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The cockpit of future conflicts

Martin Jacques

SIX YEARS ago, when I was last in Japan, the issue of China barely ever featured during conversations. China now looms large in the Japanese mind. It evokes a complex of emotions, from surprise and confusion to fear and defensiveness. While there is a recognition that China represents a huge economic opportunity — China has suddenly become Japan's largest trading partner and played a key role in hauling Japan out of its long-running economic malaise — that is far from the dominant emotion. Rather, April's anti-Japanese demonstrations in China have helped give expression to an intangible but growing sense of concern.

The demonstrations articulated and crystallised longer-run trends and problems. As a consequence of its staggering growth over the last few decades, East Asia is now the world's biggest economic region. Where once the region was overwhelmingly preoccupied with that economic growth, its countries are now acquiring new concerns and ambitions. If East Asia is indelibly associated in the public mind with growth, it is likely in future to become increasingly characterised by growing national tensions. At the heart of this process is inevitably the rise of China, fast emerging as the region's economic centre.

Japan faces a profound dilemma, one that it has barely begun to think about. Ever since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan has been at pains to identify with the West and to distance itself from Asia, which it regarded as hopelessly backward. This contempt for its own continent shaped Japanese attitudes towards its wars of conquest and colonial behaviour. After Japan's defeat in the Second World War, its security alliance with the U.S. helped to reinforce and further accentuate this Western tilt.

For well over a century, Japan was hugely more advanced than its Asian neighbours. That situation only began to change in the 1970s with the rapid economic growth of the first Asian tigers. Since then the picture has been entirely transformed. Japan now faces an Asian hinterland that is dynamic, expansive, and brimming with confidence. The post-Meiji Japanese attitude towards its neighbours has been overtaken by history. Worse, it has become a liability, preventing Japan from coming to terms with its own history and thereby also poisoning relations with its neighbours.

Haunted by the past

Japan has, of course, been mindful of Asia's transformation. Indeed it has played an important role in the process, both as a catalyst and a model. It has also been a generous donor of aid. What it has not done, however, is to rethink its own historical relationship with, and behaviour towards, its neighbours. No country in the world ever finds it easy to apologise to others for its past conduct — because of the loss of pride involved and the internal divisions that are inevitably entailed — and Japan, until now at least, has never really been required to, except in the most formalistic of terms. Those peoples it abused — especially the Chinese and the Koreans — were simply too weak to force a change of attitude, and the U.S., its post-war ally and sponsor, was too busy worrying about China to attach any importance to displays of Japanese contrition. As a consequence, Japan now finds itself staring at the past as it looks into the future. This problem will not go away — on the contrary, it is destined to loom ever larger.

In Europe all this might sound rather distant and esoteric. But think of it like this. Since 1800, arguably earlier, Europe has been the centre of the world. Even after its decline following 1945, Europe continued to play this role because the Cold War bisected it. The end of the Cold War has finally drawn the curtains on Europe's primacy. East Asia is in the process of replacing it as the new global centre. Not only is it already the biggest economic region in the world; China and Japan are the world's second and third largest economies in terms of GDP measured by purchasing power parity. Meanwhile the U.S. cannot afford to cede its position as the key military and security presence in the most powerful region in the world. East Asia, far from being a distant region, is the cockpit of future global trends and conflicts. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(Martin Jacques is a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University, Japan.)

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