A Comparative Study Of Asian And European Countries Why Is There No Security Community In Asia?

Although there are other forms of security cooperation, in contrast to Europe, there is no security community in Asia. What are the reasons for Asia’s lack of a security community? After looking at several security theories, this thesis will identify and compare key countries’ security thinking in both Asia and Europe based on their official reports and documents. We select Japan, India and China for Asia, as they are major powers in this region, without whose agreement, a security community is impossible to create. We select Germany and the United Kingdom for the contrasting case study because they are the most important actors in Europe. Germany is a powerful economy in the heart of Europe, while the UK is a nuclear and conventional military power. France is another major security actor in Europe; but as it shares key military capabilities, security concepts, interests, and political values with the UK, and because of the limited time to complete this thesis, we will not include France.Countries that emphasize traditional security often create security dilemmas and zero-sum game scenarios with their competitors. This makes it impossible to establish a security community because security dilemmas prevent the necessary convergence of security interests among actors. On the other hand, countries that focus on non-traditional security or human security will generally create a positive-sum game because it is difficult for a single country to tackle human security issues on its own. Therefore cooperation is largely possible and a security community is more likely to establish. The nature of security thinking among actors is thus vital to establish a security community that would include them.In addition, whether there exists regional partnership also may play a role in establishing a security community. In Asia, both India and China is strategic independent in international affairs. On the contrary, Japan adopts alliance with the U.S., And for Japan, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty is vitally essential for interests in its national interests. And this has been already become an obstacle for Asian actors to establish a security community.So we draw attention to two factors for the analysis, the first one is the nature of security:a positive-sum game or a zero-sum game, and the second one is the regional partnership. A security community is more likely when there exists regional partnership and when they share a positive sum cooperation of international security.In terms of methodology, this thesis will combine qualitative analysis on various countries’security thinking as well as quantitative analysis on their own military spending as a share of GDP (a proxy for traditional security) with ODA (Official Development Assistance-a proxy for non-traditional security) as a share of GNl. The core analysis is on which of these two-military spending and ODA-countries put their most emphasis. This thesis will analyze this from two perspectives. One is based on official documents and reports, which can provide a deep understanding of countries’perception on its security threats and priorities. And this qualitative analysis will analyze from two factors mentioned above, which are1) the nature of security; and2) the regional partnership. The other perspective is to dig into the statistics, which is another evidence for the first factor-the nature of security. We can compare the relative level of "military spending/GDP" to "ODA/GNI". If the level of former is higher, it illustrates that this country is more traditional security oriented, and vise versa.