The Ebb and Flow in Sino-Philippine Foreign Policy Behaviour

Named “the mother of all territorial disputes” due to its complexity, the South China Sea region has been the centre of conflict and competition for decades. The international significance, economic importance, geostrategic position and complex structure of the South China Sea dispute make it a relevant and interesting subject to study. This thesis analyses foreign policy behaviour within the South China Sea dispute and the factors that have influenced it in a period ranging from 1990 through 2014. While six Southeast and East Asian states have expressed varying and often-­‐overlapping claims in the region, the analysis specifically looks at the dispute between China and the Philippines. Their immense power-­‐variation, increasing assertiveness, and varying foreign policies provide an interesting perspective. Moreover, the U.S.-­‐Philippine alliance enables us to look at the influence of the U.S., as old-­‐stage hegemon and stabilizer in the Asian Pacific, on both China’s and the Philippines’ actions. The case study research is executed through congruence analysis, in which competing theories are used next to one another to make sense of the central case. Two main rationalist IR theories, Realism and Liberalism, are chosen to see which of them provides the most relevant explanatory factors for social reality in the Sino-­‐Philippine dispute. The Realist factors that have been deducted from theory are the anarchic international structure; relative gains and power; and threat perceptions. Liberalism has provided us with absolute gains; domestic democratic institutions; and economic interdependence as possible influencing factors for foreign policy behaviour. The empirical analysis has shown that, overall, Realism provides more accurate explanations for both China’s and the Philippines foreign policy. Due to its analytical focus on security as a foreign policy goal, states’ concern with relative gains, their position in the anarchic international system, internal and external balancing behaviour and threat perceptions it has created useful insights into both states’ foreign policy. Moreover, its consideration of states’ relative power position and the consequent variations in state behaviour have proven to be accurate, as China being the stronger state engaged in different types of behaviour than the Philippines being the weaker one. Liberalism provides a useful addition by allowing one to look at domestic structures (regime type and economy type) as influencing factors of foreign policy. Moreover, while its focus on absolute gains and welfare maximization explained Philippine behaviour in the early 1990s, it was overall especially hard to account for China’s foreign policy using Liberal factors, as eventually its foreign policy could be reverted back to Realist factors. Moreover, Liberalism generally predicted the same behaviour for China and the Philippines, with the exception of the influence of their (differing) political structure, while it is shown that their behaviour varied and was strongly influenced by their power position. Lastly, the Liberal thesis could not explain why China and the Philippines fell back into contentious behaviour at the end of the 2000s despite increasing trade relations. Thus, while we have seen that more factors have influenced both states’ behaviour, the core events can be led back to the Realist thesis with its influencing factors grounded in the international structure. Apparently, foreign policy in contentious situations still follows Realist predictions. Therefore, Realism is the strongest underlying theory to explain state behaviour in the South China Sea.