Hedging without landing: domestic regulatory friction in Japan and South Korea caught between U.S. and EU digital mandates

Through a comparative institutional analysis of Japan and South Korea, this article examines whether middle powers can engage in hedging behaviour by simultaneously accommodating competing U.S. and EU digital mandates within their domestic legal orders. The article argues that dual engagement with divergent normative systems generates a ‘dual lock-in effect’ – overlapping treaty commitments that systematically constrain domestic regulatory space. This constraint operates in two ways. First, divergent treaty frameworks render uniform national legislation inherently difficult, as a single domestic law must simultaneously accommodate two potentially incompatible normative architectures. Second, both the U.S. and the EU possess independent structural power to compel compliance, leaving the hedging state with limited room for sustainable equivocation. The article concludes that middle powers such as Japan and South Korea must strengthen domestic regulatory assessment mechanisms and pursue multilateral solutions where bilateral arrangements have proven insufficient.