Amity and Enmity: Heterogeneous Responses toChina?s Rise in the United States and the Philippines.

ABSTRACT:One of the more puzzling empirical phenomena of the post?Cold War period in Southeast Asia confounds both neorealism and neoliberalism: namely, the absence of a sizable arms race or security dilemma among claimants of territory in the South China Sea despite conflicting state interests and the absence of ?hard? institutions to help resolve those disputes. These structural theories cannot account for why, in the presence of an anarchical international system, rapidly expanding potential hegemon, and weak material position, Southeast Asian states have demonstrated the cooperative behavior that they have. Nor can they explain why, despite an overwhelming material advantage, geographic distance, and influential position of the United States in many of the international institutions in which China is now a somewhat cooperative member, U.S. policymakers and their constituents demonstrate markedly stronger suspicions about China?s assumption of great power status? This paper has two primary objectives: to present evidence that demonstrates the inability of structural interest-based theories to explain variation in international responses to China?s rise and so doing to offer an explanation from an identity perspective that examines the possible explanatory role of Othering discourses in foreign policymaking. The paper will begin by rejecting the null hypothesis, derived from structural theories, that countries can be accurately modeled as unitary actors whose behavior is an outcome of the international system. Then, through a study of the discourses with which U.S. and Philippine political leaders discuss China?as measured by government-sponsored research, public opinion polls, defense spending trends, and various other indicators of interstate perceptions?it will attempt to demonstrate that language and discursive frames serve as a powerful intervening variable mediating the impact of power and efficiency in the international system. Initial findings suggest that in an atmosphere of uncertainty U.S. policymakers utilize established sense-making images and discourses to make sense of their situational environment and rely on dispositional and racially derived assumptions about China that are common throughout the American public, and ignore or repress assessments that contradict the policies and perceptions supported by that society?s social rules. Contrastingly, notably less hostile speech-acts characterize the ?Rise of China? discourse in the Philippines. In this sense, each nation?s discursive framework provides its leaders with a unique language that provides policymakers with an understanding, as Wittgenstein describes it, of ?how to go on.? As such, political discourses, values, and beliefs can no longer be considered merely the reflections of political structure, but causal agents that can determine whether political outcomes are hostile or amicable. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]