Can Diplomacy Always Achieve a Peaceful Dispute Settlement?

On July 8, 2019, the U.S. State Department notified Congress of an arms sale of $2.7 billion, including tanks and surface-to-air missiles, to Taiwan.^[1] The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Geng Shuang, said this sale "interfere[s] with China's domestic affairs and harm[s] China's sovereignty and security interests. China regrets and firmly opposes it."^[2]

　　As this example demonstrates, when a country's attempts to change the status quo threaten another country's security, the threatened country should express concerns. Diplomatic protests are lodged to express concern about a challenge against the status quo and to seek a peaceful dispute settlement by discouraging such a policy change. Can diplomacy always achieve a peaceful dispute settlement? In the following, I will present an answer to this puzzle based on the latest findings.

Diplomatic Protest and the Rally Phenomenon

In international relations, scholars have been addressing the rally phenomenon for over sixty years to examine the impact of international events on public opinion. The rally phenomenon is a situation in which foreign threats, such as military confrontation and economic sanctions, arouse patriotic sentiment within a target country, leading to a short-term increase in support for a political leader and foreign policy. When citizens perceive a threat from a foreign country (the out-group) as threatening their society (the in-group), induced emotional reactions enhance national unity. Several empirical studies have supported this in-group and out-group argument (Murray 2017). This argument is very helpful for understanding the political consequences of diplomatic protest.

　　Military confrontation and economic sanctions impose physical damage on citizens in the target country. Diplomatic protests are merely words (or political communication) and can be lodged without such political costs. Readers may believe that diplomatic protests do not cause a rallying phenomenon. Nevertheless, security policy is a salient issue of contention for the public. Even a negative sentiment from a foreign country may be sufficient to arouse patriotism within the target country.

Findings from Our Online Survey Experiment

Wen-Chin Wu (Academia Sinica) and I published an article in International Studies Quarterly as the result of joint research. We attempted to explore the impact of diplomatic protests against Taiwan's purchase of U.S. military weapons on the Taiwanese public's political attitudes (Kagotani and Wu 2022).

　　We fielded an online survey from February 12 to March 13, 2019, and collected responses from 2,314 individuals. Within this questionnaire, we conducted a randomized controlled trial experiment, randomly assigning respondents to several treatment groups receiving different stimuli and a control group receiving no stimulus. This allowed us to capture differences in political attitudes between these treatment groups and the control group as unbiased policy effects.

　　We prepared the following fictitious newspaper articles as stimuli respondents of treatment groups received.

U.S. Arms Sale to Taiwan
The U.S. has approved a $330 million arms sale to Taiwan in another sign of Washington's support for the government in Taipei amid rising Chinese pressure on the country.
　　With regard to the U.S. arms sale to Taiwan, XX said "The U.S. should immediately withdraw the arms sale plan and stop military to military relations between the United States and Taiwan so as to avoid further damage to Sino-U.S. relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait."

One of five spokespersons - the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Democratic Progressive Party (ruling party), and the Kuomintang (opposition party) - was inserted as the speaker in the XX in the newspaper article. Then, for respondents assigned to the control group, we prepared an article with only the first paragraph as a sentence providing only background information. Finally, one of six fictitious newspaper articles was randomly assigned to each respondent at the beginning of the questionnaire. As a result, the respondents would form five treatment groups and one control group.

　　After reading an assigned newspaper article, each respondent answered three questions about their support for President Tsai, their support for Tsai's defense policy, and their policy preferences regarding the size of the defense budget. By comparing the responses of each treatment group with those of the control group, we could examine how much the protests changed Taiwanese political attitudes.

　　The results show that only diplomatic protests from China and South Korea induced the rally phenomenon. That is, these diplomatic protests not only increased support for President Tsai and her defense policy but also even increased calls for the defense budget expansion. Additional analysis confirms that these diplomatic protests induced the rally because China and South Korea had political disputes with Taiwan.

　　As Figure 1 shows, the probability that the average respondent supports President Tsai increases from 0.472 to 0.545 when the protesting country changes from a non-hostile country (like Japan) to a hostile country (like China or Korea). In other words, since the probability of support changed from less than half to more than half, diplomatic protests significantly changed the average respondent's political attitudes. When the attributes of the protesting country similarly change, the probability of the average respondent's support for President Tsai's defense policy increases from 0.793 to 0.826. Diplomatic protests change political attitudes marginally, as the high level of policy support originally existed and is only slightly strengthened. Furthermore, a similar change in the attributes of the protesting country increases the probability of the average respondent's demand for the defense budget expansion from 0.497 to 0.56. In other words, diplomatic protests significantly shaped the average respondent's policy preferences because they changed the probability of demanding the defense budget expansion from less than half to more than half.

Figure 1: The Rally Effect of Diplomatic Protest^[3]

Political Consequences of Diplomatic Protest and Implications for Alliance Politics

Diplomatic protests can provoke a backlash within the target country, causing a rallying phenomenon. The domestic backlash can then raise tensions between the two countries by increasing support for the target country's leaders and policies and increasing calls for hard-line policies. Diplomatic protest is an attempt to express concern about another country's altering the status quo, to demand its reversal, and to resolve disputes peacefully. However, it is not easy to achieve this goal. A nation faced with the revisionist country's challenge against the status quo has to choose between two options: accept the change without diplomatic protest or protest diplomatically and provoke a political backlash in the revisionist country. While confronting the dilemma of diplomatic protest, the country is forced to choose the latter option, increasing tensions in the bilateral relationship.

　　The results of the survey experiment also provide implications for the relationship between the United States and its allies. The U.S. attempts to increase the local military balance in favor of its allies by increasing the provision of military weapons and the stationing of U.S. forces abroad, thereby deterring challenges to its allies from their adversaries. Such attempts, however, invite diplomatic protests from the adversaries and trigger domestic backlash within the allies, thereby increasing tensions between the adversaries and the allies. Therefore, the deterrent effects of these policy instruments, such as U.S. arms transfers and expansion of U.S. forces stationed in the region, should be discounted more than previous research has shown.

---

[1] Mainichi Shimbun. 2019, July 10. Tokyo Morning Edition, p. 8.

[2] https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/ s2510_665401/t1679792.shtml (accessed October 15, 2019)

[3] Source: Kagotani and Wu (2022), p. 8.

---

References

Kagotani, Koji, and Wen-Chin Wu, 2022. "When Do Diplomatic Protests Boomerang? Support in Taiwan," International Studies Quarterly 66 (3), sqac043, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac043

Murray, Shoon. 2017. "The "Rally-'Round-the-Flag" Phenomenon and the Diversionary Use of Force ." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://oxfordre.com/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/ acrefore-9780190228637-e-518

Koji Kagotani／Associate Professor, Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University
Specialties: International Relations, Formal Theory, and Quantitative Methods

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1975, he graduated from Kwansei Gakuin University with a Bachelor dgree in Law in 1999, received his M.A. from the Graduate School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University in 2001 and Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

He was a lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Trinity College, University of Dublin in 2011, an assistant professor in 2012, a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics, Osaka University of Economics in 2014, an associate professor in 2016, a visiting scholar at the UCLA Department of Political Science in 2019 (to 2020), and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University in 2023 before assuming his current position.

Since 2020, he has served on the editorial boards of the international academic journal International Relations of the Asia Pacific and the Springer Book Series: Evidence-Based Approaches to Peace and Conflict Studies.

• Share articles
• 
• 
•