Mažųjų valstybių suartėjimas su didžiosiomis galiomis: kaip Lietuvai pavyko įtvirtinti strateginę partnerystę su Japonija? /

Lithuania and Japan established a strategic partnership in October of 2022, as the countries commemorated the centenary of diplomatic relations. During the visit of the Prime Minister of Lithuania Ingrida Šimonytė in Tokyo, a bilateral declaration was published stating that "the strategic partnership of bilateral relations between Lithuania and Japan, which aims to implement freedom and an open international order based on the principle of rule of law, to strengthen bilateral and multilateral cooperation on various issues" - including cooperation in politics, diplomacy and security, as well as in the fields of culture, energy, health, science and technology, and tourism. The increasingly active involvement of Lithuania in the Indo-Pacific region represents the changing concept of Lithuania's security - in the implementation of value-based foreign policy in the region, the goal is to reduce dependence on aggressive authoritarian regimes and deepen cooperation with friendly states. Lithuania and Japan are two different power actors in the international system: according to traditional thinking, Lithuania is a smaller state in the Baltic region far away from Japan. Meanwhile, Japan is a member of the group of seven most powerful countries in the world (G7), the leader of the democracies of the Indo-Pacific region and a great power. There is a clear power and material resources asymmetry between these two states, raising the question of how a strategic partnership between such actors could have happened and what can it say about today's social structure. The purpose of this work is to reveal the concept of strategic partnerships that Lithuanian decision-makers are guided by and to find out what arguments helped Lithuania achieve a strategic partnership with Japan. To achieve the goal of the work, a constructivist approach to international relations is used, conducting a comparative analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews. Three defensive statements are made: first, Lithuanian decision-makers are guided by a special concept of strategic partnership, according to which it is an exclusive and all-encompassing level of relations between like-minded states, identified in the specific case of their country as an essential manifestation of the struggle of democracies against aggressive authoritarian regimes. Secondly, the strategic partnership between Lithuania and Japan was established on the basis of cultural ties and common values, while Lithuania's value-based foreign policy towards Asia and the emerging changes relevant to both sides in the security context were the missing factors that consolidated the partnership. Third, security changes - Russia's war against Ukraine and an increasingly aggressive China - raised the importance of common values and alliance diplomacy, but were not the cause of strategic partnership. The results of the study show that the concept of strategic partnerships amongst Lithuanian decision-makers is based on the fundamentality of like-mindedness and the long-term perception. What helped Lithuania achieve strategic partnership was the mutual knowledge and common values - like-mindedness - in a changed security situation in a world where values are becoming more and more important. Finally, the study revealed that it is important to include constructivist variables - collective identity, ideas, values - in the analysis of strategic partnerships.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Šneiderytė, Gilija,

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

lit

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210585066&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210585066