Search results

AbstractWoodrow Wilson's name remains forever entwined with the Paris Peace Conference and efforts to transform geopolitics after 1918. Despite recent emphases on the power of this so-called 'Wilsonian Moment,' initiatives by the American president remain controversial, and his principal global legacy has come to be defined as the rise of nationalism in the developing world. In the historiography of modern Japan, Wilson and the Paris Conference have long been identified less as opportunities than as challenges, embodied unmistakably in Prince Konoe Fumimaro's 1918 condemnation of the conference and the proposed League of Nations as beneficial only to the USA and Britain. Reading back from 1931, historians of modern Japan have located in the Versailles settlement seeds of an epic new expansionary effort from the Manchurian Incident to the destruction of Imperial Japan. This paper, by contrast, analyzes the interwar years on their own terms and, in so doing, locates the structural foundations of a dramatic Japanese national departure. Wilson is more than a 'moment' in interwar Japan. Embraced at the very moment that a largely agricultural and regional nineteenth-century Japan becomes a twentieth-century industrial state and world power, it is potent enough to withstand the illiberal tide of the 1930s and 40s to blossom again after the Second World War.

Developments in East Asia strengthen the claims of "ConflictSpace." The contrast between general war in 1914 and the limited Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 may be explained, in large part, by the higher degree of connectivity in 1914. The difference between Japan's swift declaration of war in 1914 and hesitation by China and the United States may, likewise, be attributed to Japan's higher connectivity. A host of independent variables, such as political will and relative military strength, can wreak havoc with the basic assumptions of ConflictSpace. But used cautiously as part of an ongoing discussion between social scientists and historians, ConflictSpace may effectively gauge the relative likelihood of the spread of war. Adapted from the source document.

Dickinson reviews MAKING WAVES: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922 by J. Charles Schencking.