Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- One. Introduction: Ghosts, Regionalism, and Reconciliation -- Two. Bloody History in Two Regions -- Three. Germany and France: Creating Union -- Four. Japan and South Korea: Enmity between Allies -- Five. Germany and Poland: Enlarging the Tent -- Six. Japan and China: Can't Buy Me Love -- Seven. Janus-Faced Superpower: The U.S. Role in Different Regionalisms -- Eight. The Healing Power of Institutions -- Notes -- References -- Index.

Germany, which brutalized its neighbors in Europe for centuries, has mostly escaped the ghosts of the past, while Japan remains haunted in Asia. The most common explanation for this difference is that Germany knows better how to apologize; Japan is viewed as "impenitent." Walter F. Hatch rejects the conventional wisdom and argues that Germany has achieved reconciliation with neighbors by showing that it can be a trustworthy partner in regional institutions like the European Union and NATO; Japan has never been given that opportunity (by its dominant partner, the U.S.) to demonstrate such an ability to cooperate. This book rigorously defends the argument that political cooperation—not discourse or economic exchange—best explains Germany's relative success and Japan's relative failure in achieving reconciliation with neighbors brutalized by each regional power in the past. It uses paired case studies (Germany-France and Japan-South Korea; Germany-Poland and Japan-China) to gauge the effect of these competing variables on public opinion over time. With numerous charts, each of the four empirical chapters illustrates the powerful causal relationship between institution building and interstate reconciliation.

Introduction : external sources of continuity and change -- Social networks and the power they produce -- The postwar political economy of Japan -- Leading a flock of geese -- Maintaining the relational status quo -- Elite regionalization and the protective buffer -- The costs of continuity -- Grounding Asia's flying geese -- Some change-- at last -- Conclusion : beyond Asia

For political elites in any nation, war museums serve as powerful storytellers. They may reflect and even help shape collective identity. But the effect is especially strong in the case of authoritarian regimes that are able to tell a consistent, coherent narrative about a past conflict. In this analysis, drawing on insights from commemoration studies, comparative politics, and international relations, I look at three museums in Japan, which is politically divided over how to remember World War II, and three museums in China, which has achieved a revised, but still top‐down consensus over that war. The comparison suggests that all of these museums use "affect," more or less successfully, to tell their stories. But it also reveals that the shared history recalled in Chinese war museums is more effective and thus "useful" for Chinese elites than competing histories recalled in Japanese museums are for Japanese elites.

Cultural analysis, an increasingly popular approach, contributes to our understanding of comparative and global politics by drawing needed attention to non-material factors. In some forms, however, this approach may also strip political actors of agency, treating norms and ideas as external, independent and determinative. Gramsci offers a useful corrective, highlighting the elusive link between material and non-material factors. I invoke Gramscian analysis to explain the otherwise confounding volatility in Japanese norms of identity, norms that over the past 150 years have appeared to flip-flop between "Western" and "Asian" poles. This case study reveals that dominant forces in Japan have used these competing social constructs to consolidate their hegemony or advance their particular interests at different historical moments. (Pac Rev/GIGA)