China, Japan and South Korea are three big economies in Northeast Asia that are innegotiations for a trilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA). A concluded FTA among them willcreate world’s third largest regional market that consists of of 1.52 billion people and thataccounts for 20% of world’s GDP. However the economic cooperation between the threecountries has constantly been interrupted by political issues that root back in the history of thethree countries. In the history the three countries have developed enemy images of oneanother, which have restrained their interaction over the years and influenced their currentrelationship. This thesis uses the enmification theory to explain how these enemy images andenmity feelings have emerged in the history and what impacts they have on political issuesand the economic cooperation between the three. Examples on political issues that are broughtup in this thesis are the recent intensified territorial disputes over Diaoyu/Senkaku islands andDokdo/Takeshima islands.

With the aim to embark on the theoretical debate on soft and hard power, this study uses the territorial dispute between the ROK and Japan over the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands to illustrate how the common scholarly understanding of the two power concepts are incorrect and misleading. While soft power and hard power are commonly recognized as two antithetical types of power within the theoretical debate, I argue that they are in fact linked and cannot be divided into separate forms of power. Using a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis, the thesis replaces the concepts of soft power and hard power with the concepts of representational force and physical force to showcase how representational force can enable and legitimize the use of physical force. The thesis is able to identify how the governments of the ROK and Japan exercise representational force and legitimize the use of physical force against each other, despite them being in a trilateral security cooperation with the U.S. Consequently, the study illustrates how the concepts of soft and hard power should be better understood within the theoretical debate.