“International contribution”, diffused in the wake of Gulf War, is a peculiar idea in Japan. Western International Relations Theory (IRT) talks about “international coordination” and/or “international cooperation”, but never deals with “international contribution”. I’m going to focus on the idea of “international contribution”, which enables me to discuss Japanese perception of international relations and encourages me to reconsider so-called IRT.
How does the idea of “international contribution” rise up to the surface? The historical overview of this question is presented in the first section. Through the rapid economic growth, the prime ministers of Japan such as Eisaku Sato, Yasuhiro Nakasone and Noboru Takeshita came to feel the enhanced international status as one of big powers, which was unaccompanied by Japan’s actual performance. This gap between the expectation from “international society” and the reality in “international society” provided the setting for the idea of “international contribution”. The emergence of this idea was nothing more than contingent use initially. Notwithstanding this genesis, “international contribution” precisely captured something like the flavor of the time and got into circulation.
Then, how was “international contribution” mentioned? The structural outline, which is visible in the use of “international contribution”, is inductively extracted in the second section. The perception that Japan had taken “free ride” on “public goods” arousing international criticism keenly made Japanese realize the necessity of “international contribution”. Furthermore, “international society” is hypostatized in the background of “international contribution”, dredged through the comparison with “international coordination” and “international cooperation”. These understanding denote that at least for most of the Japanese the realm of international relations is not “anarchy”.
Besides, how was “international contribution” as practice put into? Alongside of this question, transition of subject positions, especially pertaining to the Self Defense Force (SDF) and the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), is reviewed in the third section. Although dispatching SDF which evokes the shade of military forces had long been regarded as taboo in the postwar period, the SDF brought about recognition as an actor of “international contribution” together with growing necessity of “international contribution”. NGO, on the other hand, came to accumulate fund and human material due to escalating interest in “international contribution”. Then the governmental awareness of NGO has gradually changed and the government has got to utilize NGOs.
Various aspects of “international contribution” are sketched through the analysis of these chapters. Based on these aspects, I wonder if “international contribution” is a certain type of IRT. It functioned historically as a “lens” which gave us some “answers” at that time. If that’s the case, we ought to consider what the “academic” theory is and what it should be.

View full abstract

Since the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has been recognized as a leading actor in international environmental politics. In chemicals policy, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) regulation that came into force in 2007 captured global attention and was recognized as a paradigm shift in chemicals policy. For the most part, the thematically relevant scholarly literature has merely focused on the policy-making process at the EU level. However, one of the most significant features of the EU environmental policy implementation process is that it relies predominantly on member states and private actors within these.
In the following article, I examine the process of shaping European chemicals policy by focusing on the relationship between the EU and a particular member state—Germany—regarding policymaking and implementation. Since Germany has the largest chemical industry in Europe, it is widely considered to play an important role in the implementation process. My analysis was based on a policy network approach, which allowed me to put forward the argument that the changes in the policy network since the late 1980s were significant and resulted in the further separation between the processes of policymaking and the prospects of operability in the implementation process.
During the 1970s, Germany, which had traditionally featured heavily in cooperation and consultation with the chemical industry, had a highly influential position in shaping EU chemicals policy in accordance with German interests and requirements. To compensate for the government’s lack of expertise and power to formulate and implement policies without agreements from key industry groups, policy networks in which the latter participated were developed. However, the 1980s and 1990s saw the Europeanization of chemicals policy; pioneering states, such as Sweden, gained EU membership. As a result, the policy network of the EU chemicals policy was transformed from a “policy community” to an “issue network.” This prevented the leading actors of the former policy network from retaining the previous chemicals policy, where the priority was operability in the implementation process.
This caused tangible tensions between Germany and the EU institutions during the REACH regulation negotiations. The precautionary principle is a guiding principle of environmental policy and often considered an important factor in the ambitious risk regulations of the EU. However, Germany, which had put forward the principle at the EU level, was deemed the main opponent during the REACH negotiation process.

View full abstract

This article explores how the British government agreed in the summer of 1922 to fund their debts owed to the American government during the First World War. Since the U.S. entered the war on the Allied side in April 1917 until June 1919, British debts to the U.S. subsequently swelled to approximately $4.3 billion. After the war, the American government firmly insisted on swift repayment by the Allies of their war debts; and they suggested that U.S. economic assistance for European reconstruction was not to come until the debtor countries settled their debt questions with the U.S.
Nevertheless, the British government continued to avoid funding their debts since 1920. Claiming on a general cancellation of all the inter-Allied debts, the Lloyd George government declined even to acknowledge their financial obligations. Chief Cabinet members such as the Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the War Secretary Winston Churchill were concerned with the impact on the domestic economy (and public opinion) of expending a vast sum of money; they also wished the Americans to take a more lenient position over the war debts.
A sea change in the British policy of the war debt question came in 1922, when European relations reached its nadir in regard to German reparations. The French sought to enforce on Germany the strict execution of the reparations obligations of the Treaty of Versailles; meanwhile, the Germans, undergoing hyperinflation, persistently demanded a moratorium due to its chaotic economic condition at home. Then, from May to June 1922, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Robert Horne and the British Ambassador at Washington Sir Auckland Geddes convinced the Cabinet that such deadlock in the Continent did require some external assistance from the U.S., the largest creditor nation, and they pressed for an early Anglo-American war debt settlement in anticipation of some U.S. commitment to the European problem. Around the same time, the U.S. Ambassador at London George Harvey assured Lloyd George and Churchill that a debt settlement would lead to Anglo-American cooperation to tackle problems in Europe. In July 1922, the Lloyd George government finally consented to dispatch a British delegation to Washington for starting negotiations on conditions of repaying their debt to the U.S. After the British determined to fund their debts to the Americans, Anglo-American relations again stood on a sound footing, which could be a stimulus to their joint effort over German reparations toward the subsequent Dawes Plan of 1924.

View full abstract

Shared histories are one of the most crucial factors in constructing ethnicity and nationhood. Redefining what to remember in new socio-political contexts is important for nation-building and reconciliation, especially after mass violence including genocide. However, this redefinition poses some problems. First of all, a country’s official history has been rewritten and exploited by power; historians have warned that governments exploit history in order to justify their rules and to silence dissenting voices. Secondly, it is not easy to deconstruct a previous version of historical narratives associated with past ethnic violence and replace it with a new one. Rather, the content of the new narratives can be problematic since there is a danger that it may aggravate existing ethnic conflicts. If so, what kind of historical narratives are needed in post-conflict circumstances in order to avoid further violence?
For 20 years since the genocide took place in Rwanda in 1994, a vast amount of literature has been published to explore the background and process of the genocide. Recently, scholarly attention has gradually been shifting to post-genocide issues including transitional justice, national reconciliation and state-building. However, we cannot fully understand post-genocide Rwanda without putting it into a historical context and paying attention to the continuity of historical narratives.
This article examines the historical narratives in colonial, post-colonial and post-genocide Rwanda. First, the assumption of the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ that the Hamitic Tutsi were superior to the Bantu Hutu and that Rwanda was a centralised kingdom of the Tutsi affected the European policy of indirect rule. Based on the hypothesis, the Tutsi leaders in late colonial Rwanda claimed that Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa had lived peacefully as Rwandans and that the Europeans had divided Rwandans into ethnic groups. The first Hutu administration in the post-colonial period claimed that the Tutsi were foreigners and not authentic Rwandans and that, since the Hutu had been so oppressed by the Tutsi, they needed to liberate themselves by means of revolution. President Juvénal Habyarimana, who overthrew Kayibanda and established the Second Republic in 1973, also claimed the Hutu authenticity and the legitimacy of 1959 Revolution. The ideology of the 1959 Revolution was widely publicised and contributed to ethnic division, which together with other political, economic and social factors, led to the genocide in 1994. After the genocide, the Rwandan Patriotic Front regime has returned to the narratives of the previous Tutsi leaders and emphasised pre-colonial ‘national unity’ and the ‘invention’ of ethnicity under Europeans during the colonial period and the European manipulation of the Hutu Revolution. Compared with research previously conducted by researchers, all of these historical narratives that powers in Rwanda have had from the colonial era to the present have emphasised certain aspects of the past and neglected the others, partly contributing to the escalation of the ethnic conflict. Thus, in order not to rekindle the ethnic conflict but to avoid future violence, the new historical narrative should be more nuanced and comprehensive.

View full abstract

Disciplinary history of the academic study of international relations (IR) supposes that the ascent of modern realism was intellectual responses to the political crisis of the 1930s that eventually resulted in WWII. In other words, for modern realists, the crisis was entirely the politico-military one that should be dealt with by the use of military power or diplomatic negotiation with the threat of military power. However, this acknowledged supposition has prevented IR scholars from comprehending the classical realists’ political thought precisely. This article intends to demonstrate that from the start IR scholars misunderstood Reinhold Niebuhr’s doctrine of original sin and the metaphor of ‘Hobbesian fear’ that was originally invented by Herbert Butterfield as cures to the moral-spiritual crisis, concrete manifestations of which were ‘political (secular) religions’ and ‘messianism’ of the 20th century.
It must be noted that Niebuhr and Butterfield regarded secular ‘liberal culture’ as well as Nazism and communism as dangerous political religions or messianism that in each way promised to establish the perfection in this world by human efforts and, because of these promises, aggravated conflicts in the 20th century. However, both of them attributed the moral-spiritual crisis not to secularization of Western civilization that can be cured by the return to formal religion with the help of ecclesiastical authority, but to the human sin of ‘self-righteousness’ or ‘pride of virtue’ typically preached in ‘the parable of the Pharisee and the publican’ (Luke 18: 9-14). From this it follows that the purpose of Niebuhr’s doctrine of original sin was not to explain the recurrence of interstate wars, but to warn the contemporaries in the United States not to arrogantly attribute the evil of the war to the American opponents. Similarly, Butterfield’s ‘Hobbesian fear’, that he thought originated in the human sin of self-righteousness, intended to criticize the tendency to depict conflicts in history as against the evil by the good.
The moral implication of these ideas has not been inherited by the succeeding generations of IR scholars. But it is not because of the alleged secularization of IR study after the latter half of the 1950s. A close look at published writings of John H. Herz and Kenneth W. Thompson, who were contemporaries of Niebuhr and Butterfield and acquainted with their ideas at that time, reveals that both of them misread the doctrine of original sin and ‘Hobbesian fear’ as descriptive statements and made no reference to the moral-spiritual crisis. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that it is not the secularization of IR study but the lack of the sense of moral-spiritual crisis in contemporary scholars that was the main reason of the decline of the Christian Realism in IR.

View full abstract

This article examines how Japan, Britain and China considered the intervention of the League of Nations into disputes between the Powers and China from 1920 to 1931, focusing on the problem of Chinese governmental representation in the League.
In 1920, in order to avoid becoming involved in a boycott against Japan, Britain decided to deal with the Shantung Question in the League if this was submitted by China. Britain also considered the intervention of the League as an option after the Washington Conference, because it did not expected much from cooperation with the other Powers.
Japan initially left room for dealing with the China Question, excluding the Shantung Question, in the League if the Powers agreed. However, after the Corfu Incident in 1923, in which Japan had been involved as the president of the Council, Japan came to fear being criticized by small Powers in the Assembly of the League in case of a dispute with China. On the other hand, China came to recognize the importance of the Assembly in appealing to world opinion.
Thus, there were major differences in the position of these three states. However, the political situation in China altered British attitudes toward this problem. In 1926, the Kuomintang government started the Northern Expedition to overthrow the Beiyang government, the internationally recognized central government of China at that time. While the Kuomintang government expanded its territories and clashed with the Powers, the Beiyang government represented China in the League until its collapse in 1928. Because of this, the League was temporarily paralyzed in dealing with the China Question. Britain, therefore, regarded appeals to the League as useless, so it bypassed the League in sending troops to Shanghai in 1927. When the Kuomintang government submitted the Jinan Incident to the League in 1928, Japan tried to reject the case for the same reasons as those raised by Britain. Japan, securing consent from Britain and the Secretary-General of the League, succeeded in preventing the League from intervening in the dispute.
After overthrowing the Beiyang government, the Kuomintang government assumed the right to represent China in the League. Therefore, Britain returned to its former attitude of accepting the discussion of the China Question in the League. In 1931, Japan tried to prevent the League from intervening in the Manchurian Incident. However, the Council accepted the case of China and decided to discuss the matter. This is mainly because the problem of Chinese representation, which had until then blocked the intervention of the League in China, had already been dissolved.

View full abstract

The de facto states in the former Soviet Union established the effective rules of the territories throughout warfare. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, South Ossetia in Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and Transnistria in Moldova claimed independence from each republic. The republics have not reigned these regions to this day. These divided areas have claimed independence, but have failed to gain international recognition. As a result these regions have become the de facto states. Transnistria is of special interest in these entities. Although Transnistria did not become the autonomous republic in the Soviet Union, this region was able to establish “state”. How Transnistria did build the de facto state during the disintegration of the Soviet Union?
The purpose of this article is to analyze the political process of the state building in Transnistria. I especially focus on the United Council of Work Collectives, known by its Russian acronym OSTK (Ob’edinennyi Soyuz Trudovykh Kollektivov). OSTK took the initiative to separate from Moldova. Previous studies have analyzed diplomatic and military assistance from Russia to Transnistria, autonomous systems in Soviet Union and so forth. However previous literatures have paid little attention to internal political process and the agency which led to Transnistria’s de facto separation. In this article, I examine the movement of OSTK about the session from Moldova under the condition that Moldova also separated from the Soviet Union.
This article first analyzes the formation of OSTK and the protest against the laws of the language. OSTK was composed of work collectives and established in Tiraspol. Then I conduct process tracing about the state building in Transnistria with a focus on the idea of OSTK. This plan became clearer in connection with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and separation of Moldova from the Soviet Union. Especially after the referendum to remain within the Soviet Union in Transnistria, the idea of OSTK was decided on the formation of the new republic within the Soviet Union.
However this was different position from Moldova. Moldova decided independence from the Soviet Union. The gap between Transnistria and Moldova did not fill even after the Transnistria conflict broke out. I also point out that the idea of OSTK justified military intervention from Russia during Transnistria conflict. In this conflict Moldova could not sovereign Transnistria and signed the cease fire agreement. As a result this gap has been frozen. The Conflict has not unresolved and Transnistria survived to this day as the de facto state.

View full abstract

This article explores the mutual interaction of nuclear nonproliferation negotiations in Europe and nuclear nonproliferation negotiations in East Asia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Previous studies separately surveyed European nuclear proliferation and East Asian nuclear proliferation. These studies,however, focusing on one specific area respectively cannot completely answer the question as to why the Soviet Union and the United States changed their nuclear policies as well as to why the results of the nuclear nonproliferation negotiations in Europe and East Asia became symmetric. This is because there is a clear fact that the Soviet Union supported Chinese nuclear development and the United States planned NATO nuclear sharing and the MLF, which partly allowed West Germany to “possess” nuclear weapons at first. In order to answer these questions adequately, I treat both areas’ nonproliferation negotiations as a series of negotiation and show a new hypothesis that the Chinese nuclear issue was dealt promptly to settle the West German nuclear issues.
The Soviet Union, which greatly feared that West Germany would acquire nuclear weapons, indicated that it would discourage Chinese nuclear development in return for the United States to do the same regarding West Germany’s nuclear policy. The Soviet Union promoted building trust with the United States and succeeded with the result of West Germany ratifying the PTBT and the NPT. In contrast to Europe, East Asia failed in achieving nuclear nonproliferation. What are the causes of such a symmetric outcome? West Germany and China both needed nuclear deterrence for their national security, especially against threat from the Soviet Union and/or United States. The United States offered West Germany security assurance and kept mutual confidence, but the Soviet Union unilaterally demanded that China abandoned its nuclear development in order to promote nuclear nonproliferation negotitations with the United States without any compensation. This act resulted in losing China’s trust because the Soviet Union’s top priority was to stop West Germany, and thus treated China’s nuclear issues as one of the means to achieve this goal.
Does settling West Germany’s nuclear issue in the form of mutual cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union indicate that their negotiations were excellent? If we turn our eyes towards the correlation between European negotiations and East Asian negotiations, we can understand that they are not necessarily superior negotiations like non-cooperative games which all countries gain profit, but rather,unequal negotiations that the cost for the agreement in Europe was passed to negotiations in East Asia, and the European negotiation became one of the causes of the failure of nonproliferation in East Asia.

View full abstract

What was it that eventually put a period to the Anglo-Japanese alliance at the beginning of the interwar years, a treaty that had been the most successful treaty in East Asia to that moment, through two victories in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and the First World War of 1914–1918? As many previous works have claimed, was the strong pressure from the United States decisive in terminating the alliance? Or else,as some British works in relatively recent years have argued, was the opposition of the United States no more than the last push to bring down the curtain on the arrangement, if discarding the alliance had already become all but a foregone course in London by the time Washington made clear its opposition?
This study will challenge both accounts. First, it will show that the American opposition alone was not and could have not been enough to put an end to the alliance, even though this opposition did indeed create the international dispute itself over whether or not the alliance should be continued. At the same time, the study will deny that London was almost independently decided on the matter. The British government did need something external to help it with its decision; however, that was not the increase of American pressure but the restoration of the credibility of America’s commitment to a new international order-building program, at least in the Asia-Pacific region. To this point, American diplomacy had had trouble displaying this commitment, due to the country’s failure to join the League of Nations that the US itself had conceived.
Therefore, secondly, this work will emphasize the serious dilemma that the British alone confronted in the international politics that led to the lapse of the alliance. That dilemma can be well understood as a variety of the “security dilemma in alliance politics” very well known to IR students. Major previous works,especially in British research, believe that Japan consistently held the alliance to be more significant than Britain did until the last day of the treaty, because the former gained greater advantages through an alliance with the leading power in world politics. However, this study will largely revise this view by describing both Britain’s international political dilemma and Japan’s diplomatic changeover in the aftermath of the Great War.

View full abstract