Asean
Japan’s persistent pacifism
Author: Daniel Clausen, Florida International University
Japanese pacifism appears to be fading.
As the generation that experienced the Second World War is replaced by a new cohort that is psychologically detached from the horrors of the war, the number of devotees to fervent pacifism has been shrinking. Japanese pacifism as a meaningful policy alternative is no more. The once-significant Japan Socialist Party (JSP), a staunch proponent of unarmed neutrality during the Cold War, split in 1994 when the socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama accepted both the constitutionality of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and the legitimacy of the US–Japan Security Treaty as part of a deal to create a coalition government with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In any case, the governors of Japan always tacitly accepted the need for a military force, the utility of the US nuclear deterrent, and the need to cooperate militarily with the United States, so Japan never truly embraced pacifism. What it embraced, both in its domestic and foreign policy, was an aversion to using coercive force.
But one can point to the decline of pacifism without outright rejecting its existence at some level. Pacifism lives on in forms that are subdued, but still very influential.
Political parties such as the Communist Party, New Komeito, the Social Democratic Party, and to an extent the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) continue to emphasise pacifist themes because they appeal to women voters and those who associate the shocks of globalisation with US militarism. In practice, the commitment of the various parties to pacifist principles has varied. Small parties like the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party (the rump party of the Japan Socialist Party) have been the most persistent in their devotion to pacifist principles. The New Komeito continues to use pacifist rhetoric in its campaign literature and to lobby for restraint in Japanese defence policy, but has on many occasions compromised its stance to maintain its coalition with the LDP. Meanwhile, the diverse views of DPJ members, including some pacifist members, has resulted in a vague and confusing policy discourse and muddled policy initiatives. Because both the LDP and DPJ have had to form coalitions with minority parties such as the New Komeito and the Social Democratic Party, they have often been deterred from strong moves toward remilitarisation such as revising Article 9 (the peace clause) of the constitution.
For the most part, the purest forms of pacifism continue to thrive at the local level, where it is both more relevant and more nimble in its formulations. Pacifism is a strong and persistent aspect of local identity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities that advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons through initiatives like the Mayors for Peace initiative. The unique standing of these cities as the birthplace of atomic warfare provides them with significant moral authority to express pacifist sentiments and denounce the use of nuclear weapons.
Okinawa, too, is heavily influenced by a particular brand of pacifism. During the Second World War, Okinawa was abandoned for the sake of mainland defence, and many Okinawans feel that the continuing concentration of approximately 75 per cent of Japan’s US military bases in Okinawa prefecture represents another sacrifice of Okinawa for the interests of the mainland. Not surprisingly, various elements of nationalism, pacifism, and environmentalism are often subsumed in the anti-base movement.
Despite evidence of weakening grassroots activism, there have been some very meaningful successes. Advocacy campaigns by the Article 9 Association (Kyū-Jō no Kai), which has had up to 7000 branches nationwide, have blunted the efforts of national-level politicians in their attempts to revise the peace clause of the constitution.
Thus, even if pacifism is declining in Japan, it can still have an important influence on Japanese defence policy and politics. Its most obvious influence is its ability to frustrate actors in the political mainstream who desire the revision of Article 9, more frequent dispatches of the SDF overseas, and the ability to participate in collective self-defence. The local pacifisms of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa will survive as the purest forms of Japanese pacifism even as its influence in defence policy diminishes over time. Even in national policy, however, the influence of pacifism will continue to be felt as long as politicians need to strike bargains with minority parties and maintain party cohesion.
Daniel Clausen is a graduate of Florida International University’s PhD program in International Relations.
Continued here:
Japan’s persistent pacifism
Asean
ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon
Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University
The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.
Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.
Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.
Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.
A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.
Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.
Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.
ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.
In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.
This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.
What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.
It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.
Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…
Markets
Tiger Trade Launches SGX Trading, Meeting Demand from Asian Investors
Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).
SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
(more…)Asean
Can Asia maintain growth with an ever ageing population ?
To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.
Asia has been the world champion of economic growth for decades, and this year will be no exception. According to the latest International Monetary Fund Regional Economic Outlook(REO), the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP is projected to increase by 5.5% in 2017 and 5.4% in 2018. (more…)
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