Foreign Policy

The article examines postwar Philippine-Japan relations by using Mohammed Ayoob's theory of subaltern realism. Subaltern realism posits that Third World state behavior is largely influenced in its security predicament by the twin pressures of late state-making and late entry into the system of states. Applying this paradigm to the postwar Philippine situation explains why the Philippines behaved as it did in the postwar international system. The article offers a new approach to the study of postwar Philippine-Japan relations by focusing on security and state-building factors, systemic as well as unit variables, as the primary determinants of Philippine foreign and domestic policy.

""This article aims to provide answers to two questions prompted by the latest reforms of Brazilian foreign service during Lula da Silva’s presidency: How exactly might these institutional changes generate any impact over the Brazilian diplomatic corporation cohesion at large? How could bureaucratic insulation be undermined as an unexpected outcome of this process? To accomplish their objectives, the authors will briefly review the process of institution-building in Brazil, with an emphasis on the diplomatic corporation and the transformations it has undergone
over the last three decades.""

The first section of this introduction arranges the four theoretical approaches and methods presented in the special issues – namely interpretative constructivism, post-structuralism, discursive institutionalism (DI) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) – along two dimensions: a) the role of discourse in the constitution of the world, depending on whether approaches perceive social structure as being constitutive of or constituted by discourse; and b)  interpretation of the weight of material and ideational elements in discourses. This model helps us make sense of the profound theoretical diversity that characterises analytical approaches to International Relations discourse. The second section tackles the question of ‘who does the speaking.’ It identifies the different voices that converge in the EU's international choir and problematises the discursive environment that forges international discourses through the theoretical lenses of selected approaches. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are presented.

"La actual crisis económica y financiera mundial favoreció un mayor acercamiento entre las economías sudamericanas y China profundizando el salto cualitativo y cuantitativo de la relación. Sin embargo, la creciente concentración del comercio en este gran socio oriental ha comenzado a generar temores de una nueva relación de dependencia reproduciendo un patrón de inserción centro-periferia.
Nuestro propósito es analizar las relaciones de América del Sur con China en el actual siglo, focalizándonos en los cuatro principales socios comerciales sudamericanos – Argentina, Brasil, Chiles y Perú-. El análisis es realizado a la luz de los conceptos de
inserción internacional y diversificación. Complementaremos nuestro trabajo como una visión sobre los vínculos con el Sudeste de Asia, por su potencial para lograr una mayor diversificación con una región con proporciones más cercanas a las sudamericanas.
El artículo se divide en dos principales apartados, el primero que se orienta al tratamiento de los vínculos comerciales y el segundo en el que sintetizamos las características de las relaciones político diplomáticas"