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Despite substantial differences in many aspects, modern history of Korea and Poland share a significant level of similarities mainly thanks to their geographic locations between two great powers: Korea between China and Japan, and Poland between Germany and Russia. The unfavorable locations have constantly forced the two nations to adjust and accommodate to changing external environment beyond their control, while desperately trying to preserve their sovereignty. The two unfortunates had to go through partition, occupation, or colonization for a significant period of time in their modern history. The asymmetric relationships also pressured the two to build a clientele relationship with much powerful neighbor(s), especially during the Cold War. However, the end of the Cold War and domestic success of the two, both political and economic, have allowed these nations position themselves in much confident and assertive manners in both regional and global politics. The paper seeks to explain a non-major power's foreign policy behavior by historically comparing Korea and Poland. Through thorough investigation of modern history of two nations, their hedging strategy, the entrapment-abandonment dilemma, the special relationships with the US (The War on Iraq and missile defense system to name a few), and aspiration of independent foreign policy will be fully explained. This study will contribute to the development of non-major power's foreign policy and the debates in IR theory (such as balancing and bandwagoning) and provide policy implications for future security challenges of these countries. The study will also contribute to build bridges between the two disciplines of political science and history. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northeast Asian countries have been engaged in disputes over history. While their historical contentions have caused suspicions and frictions among them, I argue that they have also served as a medium of dialogue that helps establish a common understanding about the individual countries' contemporary reality and future direction. Historical contentions contribute to such a dialogue if and only if two conditions are met: regional actors recognize each other as legitimate participants in a dialogue about the salient past; and they contend over the past within a common framework of meaning. In the immediate post-war period, the region's order began as a collection of parallel national spheres where the region's actors remained within a common framework but without recognizing others' legitimacy. Northeast Asia, through historical contentions in the 1980s and 1990s, produced an embryonic form of a regional public sphere that made possible transnational communications about the region's future and each nation's desires, but it now stands at a fork between strengthening the regional public sphere and fracturing it into a contentious regional sphere. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]