The Fault in Our Stars? Korea’s Foreign Policy and Germany’s Rise, 1876–1910

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Abstract

The annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 is generally explained as a failure to reform Korea and adopt more efficient economic and military models. With its backward economy and sclerotic political regime, Korea was ill-prepared to enter power politics. The period running from the mid-nineteenth century up to 1910 is often implicitly considered as a straight line leading to inevitable Japanese colonization.
In this article, I show that this domestic explanation of Korea’s colonization is not sufficient. Indeed, even after successful reforms, Korea would still have been a small state surrounded by great powers. The domestic-level explanation overlooks the international environment in which Korea was evolving. The true cause of the annexation lies at the level of the structure of the international system.
After the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, Asian and European power politics became irremediably intertwined and came to form a single global international system. Korean leaders had to adapt to a new environment where China was not the hegemonic power anymore. From the mid-nineteenth century until the first years of the twentieth century, Korea was evolving in a stable multipolar world — a world with several great powers with even capabilities — and was able to play one great power against the other in order to preserve its sovereignty. This strategy is commonly known by theorists as ‘buck-passing’. It is a relatively cost-free strategy that worked well for the Koreans for several decades. Great powers such as Britain, France, Japan, and Russia were preoccupied to not let one of their rivals dominate the Korean Peninsula; they readily caught the bucks passed by Korea. However, the global balance of power changed after Germany emerged as a potential hegemon. Because the European great powers had to focus all of their forces to contain Germany, they could not afford anymore to balance against Japanese power in East Asia. Most capitals tried to maintain cordial relations with Japan in order to extirpate themselves from Asian affairs. Consequently, the great powers left Korea to confront Japan on its own. Korea, whose strategy had worked up to that point, had no one left to pass the buck of balancing Tokyo after Russia’s decisive defeat in 1905 against Japan.
Thus, I conclude that Korea’s conquest and colonization by Japan are not sufficiently explained by domestic factors and reform failure and that the international structure of the time put Korea in a situation where survival was near impossible. Reforms or not, the emergence of the German threat broke the balance of power in Asia in favor of Japan, and so doing doomed Korean independence.
After introducing the topic and the theoretical framework, I describe Korea’s foreign policy strategy from 1860 to 1910 using both primary and secondary sources within a process-tracing approach. I then describe the changes in great power politics that occurred in the early 1900s and how this affected Korea’s preferred strategy of buck-passing.
This study has two main goals. First, it sheds new light on the annexation of Korea by Japan using international relations theory. Second, it contributes to the understanding of small states’ strategy for survival and small states’ responses to the international structure.

Author

• Dylan Motin, Kangwon National University