National role conceptions: la politica estera di Cine e Corea del Sud nell'era della connettività

What are the national role conceptions of South Korea and China? What kind of identity do they aspire to project to the outer world? Do they aim at playing more relevant roles as international players? And if they do, what kind of roles do they aspire to play? Do they wish for more leadership at a regional or global level? Or do they want to avoid facing more responsibilities? This research analyzes the foreign policy behavior of South Korea and China using the Role Theory as its theoretical framework to find an answer to these research questions. The evidence used for the analysis consists of three sets of data: the first one consists of official statements on the two countries’ foreign policy visions, the second one consists of two foreign policy speeches corpora analyzed in their original languages, Chinese and Korean, the third one consists of information concerning the two countries’ respective economic development models that will be compared to the two countries’ contributions to international development. The findings suggest that while both South Korea and China use experience-based strategies in their contributions to international development, South Korea appears to promote its economic development model abroad more assertively compared to China, and with the underlying intention to gain more global influence. Rather than promoting its development model abroad, China seems to support the economic growth of developing countries in the ways its government knows how to, pursuing common development under mutually beneficial agreements. While South Korea appears to have global ambitions exceeding its middle-power status, China seems to be reinforcing its status as a cooperative major country, taking on its due responsibilities, but not seeking to take more, especially as an individual global leader.