FOCUS ON ASIA

The world today is grappling with an unprecedented financial and economic crisis. The threat is on a scale that cannot be handled by a single nation alone, and the world’s leaders are searching for a variety of international measures to tackle the problems. The 20-nation summit in London at the beginning of April was one example of a global-level attempt to deal with the crisis. We also see new moves toward cooperation on the regional level—in the European Union, for example, and in East Asia as well. For Japan, though, the path to realizing such multilateral initiatives as an East Asian community and an Asian Monetary Fund is strewn with problems arising from history—territorial claims, the country’s school textbooks, the spirits of war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine, and the "comfort women" issue, to name a few. Added to these is the problem of the "Asianism" of Japan’s past.

In "Beyond the Spell of ‘Asianism,’" which we carry in this section, Shiraishi Takashi, visiting professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (and editor in chief of Japan Echo), and Associate Professor Caroline Sy Hau of the Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies tackle these very issues. The authors describe characteristics of the prewar and wartime concept of Asianism that held sway in Japan: first, it "criticized the ‘double standard’ represented by the claim of universality for the Eurocentric world order and its exclusiveness in practice," and second, it "aimed for solidarity among the people of Asia based on race, culture, civilization, tradition, resistance, experience of oppression, and other commonalities . . . to create an ‘Asia-centric’ order to rival the Eurocentric one." The authors note that Asianism was at once a "mentality, ideology, and movement" with these characteristics and that it took the form of many different types of projects not just in Japan but throughout Asia during this period.

The two world wars of the twentieth century put an end to the Eurocentric world order that Asianism criticized, though, and Asia has departed considerably from its past by becoming a developing region of economic wealth and political democratization. It is time, state Shiraishi and Hau, to consider Asia as a "regional system alongside those of other regions, such as Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, and consider the historical processes of growth, development, maturity, and demise" with respect to the region. Over the past seven or eight years, the creation of an East Asian community has developed into a political project for two reasons: first, the regional economic crisis of 1997–98 caused the "politics of productivity" or "politics of economic growth" to stop functioning as they had, and second, the rapid rise of China has changed the playing field. In the wake of that economic turmoil a decade ago, the authors note, the region’s countries came to see regional cooperation as "the only way to deal with the highly strategic domestic and international issues" confronting them. They go on to state that they do not expect the region’s people to develop a cohesive Asian identity through market forces alone, though, and that rather they foresee an Asia whose people engage in identification as Asians—which they caution is not the same as identity.

The other piece we carry below is by Taniguchi Makoto, formerly the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations and deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In "Building an East Asian Community," he notes that negotiations on establishing such a community began in 2000 or so but have made little progress since then.

The main reason for this, he says, is that while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has played a leading role in shepherding the negotiations forward, East Asia’s three main powers—China, Japan, and South Korea—have failed to enter into serious discussions on the topic. He draws a critical conclusion from this: "Looking at the Japanese government’s approach to the negotiations on forming an East Asian community, I cannot help wondering whether it was ever seriously interested in this undertaking." Taniguchi goes on to stress that the current economic crisis will press China, Japan, and Korea to rethink their dependence on the US dollar, and that Japan must not miss this opportunity to advance an initiative toward creating an Asian currency basket under the aegis of the Asian Development Bank.

Former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro made a similar proposal in an essay he contributed to the April 2009 issue of Chûô Kôron. The details of his idea can be downloaded from the website of the Institute for International Policy Studies (www.iips.org), where he serves as chairman, in a report titled "Prospects for the Global Economic and Financial Systems in the 2030s." (Tanaka Toshirô, Professor, Keiô University)

© 2009 Japan Echo Inc.