly world of diplomacy, the meeting between Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea was something of a shock.

Mr. Hagel was in the region to try to revitalize America’s faltering “pivot” to Asia and had one especially pressing request for Ms. Park: to try to get along better with Japan. The steely Ms. Park instead delivered a lecture about Japan’s “total absence of sincerity” over the suffering that imperial Japan caused Korea in the last century and finished with a request of her own: that Washington force Tokyo to behave.

“If Germany had continued to say things that inflicted pain, while acting as if all was well, would European integration have been possible?” she asked Mr. Hagel. “I think the answer is no.”

Ms. Park’s refusal to budge during that September meeting was one of many recent reminders that the leaders of Japan and South Korea, the United States’ closest military partners in Asia, seem to be barely on speaking terms. Analysts say the current tensions are among the worst in recent years, an increasingly vexing problem for the Obama administration as it struggles to present a united front in dealing with a rising China and a nuclear North Korea.

This month, a rare meeting of Japan’s and South Korea’s top defense officials ended in an impasse, with harsh words and no progress on an intelligence-sharing deal the United States had been pushing for years.

Ms. Park went so far as bringing China into the fracas, even as the Japanese and Chinese feuded over disputed islands. She asked China’s leader during a summit meeting to erect a monument to a Korean national hero who assassinated the first prime minister of Japan for his role in the Japanese colonization of Korea. The Chinese complied. It has also not been lost on the Japanese that Ms. Park held the summit meeting with China’s leader while she continued to refuse to do the same with Japan’s prime minister, breaking a longstanding tradition of Korean and Japanese leaders meeting soon after taking office.

“History issues are having impacts on us and our alliances in Asia in ways that we never anticipated,” said Thomas Berger, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University.

While history has long haunted relations between Japan and South Korea, the recent chill is being driven partly by the very pivot to Asia that increasingly makes the administration anxious that its allies get along. To bolster its attempts to contain China’s territorial ambitions, the United States has supported Japan’s moves to strengthen its armed forces despite South Korea’s fear that Japan is reverting to militarism.

But beyond the policy irritants, the frustrations in the two countries seem very much rooted in the personal history of their new, and conservative, leaders.

The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a rightist who has long sought to have his country’s World War II-era history portrayed in a more positive light. He is driven, analysts say, by a deep desire to exonerate his grandfather, an architect of Japanese empire-building in the 1930s who was eventually arrested as a war criminal by Japan’s American occupiers, before becoming prime minister.

Ms. Park carries her own historical baggage. As the daughter of Park Chung-hee, a military ruler who served as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army while Korea was still a colony, she is under constant pressure to distance herself from her father’s ties to Japan.

“Neither Park nor Abe can come together for personal reasons that run across generations,” said Mikio Haruna, a politics professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. “And this fact is driving Washington up a wall.”

The lack of communication, analysts and American officials say, has practical ramifications, including a setback of American efforts to nudge the two countries’ militaries to work together. Such cooperation, which is very limited, would be crucial during any regional conflict.

“The headwind created by these tensions over history raise the political cost of Japan-Korea cooperation that should be a given,” said Daniel R. Russel, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

For its part, South Korea wants to avoid any regional conflict and is reluctant to take sides in the rising tensions between China, its largest trading partner, and Japan, its third largest.

Initially, American analysts say, much of the blame in Washington for the troubled Japan-South Korea relationship fell on Mr. Abe, viewed by some as a dangerous nationalist. But the analysts say that has been changing, especially since the Hagel meeting.

Analysts say that there is no personal bad blood between Ms. Park and Mr. Abe, that any Korean leader would feel pressure to take a hard line with Mr. Abe, who has long denied that the Japanese military had a direct role in coercing so-called Korean comfort women to provide sex to soldiers during World War II — a particularly fraught issue for South Koreans. And relations began on difficult footing. According to South Korean officials, Ms. Park — who had called for stabilizing South Korea-Japan relations during her presidential campaign — became deeply upset when Taro Aso, the No. 2 man in the Abe cabinet, visited Seoul for her inauguration and, they said, told her that there was no big difference between the Yasukuni Shrine, where some convicted war criminals are honored, and Arlington National Cemetery.

Mr. Abe has not visited the shrine since taking office but has sent offerings on special days, feeding South Korean suspicions that although he has toned down his rhetoric, his hawkish stances have not changed.

But the legacy of the collaboration by Ms. Park’s father makes it even tougher for her to compromise, experts say. “For President Park, the negative legacy carries a huge domestic political risk,” said Park Cheol-hee, director of the Institute for Japanese Studies at Seoul National University.

Korean leaders have made it clear that ties can be improved only if the Japanese prime minister admits to greater government responsibility for past offenses and agrees to pay compensation to the surviving “comfort women.”

That may be the one thing Mr. Abe cannot do. This is also a highly emotional issue for the Japanese ultraconservatives who form his political base; the nationalists see it as a fabrication used to help paint their nation as the villain in World War II. (Their take is that Japan was fighting to liberate Asia from European and American imperialism.)

Referring to the historical entanglements, Mr. Berger said, “These are chronic problems that only seem to be getting worse.”