Korea’s Choice for Asia

Abstract

The article discusses the Republic of Korea’s role in multiple already working
and being negotiated free trade agreements from the viewpoints of the influence of
Korea’s domestic affairs on the role and of the political and economic change among its
partners in the free trade agreements. It finds that Korea’s position on the free trade
agreements remained stable despite the shift to the domination of right-wing parties in
Korea’s domestic politics in 2008 and back to domination of left-wing parties in 2017.
Both left- and right-wing parties in Korea supported the free trade agreements, despite
their rationale was different: in 2000s left-wing parties perceived the free trade
agreements to curb negative consequences of the 1990s Asia’s financial crisis, while in
2010s right-wing parties perceived them as a response to the failure of multilateral trade
negotiations within the World Trade Organization. It also finds that Korea’s partners in
the free trade agreements sometimes seek to re-negotiate the already existing free trade
agreements in response to domestic political and economic changes in those countries. In
most cases, Korea and its partners managed to find common grounds at re-negotiations
and thus to conclude renewed bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements. At the
same time, Korea, China, and Japan have so far failed to conclude a trilateral free trade
agreement, thus leaving the ASEAN in the position of the exemplary group of countries
in the core of the network of Asia’s free trade agreements.