モンロー・ドクトリン，アジア・モンロー主義と日米の国際秩序観――戦前・戦中期における日本のモンロー・ドクトリン論を手掛かりに――

抄録

As the bicentennial of the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine approaches, it is astonishing to see the contrast between the understanding of the Monroe Doctrine almost a hundred years ago and that of the present-day United States. The complacent applause of the Doctrine at its centennial gave way to the detachment of American society from it and its critical reexamination in academia.

Interestingly, this kind of critical, if not thorough, examination of the Monroe Doctrine was preceded not just by scholars in Latin America, a region in which the United States frequently used the Doctrine as a pretext for intervention, but also by Japanese scholars whose government advocated the Asian Monroe Doctrine before and during World War II. During the 1930s and the early 1940s, the Monroe Doctrine was a favorite topic of Japanese intellectuals as their government pursued what it termed a “New Order in East Asia” and the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Area” with the goal of creating an “Asia for Asians.” The vision clashed with U.S. Open Door policy toward China.

Tachi Sakutaro, a specialist in international law, Kamikawa Hikomatsu, one of the founders of the field of international relations in Japan, and other Japanese scholars have been quite critical of the Monroe Doctrine. Their points, at least superficially, are similar to those of today’s American scholars who focus upon the unilateral and imperial traits of the Doctrine. Tachi, Kamikawa, and others, however, did not seem to grasp the tendency of American foreign policy to lean increasingly toward Pan-Americanism and collective security in the interwar years. On the other hand, a few intellectuals such as Yokota Kisaburo, international law professor and a former student of Tachi, Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, a harsh critic of Japan’s foreign policy, and Takagi Yasaka, a founder of the field of American Studies in Japan, belong to a decided minority of scholars who have taken issue with the Asian Monroe Doctrine and inquired into what the Monroe Doctrine really meant to the United States of the time. These scholars, nonetheless, did seem to understand the American vision of international order better than those Japanese ones who criticized the Doctrine.

Japanese scholars who criticized the Monroe Doctrine made some penetrating remarks concerning its traits, which preceded the contemporary reexamination of the Doctrine by American scholars. But it was the vision of those who opposed the Asian Monroe Doctrine and gave a balanced appraisal of the Doctrine that paved the way for the merger of the two visions of the international order in Japan and the United States after the Pacific War.

Although the Cold War in Asia may have been the primary factor in the making of U.S.-Japan alliance, the merger of the two visions of international order was the underlying cause of the postwar cooperation between the United States and Japan.