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My point of view: China needs a close eye on Japan, an neighbouring economic power which has the ability to become a military one in very short time. A lot of us must have noticed changes in Japan's foreign policy in recent years. Is that a resurgence of the right wing or a reflection of the idea prevailing in its people as claimed by the author? China needs to make its own judgment. Still there are some points worth our rethinking in the article. For instance when talking about the future trend of Japan's foreign policy, the author listed three important factors, namely North Korean threat, the American alliance and the Japanese public's changing perceptions.
Japan's foreign policy
From pacifism to populism
Jul 8th 2004 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition
AFP
As Japan begins to stretch its long-unused military muscles, how far does it want to go and what can it do?
Get article background
IN DECEMBER 2001, with the world still shocked by the September 11th attacks, a North Korean spy ship sailed mischievously close to Japan. Although North Korean vessels did this often, Japan's coastguard had never done much about it. Japan is well known, after all, for its pacifist constitution. But this time was different. Japanese coastguard cutters gave chase, got into a gun battle that left some of their own crewmen wounded, and stuck with the fight until the spy ship exploded and sank in the East China Sea.
Apart from North Korea making trouble, everything about the clash was extraordinary. Although the spy ship was spotted within Japan's “exclusive” economic zone, it was outside Japan's more narrowly defined territorial waters. The official Japanese response to ambiguity is usually some sort of fudge. In this case, moreover, Japan had ample time to calibrate its reaction: the ship sank more than 24 hours after it had first been spotted. Nor did Japan offer a hint of regret. Even though the spy ship sank in China's economic zone, Japan's government claimed a right to salvage it, and stood by this decision. When the ship was raised, it was found to be loaded with spy gear and heavy weaponry.
The incident highlighted Japan's changing attitude towards its armed forces, which has gathered pace during Junichiro Koizumi's three-year stint as prime minister. The most visible sign of that shift occurred earlier this year, when Mr Koizumi sent more than 500 troops from its carefully-named Self Defence Forces (SDF), to help rebuild Iraq. Deploying them was a giant step historically, and not just because the force is sizeable and the theatre is dangerous. For the first time since the second world war, Japan has sent its soldiers abroad without the moral comfort of an international mandate.
In other ways, too, Mr Koizumi has sought throughout his tenure to test Japan's pacifist limits. Soon after the 2001 attacks, parliament passed a special law authorising ships from the Maritime SDF to help America's fleet in the Indian Ocean. The law restricted co-operation to refuelling and logistics, but Japan's navy, in effect, provided rear support for the invasion of Afghanistan. Last summer, parliament passed laws spelling out the government's powers in the event of an attack on Japan's territory. These laws had been discussed since the 1970s, but pacifist nervousness had prevented their enactment before last year. The prime minister has also called for changes to the constitution, including the pacifist restrictions in Article 9.
Land of the rising gun?
All this has delighted the administration of George Bush. America's alliance with Japan helps to shrink the Pacific, much as Anglo-American ties do the Atlantic. And because Asia is less coherent than the European Union, Japan's regional role is in some ways even more important to America than Britain's. In particular, America's 45,000 troops in Japan, and their related air and naval bases, matter more than its bases in any one European country. They not only protect Japan, but allow America to project strength across a region littered with potential hotspots. Many American officials reckon that as Japan gains confidence in its ability to use sailors and soldiers wisely, the alliance will grow more flexible and useful.
Although it pleases Mr Bush, however, Mr Koizumi's efforts to knock the rust off Japan's armed forces have rattled many others. Indeed, some of Mr Koizumi's critics seem unhappy precisely because America likes the idea. Others, both in and around Japan, take notice of Mr Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni shrine, where more than a dozen war criminals are commemorated along with Japan's fallen soldiers. They detect signs of a resurgent right wing, and fear a return of Japanese militarism.
These criticisms are not convincing. Although Japan has indeed done much of what America wanted in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has hardly been bullied into it. Mr Koizumi has been as keen to lend a hand as Mr Bush has been to receive one. When their interests have diverged, Mr Koizumi has gladly stood up to his chum from Crawford. The Americans squealed last year when Japan ignored their sanctions on Iran and signed a deal to invest in its Azadegan oilfield.
Nor does Mr Koizumi's eagerness imply a sinister swing to the far right. His foreign policies reflect clear and reasonable national interests and draw support from the broad Japanese public, which shows little desire to remilitarise and start strong-arming neighbours. Mr Koizumi displayed his popular touch in May, for example, by visiting North Korea and trading food aid for the release of five children born to former abductees from Japan. This upset the nationalist right, but mainstream Japanese voters agreed that it was better to be pragmatic than tough. Mr Koizumi's poll ratings shot up by ten percentage points.
Since then, domestic issues, a looming election and other factors have combined to reverse that trend. Indeed, the poll numbers for Mr Koizumi and his cabinet, below 40% in some surveys, have rarely been lower (see chart). This week, as voters prepared to replace half of parliament's upper house in elections on July 11th, his ruling coalition seemed in danger of retaining its majority by an embarrassingly narrow margin. But the recent slide largely reflects a domestic row over pensions policy, combined with a sense that Mr Koizumi's political style has crossed the boundary from confident to cocky. It is not proof of a sudden and broad-based change of heart about foreign policy.
Voters do seem to have been dismayed by the prime minister's abrupt pledge, at the G8 meeting of rich countries last month, to include Japanese troops in a new multinational force in Iraq that has been endorsed by the United Nations. Since Japan has complex pacifist restrictions, the decision has important legal and democratic implications; but it will have little effect in practice on Japan's current mission, which involves helping to rebuild a quiet Iraqi town. The public reaction does not appear to reflect attitudes towards the deployment, since the mission will not change, so much as a sense that Mr Koizumi is cutting through delicate legal precedents without proper debate.
Far from being hijacked by a right-wing cabal, therefore, Japan's conduct of foreign policy is arguably growing more democratic. And the recent widening of the SDF's role, although driven by Mr Koizumi and viewed nervously by the public, reflects an interaction between his keen political instincts and broad popular attitudes. Those attitudes suggest that Japan is not so much flexing its muscles as it is stretching them after a long convalescence, to see whether they work and what they can usefully do.
The experiment began more than a decade ago. Many Japanese were humiliated by the first Gulf war, when western countries chastised Japan for failing to send troops, even though it had paid billions into America's war chest. In 1992, parliament passed a law allowing the SDF to venture abroad as long as its troops were part of a UN mission and met several other criteria. Japan soon sent SDF troops to help UN peacekeepers in Cambodia (1992), Mozambique (1993) and East Timor (1999 and 2002); used them to extend relief to Rwandan refugees in 1994; and has had SDF members in the Golan Heights since 1996, as part of a team of UN observers.
Self-Respect Forces
Most Japanese are proud of these missions, but this hardly reflects a popular urge to redefine their country as a military power. The prevailing Japanese attitude towards using force is closer, for obvious reasons, to the dominant view in Germany. Whereas many Americans, Australians and Britons look on war as a terrible option, which at times must be weighed against other nasty outcomes, most Germans and Japanese came to a simpler conclusion after the second world war: that war is always wrong.
That pacifist streak, along with a desire to avoid criticism, is reflected in the limits that the 1992 law placed on Japanese peacekeeping missions. These state that the SDF can be sent only when a ceasefire is in place and when all parties to a conflict agree that Japan can take part. The law also strictly limited the use of weapons to “the minimum necessary to protect the life or person of the personnel”.
These rules seemed a reasonable extension of Japan's previous post-war foreign policy, which had used generous aid and tireless self-promotion of Japan's “peace-loving” credentials to win friends and influence governments. Yukio Okamoto, a former adviser to Mr Koizumi on foreign affairs, says that the restrictions led his countrymen to view the Japanese troops as “NGOs in blue helmets”: harmless aid workers with a UN stamp of approval.
Despite these pacifist leanings, however, there are huge differences between Japan on the one hand and Germany on the other. One is obvious: Japan faces clear threats. For Germany, the end of the cold war removed the Soviet threat, and it now faces little risk of a military attack. In Japan, however, the cold war gave way to a new danger: North Korea.
The discovery in the early 1990s that North Korea was developing plutonium, which could be used to make nuclear warheads, got the public's attention. Those fears grew after North Korea's shocking decision to test a medium-range Taepodong missile in 1998, lobbing it over Japanese airspace into the Pacific Ocean. Even before Mr Koizumi entered office, therefore, Japan had taken steps to deal with the North Korean threat. Further signs of bad behaviour during his term have strengthened the public resolve—not least North Korea's admission (since denied), in 2002, that it had violated a 1994 agreement by trying to enrich uranium.
Japan has responded stiffly. Last year it launched the first spy satellites in its history to get an independent look at North Korea. It has joined the Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral effort to interdict North Korean ships carrying weapons and contraband, and thus to eat into the regime's hard-currency earnings. In February, parliament passed a law allowing the government to impose economic sanctions on North Korea—including banning cash remittances—unilaterally, and without any UN resolution. Another law allowed the government to deny port calls by the North Korean ferry that retrieves hard currency from criminal groups in Japan. And Japan is now in talks to quicken the rollout of a proposed missile-defence system, on which it is co-operating with America.
The public clearly favours Mr Koizumi's tough stance towards North Korea. When he needed a new secretary-general to run last year's general-election campaign, he chose Shinzo Abe, a youthful politician who had made a name for himself with his hawkish views on Kim Jong Il's regime. The North Korean threat, by highlighting the importance of the alliance with America, partly explains why much of Japan's public supports the sending of the SDF to Iraq, even though that mission stretches the pacifist limits.
That, however, is only part of the story. Besides having North Korea next door, Japan also differs from Germany, and, indeed, other European countries, in other important respects. For both Germany and France, one of the easiest ways to strut a little taller in the world is occasionally to get up America's nose. France can do this easily, given its permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Working in tandem, moreover, France and Germany together can exert a strong influence on the European Union, sometimes trying to steer it in ways that frustrate American goals.
Japan has no such diplomatic clout—and only three conceivable ways to gain any in the near future. It could get a permanent seat on the Security Council, which it has sought for years and shows few signs of obtaining. It could behave in Asia as France does in the EU, putting its weight behind regional initiatives that exclude non-Asian countries. But even if it could pull this off—which would be highly implausible in the face of regional rivalries—it would damage its own economy, which depends heavily on globalisation. Since these two ideas are non-starters, the most sensible way for Japan to gain influence is to start putting its substantial military resources (see chart) to work multilaterally, and to make genuine security contributions as often as they are called for.
Many Japanese diplomats and foreign-policy experts argue that Japan already carries weight on the global stage. It has been one of the world's top two official aid donors, along with America, since the 1980s, spending |
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发表于 2004-7-14 22:51:43
发表于 2004-7-14 23:16:05