序論 一国史・二国間関係史からアジア広域史へ

二〇世紀アジア広域史の可能性

抄録

Critics of Orientalism have pointed out that the concept of “Asia” lacks any real substance and that it was invented in opposition to the idea of “Europe.” Consequentially, by speaking of shared characteristics within Asia, one risks being dismissed as simply reproducing the foundations for either Euro-centric notions of “Asian despotism” and “Asiatic modes of production” or the ethnocentrism of modern Japan. Traditionally attempts to employ a politico-cultural approach that analyzes particularistic qualities of political phenomenon and systems different from Europe and America have been critiqued as tautological exercises fostering racism and stereotypes. However, while refraining from arguments based on innate particularities of a region or ethnicity, by looking at the diffusion and formation of shared systems of possible exchange, is it still not possible to historically consider a sort of political culture of the Asian region formed through path dependency? The birth of the EU brought us a greater focus on the leadership of politicians that initiated such a project, and at the same time highlighted the importance of common factors that accumulated in Europe such as the legacies of the Roman empire in the form of law and Christianity, post-medieval political unification, the history of tariff and monetary exchange, the Marshall Plan, and NATO.
By employing a framework of broader regional Asian history, it may be possible to conceive of nations and regions in a new manner that corresponds to a globalization not bound by national borders. This trend was begun by pre-modern historians and has continued with recent research employing the notion of intellectual and cultural chains. However, attempts to historically analyze modern political, economic, and social conditions of a wider regional Asia as a whole have remained insufficient. To this end, this Introduction presents an historical model of six world orders that have come to exist in Asia over the course of history and thus hopes to relate events currently taking place in the greater Asian region during this century to earlier developments. The six imperial world orders elaborated include; 1) the imperial Chinese world order, 2) the Western imperial order (represented by the greater British empire), 3) the Japanese imperial order (The Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere), 4) the first American imperial order (from WW I to the end of the Cold War), 5) the Soviet imperial order, 6) and the second American imperial order (post-Cold War).
This special issue has brought together both diplomatic historians and other specialists in order to historically analyze several phenomena unfolding on the stage of greater Asia between 1910 and 2000. Their articles all point to new possibilities for an Asian history that analyzes what traditional approaches based on unilateral and bilateral histories could not and, in their substantive quality, take a first step toward deconstructing the image of “Asia.”