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- Convenor:
-
Giulio Pugliese
(Oxford University - EUI)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Arthur Stockwin
(Oxford University)
- Section:
- Politics and International Relations
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Through novel arguments, extensive fieldwork and primary sources, this panel explores Japan's widening strategic horizons. Specifically, its engagement with strategic communications, US-Japan policy formulation of forward deployment in Okinawa, new military doctrine and new strategic partnerships.
Long Abstract:
Away from the literature's qualification of contemporary Japanese diplomacy and security policy along balancing, defensive realist or hedging lines, Abe's Japan testifies to a preference for strategic realism. To be sure, many scholars had qualified post-war Japan as a realist player in international politics, but Japan has been seldomly understood as a hard security realist player tout court.
Instead, Tokyo's "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" (FOIP) vision betrays a much more expansive understanding of Japanese statecraft, one that makes full use of Japan's material and ideational capabilities to better project Japanese power -both hard and soft- as the global security environment worsens. The Abe administration has injected Japanese statecraft with clear strategic thinking that has departed from the strictures of preceding administrations and this panel aims at underlining underappreciated avenues of change in that direction.
Specifically, the panel details: how Japan has identified clear objectives through new military doctrines, as evidenced by its first-ever national security strategy and new defence program guidelines; how Japan has sought new security partnerships, such as those with France and India in an expansive redefinition of its strategic horizons under FOIP; how Japan has leveraged its strategic communications assets to engage policymakers in DC and elsewhere; how Japanese and US policymakers get to formulate important security decisions, such as US basing policy in Okinawa.
The essays in this panel intend to make an original contribution to the field not merely by presenting a stronger case on how Japanese security policy is changing; they do so also by drawing on the authors extensive fieldwork in Japan, in Washington DC and elsewhere based on interviews with a wide range of stakeholders and primary documents analysis.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 25 August, 2021, -Giulio Pugliese (Oxford University - EUI)
Paper short abstract:
Contrary to the academic literature's understanding, Japan has been an active and effective player at government-led strategic communications, especially under the Abe Shinzo administration. To demonstrate the above, this paper presents the impact of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific in Washington DC.
Paper long abstract:
Abe's Japan has ventured forcefully in government-led strategic communications, defined as "the use of words, actions, images, or symbols to influence the attitudes and opinions of target audiences to shape their behavior in order to advance interests or policies, or to achieve objectives. For the military […] it includes creating conditions that define a desired end-state" (Farwell 2012: 12). Scholars have studied Japan's recent engagement with public diplomacy, but mostly highlighted its weak spots, including its focus on business promotion, its lack of strategic depth, if not its strident ideological qualities; in short, the scholarly consensus suggests that Japan does not engaged in strategic communications.
This paper suggests that the Abe administration has made good use of its communications leverage, with international and domestic audiences in mind. The government's budget for information activities more than tripled in 2015 and, far from wasting money away, it targeted institutions close to power, such as the 2019 endowment of a Japan Chair to Trump's former National Security Advisor at the Hudson Institute, an institution which may also provide the next US Ambassador to Japan. Moreover, Japan's communication and strategic engagement in the wider Indo-Pacific region have been accompanied by an uptick in diplomatic tours, speeches and economic initiatives: powerful rhetorical, material and symbolic demonstrations -- to target countries, strategic partners and Japanese citizens -- that China and the BRI were not the only games in town. The embedded strategic narratives suggest that Japan and likeminded states are a staying power in the so-called Indo-Pacific.
In fact, the Free and Open Indo-Pacific provides a tangible measure of Japan's successes and the paper proves how FOIP's embedded strategic narratives and geographic re-invention have gained currency among research specialists, journalists, and policymakers alike. More importantly, the paper details evidence of the US government's embrace of the Japan-born concept, as evidenced by the rechristened Indo-Pacific Command and the National Security and Defense Strategies. Preliminary fieldwork in Washington DC ascribes the US embrace of FOIP to the Japanese government's multipronged engagement with influential think tanks, academic institutions, and the global news media.
Beata Bochorodycz (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes the formulation of the US "security consensus" towards Japan focusing on a) the US think tanks, b) the "alliance mangers", c) personal networks, d) the personality traits of Policy Entrepreneurs, and the implications of the process for the US military base issue in Okinawa?
Paper long abstract:
The paper analyzes the formulation of the US-Japan "security consensus" focusing on a) US think tanks, b) the "alliance managers", c) personal networks, d) and the personality traits of Policy Entrepreneurs. Finally, it presents the US military base issue in Okinawa as a case study.
For a long time, the US-Japan alliance - the linchpin of the American East Asian security framework - has been strained by the problem of US military bases in Okinawa, Japan. These tensions are exemplified by cyclical local protests since the rape incident of September 1995. In February 2019 Okinawa held a prefectural referendum on the issue of a new base construction in Henoko, which again showed that the majority of the local population opposes the construction of a base within the prefecture. Nevertheless, local protests do not seem to have major effects on US-Japan security policy. Andrew Yeo argues that security consensus - defined as "shared perception and intersubjective understanding of the concept of national security held by host government elites" (Yeo 2011: 7) - and particularly the degree of that consensus constitutes the decisive factor that determines the impact of social movements on the security policy.
In light of the above, this paper tackles the questions: What is the American security consensus regarding the US military bases in Japan, and particularly in Okinawa, in the broader context of the American security policy? Who forms that security consensus and how? What is the role of American think tanks and "alliance managers" in the process? How do they interact with their Japanese counterparts? What are the implications of that consensus formulation process for the future development of the US military base issue in Okinawa? Methodologically, the paper tackles the above questions employing Yeo's concept of "security consensus" and by process-tracing the decision-making process through primary sources obtained during extensive fieldwork in Washington DC and, eventually, Japan.
Elena Atanassova-Cornelis (University of Antwerp)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Japan's alignment cooperation with India and France in the Indo-Pacific region. It looks at the drivers of these alignments and achieved levels of cooperation, while also assessing the opportunities and constraints of these partnerships to meet Japan's security needs.
Paper long abstract:
As one of the strongest supporters of the US-led "hub-and-spoke" security system in the Asia-Pacific, Japan under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has made significant efforts to reinforce its alliance with the US. Contemporaneously, Tokyo has enthusiastically promoted a deepening of Japan's security cooperation with other "like-minded" countries - both treaty and non-treaty allies of Washington. These include regional (Australia and India) and extra-regional (the UK and France) nations, which share liberal democratic values with Japan, as well as support America's continuity security engagement in Asia and Europe.
Differently from Japan's formal, threat-based alliance with the US, and its military-strategic focus, Tokyo's bilateral partnerships with these countries are representative of alignment cooperation - they are characterised by a lower level of institutionalisation, informality, and emphasis on shared interests and (primarily) non-traditional security (NTS) challenges. Abe's Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIPS) - which focuses on promoting regional economic prosperity through connectivity, maritime capacity-building and free navigation - has become central in Japan's strategic alignments. FOIPS has largely contributed to the recent reconceptualisation of the region, from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific, under the Donald J. Trump administration.
Against the above background, the proposed paper takes a closer look at Japan's alignment cooperation with India and France, with a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific region. These two countries come second after Australia and the UK in terms of their strategic importance to Japan in Asia and Europe, respectively; additionally, India (differently from Australia) has not been a formal "spoke" in the US-led security system, while France (in contrast to the UK) has remained a key pillar of the EU. The paper examines, from Japan's perspective, the drivers of these alignments and achieved levels of cooperation so far. It also assesses the opportunities of these partnerships, as well as the constraints they face, to meet Japan's security needs and address the deficiencies of the US-led alliance system, especially concerning more threat-based security issues.
Matteo Dian (University of Bologna)
Paper short abstract:
The Abe period has been characterized by a significant evolution of the Japanese military doctrine. The paper describes this evolution, looking at the changing objectives and roles of the JSDF and discusses the main external as well as domestic drivers of change.
Paper long abstract:
The paper describes the evolution of Japan's military doctrine during the Abe period (2012-2020). The military doctrine is considered as the institutional operationalization of the cognitive frameworks and preferences of the political and organizational leadership for its military structure. Military doctrines are generally presented in official documents, such as, in the Japanese case, the NDPG (National Defense Program Guidelines), recently published in 2013 and in 2018, as well in the country's first National Security Strategy.
During the post-war and the 1990s, the Japanese self-defence forces had only one main stated purpose, namely defensive defence. Since the beginning of the 21st century, and particularly since 2012, Japan fundamentally reconsidered its military doctrine.
This evolution has been driven by several factors. Firstly, the country has been confronted with an increasingly severe security environment: China's military expansion, coupled with the recurrent use of grey zone tactics in the South and East China Seas; North Korea's nuclear and ballistic programme; and finally the perceived unreliability of the Trump administration.
Secondly, domestic factors have also played a significant role. On the one hand, the political leadership provided by Prime Minister Abe and its durability were functional to the implement security reforms. On the other hand, despite very significant steps in terms of legislation, such as the re-interpretation of the Article 9 of the Constitution and the approval of the security legislation in 2015, the Japanese "culture of anti-militarism" has continued to affect security policies and the military doctrine, particularly in terms of limiting interoperability and constraints to offensive capabilities.
Recent reforms introduced a key new purpose for the JSDF: dynamic deterrence. This was designed to close 'windows of deterrence' in the East China Sea, containing China's 'creeping expansion' and grey zone tactics. In the process, Japan has increased ISR capabilities and inter-service cooperation, promoted new policies in the cyber and space domains, and adopted a "whole of government" approach to defence. Moreover, Japan has made efforts to improve interoperability in the alliance with the US and has fostered new security partnership with like-minded states in the region.