Open AccessDissertation
Nationalism in Japan’s contemporary foreign policy: a consideration of the cases of China, North Korea, and India
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors explored how political actors manipulated the concept of nationalism in foreign policy discourse and explored how the two administrations both used nationalism but in the pursuit of contrasting policies: an uncompromising stance to China and a conciliatory approach toward North Korea under the Koizumi administration, a hardline attitude against North Korea and the rapprochement with China by Abe, accompanied by a friendship-policy toward India.Abstract:
Under the Koizumi and Abe administrations, the deterioration of the Japan-China
relationship and growing tension between Japan and North Korea were often interpreted as
being caused by the rise of nationalism. This thesis aims to explore this question by looking at
Japan’s foreign policy in the region and uncovering how political actors manipulated the
concept of nationalism in foreign policy discourse. The methodology employs discourse
analysis on five case studies. It will be explored how the two administrations both used
nationalism but in the pursuit of contrasting policies: an uncompromising stance to China and
a conciliatory approach toward North Korea under the Koizumi administration, a hard-line
attitude against North Korea and the rapprochement with China by Abe, accompanied by a
friendship-policy toward India. These case studies show how the nationalism is used in the
competition between political leaders by articulating national identity in foreign policy.
Whereas this often appears as a kind of assertiveness from outside China, in the domestic
context leaders use nationalism to reconstruct Japan’s identity as a ‘peaceful nation’ through
foreign policy by highlighting differences from ‘other’s or by achieving historic reconciliation.
Such identity constructions are used to legitimize policy choices that are in themselves used to
marginalize other policy options and political actors. In this way, nationalism is utilized as a
kind of political capital in a domestic power relationship, as can be seen by Abe’s use of
foreign policy to set an agenda of ‘departure from the postwar regime’. In a similar way,
Koizumi’s unyielding stance against China was used to calm discontents among right-wing
traditionalists who were opposed to his reconciliatory approach to Pyongyang. On the other
hand, Abe also utilized a hard-line policy to the DPRK to offset his rapprochement with
China whilst he sought to prevent the improved relationship from becoming a source of
political capital for his rivals. The major insights of this thesis is thus to explain how Japan’s
foreign policy is shaped by the attempts of its political leaders to manipulate nationalism so as
articulating particular forms of national identity that enable them to achieve legitimacy for
their policy agendas, boost domestic credentials and marginalize their political rivals.read more
Citations
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Koizumi diplomacy : Japan's kantei approach to foreign and defense affairs
TL;DR: Shin this paper analyzes the prime minister's role in policymaking, focusing on the assistance he receives from the Kantei, or Cabinet Secretariat, the Japanese equivalent of the American president's White House cabinet.
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References
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Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
TL;DR: In this paper, Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time.
Journal ArticleDOI
Absolute Voluntarism: Critique of a Post-Marxist Concept of Hegemony@@@Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Book
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Chantal Mouffe,Ernesto Laclau +1 more
TL;DR: The authors traces the genealogy of the present crisis in left-wing thought, from stifling of democracy under Marxist-Lenninism and Stalinism to the contemporary emergence of new forms of struggle and reexamines the idea of hegemony, from the formation of the idea in the writings of Lenin and Gramsci, to the expanded and discursive ideas of Foucault to posit a claim for the new possibilities of a radical democracy.
Book
Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method
TL;DR: Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method as discussed by the authors is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research, which brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries.